My Next Book: The Remedy
Just a quick note about my next book, The Remedy, which will be out in early 2014, published by Penguin/Gotham. It's about the invention of modern medicine, the pursuit of scientific glory, and the attempt to cure the world's most deadly disease, tuberculosis (also known, at the time, as consumption).
Just a quick note about my next book, The Remedy, which will be out in early 2014, published by Penguin/Gotham. It's a tremendously exciting true story that takes place in the last decades of the 19th century. It's about the invention of modern medicine, the pursuit of scientific glory, and the attempt to cure the world's most deadly disease, tuberculosis (also known, at the time, as consumption).
The book traces the career of Robert Koch, a provincial German doctor who rose, through sheer determination and scientific diligence, to be the greatest scientist of the day. Koch was a self-made microbiologist, and thanks to his exacting personality, he built a body of evidence that convinced the world of the Germ Theory of Disease: that there is such a thing as germs, and that they are the cause of infectious disease -- the very diseases that plagued mankind in the 19th century, tuberculosis worst among them.
The book also follows the unlikely rise of another provincial doctor, this one in England, named Arthur Conan Doyle.
Conan Doyle, of course, is known today as the author of Sherlock Holmes stories, but he was trained as a physician. The book follows Conan Doyle's early years as he struggled, equally, to build a career as a physician and a reputation as an author. And it investigates how he diligently followed the changes to the medical profession, in particular the Germ Theory. From his small office in southern England, Conan Doyle admired the work of Robert Koch in Berlin, and eventually adapted his science into his stories: most prominently, a new detective story featuring a character named Sherlock Holmes.
What these two historic figures didn't realize is that they were on an unlikely collision course -- they would meet in one of the greatest showdowns in science, as Koch delivered the antidote the world clamored for: a Remedy for tuberculosis.
The book will be out in early 2014. I'm terribly excited about it. It's not yet available for pre-order, but will be soon. If you want to be notified when it is available, send your email hereand I'll let you know.
Some News
Since I left WIRED in January, everybody’s been asking me: What’s next? Today, finally, I can start answering that question. I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining two amazing organizations.
Since I left WIRED in January, everybody’s been asking me: What’s next? Today, finally, I can start answering that question.
I’m thrilled to announce that I’m joining two amazing organizations. As of today, I am 1) starting a post as Entrepreneur-in-Residence at the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and 2) joining the Atlantic as a Correspondent, blogging on big ideas in technology and healthcare.
First, the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation: It’s a remarkable organization, with an unrivaled reach, authority, and impact. If you listen to NPR, you’ve heard the mandate: To improve the health and healthcare of all Americans. For 40 years the Foundation has ably met that standard, and with a $9 billion endowment (the fourth biggest in the U.S., after Gates, Ford, and Getty) and $400 million in annual giving, RWJF is uniquely situated to influence the future of healthcare. Not content to just fund academic research, the Foundation has also driven big changes in society, policy, and technology. I’m honored and a bit awestruck to join the effort to expand that influence.
Here in Silicon Valley, Entrepreneurs-in-Residence are typically affiliated with venture capital firms, working to evaluate portfolio investments and hatch new companies. At best, they’re interim positions that end up producing something exceptional. My role with the RWJF is modeled on those posts, with a few differences befitting a non-profit foundation rather than a VC firm.
Over the last several years, I’ve had the chance to collaborate with the folks from RWJF’s superb Pioneer program, including Brian Quinn, Paul Tarini, and Steve Downs (most notably as partners at the Living By Numbers/WIRED Health Conference last October). I’ve long admired their knack for spotting innovative ideas and nurturing them into promising projects and real results.
As EiR, I’ll work closely with Pioneer team director Brian and his group. But this post isn’t specific to the Pioneer program; I’m excited to have the chance to work with the Foundation’s leaders and other programs, which are blazing trails in Public Health, Healthcare Quality and Equality, Childhood Obesity, and other areas. My sincere gratitude to James Marks, John Lumpkin, and RWJF CEO Dr. Risa Lavizzo-Mourey for bringing me on.
At the Atlantic, I’ll be joining the outstanding posse at TheAtlantic.com, offering irregular thoughts about technology, healthcare, and whatnot. My hope is to proffer the sort of mind grenades that made the cover of WIRED during my tenure there. My first post is up there now, about the Diabetic’s Paradox, an idea I’ve been kicking around for a while now that puts the vogue for self-tracking and self-quantification in some perspective.
I’m tremendously grateful to Bob Cohn for opening the door to theAtlantic.com -- he’s built what may be the web’s best source of reporting, analysis, and synthesis. I’m proud to be able to join, in some small way, the august team at The Atlantic, which I consider the best media property around, print/digital/tablet/events, whatever.
The next few months are going to be busy and fun and full of opportunity. And there’ll be more -- much more -- to come. Or as we say in journalism, TK.
Are We Artificially Intelligent?
