Audio Options:
Listen | 24 mins. | 2.8 MB | Right-Click to Download

Massive Change Radio was broadcast on the University of Toronto’s CIUT 89.5 FM from September 2003 to June 2004. Created and hosted by Jennifer Leonard, co-author with Bruce Mau of Massive Change (Phaidon Press, 2004) and former Institute without Boundaries team member, the entire season of multidisciplinary interviews is archived for download.

Moving together: The new mobility culture considers not only transit, but also health, education, housing, waste and social needs. No transportation system is an island; it must coordinate all shared systems for maximum effect.

Archetypal cities of the new mobility culture include Bremen (Germany), Bogotö (Colombia) and Curitiba (Brazil). Bremen’s mobility strategy takes its inspiration from a mythical creature known as “die eierlegende Wollmilchsau” (”egglayingwoolmilksow”), which translates roughly as an all-in-one device that’s suitable for everyone. The idea is to develop an intermodal system, involving public transport and car sharing. In Bogotö, just two years since the implementation of Transmilenio, the BRT (Bus Rapid Transit) system, there have been radical improvements in mobility and overall quality of life: decreases in travel time for users (32%), violent crime citywide (50%), traffic accidents (80%), number of fatalities caused by traffic accidents (30%), noise pollution (30%); and an increase in time spent by mothers and fathers with their children (37%).

Audio Options:
Listen | 48 mins. | 5.5 MB | Right-Click to Download

Text Options:
Read full interview text below or download PDF

Freeman, what are some of the more outstanding scientific breakthroughs you’ve personally lived through?
The most outstanding, of course, was the double helix, the discovery of the structure of DNA. As soon as we saw that little two-page article in Nature in 1953, I think we all recognized that this was the big step forward. And it has been, I think, the big event of the last fifty years.

Your inventions for the benefit of all humankind involve freeze-dried fish, warm-blooded plants, and even turtles with diamond-tipped teeth. However, I’d like to hear more about the silicon leaves.
Yes, these all relate to genetic engineering. This is a hugely powerful technology but it’s not something that just comes suddenly into the world. It has to be developed slowly and carefully over long periods of time. The point about genetically engineered leaves is simple. Let me explain. Today we have two ways to use solar energy. One is to manufacture silicon collectors that turn sunlight into electricity with ten percent efficiency. The other is to grow plants such as sugarcane that turn sunlight into chemical fuel, with one percent efficiency. The first method is too expensive to compete with fossil fuels. The second method uses too much land. The question is whether by using genetic engineering we couldn’t genetically engineer crop plants to use sunlight with ten percent efficiency. In other words, could we grow trees with silicon leaves instead of green ones? I don’t know why not. This way, the leaves would become solar collectors and we would have a cheap way to use solar energy using only a tenth as much land as existing crop plants. If it could be done it would transform the world and spread the wealth much more evenly over the earth.

What does the biotech industry today share in common with the nuclear industry in terms of public perception?
I think the public is rightfully scared of both. The reason the public is scared of the nuclear industry is because it’s also associated with bombs. I think the public is distrustful of the biotech industry because some of its first applications were putting poisons into food - that is, putting pesticides into crop plants. That was a tactical mistake just as it was a tactical mistake of the nuclear industry to build the bombs first. There are other things you can do with biotech, of course, like producing food with much higher nutrient value or producing plants that will grow in poor soils or in unfavourable conditions, which is what the world badly needs. (more…)

Audio Options:
Listen | 35 mins. | 6 MB | Right-Click to Download

Text Options:
Read full interview text below or download PDF

How significant is it that for the first time in four billion years a species on this planet has read its own recipe?
We don’t entirely know how to understand the significance of this, but we have just in the last year, for the first time, got an absolutely nailed-down, gold standard sequence of what’s in that. It’s a very, very big document - as long as eight hundred copies of the Bible [inside the nucleus of every cell] - and it’s written in DNA code, which consists of a four-letter alphabet. It’s linear, digital, and just like text. We know in a sense that even with a 26-letter alphabet we could never exhaust the number of potential books that could be written, and that’s what genomes are all about.

What significant scientific work was going on just before the discovery of the double helix?
It’s a wonderful period, fifty years ago, with the birth of molecular biology. And in retrospect it all fits together. There were a whole series of steps that led to the discovery of what the gene was made of. Everybody knew what genes were; everybody knew that inheritance came in particles in some sense. There were blobs of inheritance: you either got blue eyes or you got brown eyes; you didn’t get something in between. That was what Mendel discovered. By 1944 anyone who was in the know knew that genes were made of DNA. That was because of a series of brilliant experiments by a man named Oswald Avery, who never gets quite enough credit, who pinned down that DNA was the substance of which all genes are made. But nobody could figure out how, because DNA seems to be a monotonous and simplistic chemical compared with proteins, which had a lot more diversity.
If you go back to 1953 and ask who was predicting how DNA would have this capacity for carrying inheritance from one generation to the next, they were all barking up the wrong tree. They were talking about something to do with special quantum energy states; they were talking about special three-dimensional configurations. In fact, it turned out that it’s a simple linear digital code. In other words, there are four chemicals and they’re repeated in a significant order, which gives you a piece of text that tells you whether your eyes are blue or brown.
On the 28th of February, 1953, at 9:30 in the morning, it became immediately obvious that what we were talking about was a digital sequence. This is the time when Jim Watson found the base-pairing phenomenon. He discovered that these letters fitted together on the opposite strands of DNA in such a way that A and T fitted together with the same shape as C and G. It really was a Eureka moment.

Up until recently, we didn’t hear much about Rosalind Franklin. What role did she play?
A very important one. She arrived on the scene in late ‘51, taking over the project from Maurice Wilkins, who had developed a technique for taking X-ray photographs of DNA. Franklin perfected this technique and managed to get a photograph that showed what shape the molecule was. Wilkins had suspected that it was helical, and she proved it beyond doubt. At this point, Watson and Crick started playing with models, and they solved the problem. Franklin could have done it though, as she had the best data. If she had done it all alone she would have gained it for Britain, for women, and for Jews. It would have been such a great story. So, in a way, I feel frustrated with her rather than sorry for her - that she didn’t manage to grasp that prize. But there were lots of reasons for that, including institutional sexism, which has clouded the history of the discovery of DNA. (more…)