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IAN WILMUT, the co-creator of Dolly the Sheep, now intends to clone human life. This is quite a shift for Wilmut. When he and Keith Campbell entered the science pantheon with their announcement of the birth of Dolly, they forced the world to grapple with the question of whether it is moral to clone human life. But Wilmut claimed not Read More ›

They wanted to understand the mind. To do that, Carver Mead and his associates, ensconced at Cal Tech, decided that they had to understand the brain. That search for knowledge led to madness and suicide, as one researcher delved too deep into pharmaceutically assisted research, and to unexpected discoveries. In the end, understanding the brain turned out to require understanding vision.

George Gilder’s “The Silicon Eye” (Atlas Books, 318 pages, $22.95) traces the history of Foveon, the ground-breaking digital imaging company that grew out of the Mead team’s efforts, and finds it to be nearly as tangled and interconnected as the axons and dendrites of the brain itself. The complexity accounts, in part, for the story arc of the book or, perhaps more accurately, for the lack of a story arc, for this is no straightforward tale of innovation. Mead’s group started out in the 1980s with neural networks, took a detour into check-scanning machines, made a good deal of money with touch-pad technology and wound up, around the turn of the millennium, producing the Foveon imaging chip, which itself may wind up in a different class of devices than its inventors imagined.

Foveon is itself a story in search of an arc. The chip — which can image all three colors in a single pixel instead of relying on the Rube Goldberg array of filters and post-processing techniques employed by conventional digital cameras — is far more elegant than the technology it’s slated to replace. In a conventional story, this superiority would translate into commercial success. But Foveon hasn’t managed to find it yet, and the application of its technology to cameras has turned out to have a lot of rough patches. The first consumer-grade camera employing Foveon technology was recalled last month for poor image quality.

The muddled nature of Foveon’s story, in fact, led me to wonder why Mr. Gilder chose to build a book around the company. I’m a digital photography fan (I own five digital still cameras, ranging from a superb but balky Nikon D70 to a rugged but mediocre Olympus 520, and two digital video cameras), and even to me Foveon seems an odd choice. The technology is great in theory but nowhere near as revolutionary as the book’s subtitle proclaims: “How a Silicon Valley Company Aims to Make All Current Computers, Cameras, and Cell Phones Obsolete.”

I recently attended my first “Blogger Bash” hosted by Andrew MacDonald of Sound Politics, intended as a gathering of all Puget Sound area bloggers. As someone new to the world of blogs — shorthand for “Web logs” — the event offered some insights into this new alternative media phenomenon. Blogging has received much attention lately. Names like RealClearPolitics, Instapundit and Read More ›

Which countries do you think have the best business environments? Economists, politicians and business people fiercely debate this question. There is obviously no one correct answer because there are many variables, depending on such things as whether a particular business is capital- or labor-intensive, import- or export-dependent, etc. Forbes magazine has just issued its list of the “2000 biggest, most Read More ›

This article, published by The Washington Times, is about Discovery Institute Center for Science & Culture Senior Fellow Richard Sternberg:

A former editor of a scientific journal has filed a complaint against the Smithsonian Institution, charging that he was discriminated against on the basis of perceived religious and political beliefs because of an article he published that challenged the Darwinian theory of evolution.

“I was singled out for harassment and threats on the basis that they think I’m a creationist,” said Richard Sternberg, who filed the complaint with the federal Office of Special Counsel.

Are you aware we are increasingly regulated and even taxed by international organizations that are undermining the protections guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution? The “Oil for Food” and other recent U.N. scandals made many aware the U.N. is quite literally out of control. What is not well known is that the U.N. is only one of now dozens of international Read More ›

Demagoguery comes easy to the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (PETA). The most recent example comes out of Australia, where PETA is mounting an international boycott against that nation’s wool industry over the admittedly unpleasant — but necessary — Australian sheep-ranching practice known as “mulesing” (described below). Yet the defensive response of the Australian wool industry after being Read More ›

A guest commentary by Center for Science and Culture Senior Fellow Michael Behe appears on today’s New York Times op-ed page. Behe, also a professor of biology at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, advocates and explains the theory of “Intelligent Design” in a piece titled The Basis for a Design Theory of Origins. “Darwinists assert that their theory can explain the Read More ›

SBC’s purchase of AT&T, if approved, would create a vertically-integrated communications firm with nearly 35 percent of the total revenues of the five largest wireline carriers ($75.4B of $217.7B).1 Consummation of the deal would end more than two decades of federal telecom policy delusion, one that cost the domestic telecom marketplace untold billions in shareholder value and frustrated advanced infrastructure Read More ›