Sometimes, but not often enough, you hear somebody mention something about their work that is, to them, routine, just part of the world in which they live. But outside of their world, that statement seems amazing, fantastic, and a glimpse of something massive.
Sometimes, but not often enough, you hear somebody mention something about their work that is, to them, routine, just part of the world in which they live. But outside of their world, that statement seems amazing, fantastic, and a glimpse of something massive.
I just had that happen to me when I read this interview on TheAtlantic.com by James Fallows, talking with Michael Jones – Google’s mapping guru (or more accurately, one of their gurus). Jones was describing how having on-demand maps with near-instant access changes human behavior. And then he slips this in:
This kind of extra-smartness is coming to people. Effectively, people are about 20 IQ points smarter now because of Google Search and Maps. They don’t give Google credit for it, which is fine; they think they’re smarter, because they can rely on these tools. It’s one reason they get so upset if the tools are inaccurate or let them down. They feel like a fifth of their brain has been taken out.
I have no idea where this statistic comes from — I’d love to know how Google has tested this, but I don’t doubt for a second that they have, so let’s just assume that it’s true. It’s the kind of thing that just makes the mind reel when you start to think about it. Basically, we now live in a world where we are, by default, 15-20% smarter than our parents, just because of Google (or, to put less of a brand stamp on it, because of immediate access to information).
In this light, I wonder if we’ve truly grasped how different the Internet is than other, previous, technological tools. I’ve been thinking a lot, recently, about Freeman Dyson’sriff on scientific revolutions and tools — he talks about X rays and radio telescopes and particle accelerators as the real stuff of revolutions, rather than outright ideas (the framework Thomas Kuhn proposed in 1962). I’ve considered Dyson’s argument persuasive but somewhat disappointing, in the sense that tools seem, well, less exciting than ideas. Tools seem prosaic and utilitarian, while ideas are portentous and vast. Tools seemed useful for improving productivity, say, or creating businesses, but they seem to stop short of wholesale human advancement.
But I think I’ve been selling Dyson short (which is to say, of course I have). Sure, some tools are incremental — but the big ones are exponential. They not only change how we do stuff, they can change the substance of who we are. That, I gather, is what Google’s quants have calculated with this 20+ IQ points metric. Having on-demand information isn’t just useful. It fundamentally changes how we think. It is human enhancement, without the surgery or the needle. In other words, we have already stepped into the world of artificial intelligence. Only it’s not some robot that we are dealing with; some version of IBM’s Watson. It’s us: We are the ones who have become artificially intelligent.
There are all sorts of issues that this creates: As Jones mentions, what happens when we become unplugged, and lose one-fifth of our brains? And what happens when that 20+ points becomes 50, or 70 — how will we make sure that everyone has access and understanding of these tools?
I should note that Nick Carr anticipated some of this worry with his 2008 piece on “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” And I should also note that my hero Kevin Kelly was exactly right in his riff on Carr’s piece when he guessed that Google added 20 points to our IQ. As Kevin wrote: “I think that even if the penalty is that you lose 20 points of your natural IQ when you get off Google AI, most of us will choose to keep the 40 IQ points we gain by jacking in all the time.”
I think Kevin is spot-on (and as usual, five years ahead of the curve). But we should all be aware that this augmentation has happened. We have already stepped way into the future, without even noticing it, or fathoming what’s happened. The more we do notice it, and wrestle with the implications, the better off we’ll be.
Un-Wired
I first came to WIRED in 2001, when the dot-com blowup was in full howl, and when the promise of a magazine built around technology seemed dubious. It took some months, but soon WIRED found its footing in a new era: one where the promise of science was rejuvenating, and where the benefits of technology reestablished themselves as fundamental to the future. Oh, and in this new era, technology was for everyone, and could be fun. Even cool.
I first came to WIRED in 2001, when the dot-com blowup was in full howl, and when the promise of a magazine built around technology seemed dubious. It took some months, but soon WIRED found its footing in a new era: one where the promise of science was rejuvenating, and where the benefits of technology reestablished themselves as fundamental to the future. Oh, and in this new era, technology was for everyone, and could be fun. Even cool.
Since then, for those 11 years, I’ve been happily helping that future emerge. With Chris Anderson as editor in chief, and with my WIRED colleagues, we’ve had the best minds in the business: editors, designers, engineers, writers, creators. For me, it’s been one long picnic. It’s been an honor to play the executive editor role that one of my heroes, Kevin Kelly, first created. I’ve been able to talk candidly with the best minds in Silicon Valley and around the country and around the world, and hear what they think is going to happen next. I’ve been able to groom ideas on their way out of the stable, to steer them slightly, but then they’re off.
To my friends in technology, I have often described my job as being COO (to Chris’s CEO) in a company that released one new product every month, a constant stream of alpha versions. We had no betas, no revisions, no second chances (until the iPad, when suddenly there was one, sort of). It has required both perfectionism and concession, and always a tolerance to be wrong 1/3 of the time (not a bad hit rate, considering).
I’ve been proud, incredibly and uproariously proud, of what we’ve done at WIRED during the past decade. We have been on top of so many things, and had such a blast bringing them to our readers first, before they caught a whisper of these ideas elsewhere. It’s a singular job, and WIRED is a singular place.
But: For the past few years, I’ve bristled at merely spotting this stuff and letting everyone else have the opportunity to exploit our acumen. For a while now, I’ve had the itch to roll up my sleeves and start building something, to bore a little bit deeper and start pushing the potential of the tools and ideas that WIRED covers so well.
Now is that time. I’ve got an idea, hinted at in the name of this blog here, that I think will help people find powerful ideas and put them to use – even help them improve their lives.
So as of January 4, I’m leaving WIRED to turn ideas into action. Expect something cool in mid to early 2013.
In the meantime, I’ll be posting some thoughts here, and lobbing bigger bombs elsewhere.
Oh: And I’ll also finish writing my second book, The Remedy, which is coming out from Penguin/Gotham in Fall, 2013. It’s an incredible story about the quest to identify and cure tuberculosis in the late 19th century, and it touches on everything from the origins of the germ theory of disease to Iowa corn farmers to Sherlock Holmes (there’s a LOT of Sherlock Holmes). It’s a story about discovery and failure, and about nothing less than the emergence of the modern scientific method that, these days especially, we take too much for granted. I’ll give more information about that here, too.
My greatest thanks and best wishes to my colleagues at WIRED. Enjoy the ride, comrades. It’s a worthy ship you’re on.
Finding the upside of failed clinical trials
Forbes reported that Astra Zeneca sponsored a drug trial where their lipid-lowering drug, Crestor, went head-to-head with Pfizer's Lipitor, a strange battle from the start since many considered Lipitor the underdog in the battle. But the results showed no difference in outcome, which for this study was how blockages in the arteries of the heart progressed after treatment. In other words, the trial resulted in a draw, and delivered a huge blow to Crestor, since it will retain its patent, and associated high price tag, until 2016, while Lipitor's constituant, atorvastatin, will be available as a generic this week at a fraction of the price of the brand-name cholesterol-lowering meds (http://ti.me/tZf3j6).
Forbes reported that Astra Zeneca sponsored a drug trial where their lipid-lowering drug, Crestor, went head-to-head with Pfizer's Lipitor, a strange battle from the start since many considered Lipitor the underdog in the battle. But the results showed no difference in outcome, which for this study was how blockages in the arteries of the heart progressed after treatment. In other words, the trial resulted in a draw, and delivered a huge blow to Crestor, since it will retain its patent, and associated high price tag, until 2016, while Lipitor's constituant, atorvastatin, will be available as a generic this week at a fraction of the price of the brand-name cholesterol-lowering meds (http://ti.me/tZf3j6).
This story was intriguing in many ways. First, I think it's great that the researchers published the results of the study, which Astra Zeneca funded, in the New England Journal of Medicine. It would have no doubt been much easier to sweep these results under the carpet, where they'd join the other dark data of failed clinical trials (http://bit.ly/tn7dBr).
Second, I think it's important to set a precedence that drugs intended to treat the same condition go head-to-head in properly designed clinical trials. As consumers and patients, we deserve to know how each treatment measures up.
So kudos to Astra Zeneca for taking the high road. The results of the trial will cost the company money in terms of decreased sales. But they made infinite strides in forging a transparent relationship with their customers.
Photo via Flickr / Grumpy-Puddin
Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.
Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.
Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.
Miracle berries: the artificial sweetener that never was
The small, red berries of the _Richadella dulcifica_ plant are not very sweet. In fact, miraculin, the main chemical found in the berry's flesh tastes like, well, nothing. But after eating these berries, people's taste buds embark on an hour-long wild ride, so that any sour foods they eat -- even lemons -- will taste sweeter than candy. Quite trippy
The small, red berries of the _Richadella dulcifica_ plant are not very sweet. In fact, miraculin, the main chemical found in the berry's flesh tastes like, well, nothing. But after eating these berries, people's taste buds embark on an hour-long wild ride, so that any sour foods they eat -- even lemons -- will taste sweeter than candy. Quite trippy.
A new paper published in PNAS describes how this process works: miraculin binds to receptors in the tongue, partially blocking the taste buds that identify sweet foods under normal conditions. But if something acidic, like the juice from a sour lemon, interacts with miraculin, the molecule shape-shifts, and suddenly, the sweet taste receptors are kicked into high gear. Although the same lemons would taste sour to anyone else, miraculin makes them taste sweet.
As interesting as the finding may be, the backstory is even better.
In the 1960s, biomedical scientist Robert Harvey first reported these miracle berries, as they're called, which locals in west Africa had eaten for centuries. Quickly realizing the potential these fruits might have for making bad-tasting, good-for-you foods more palatable, as well as the role this type of artificial sweetener might play on diseases like diabetes, Harvey organized a new venture, the Miralin Company, to bring the additive to market, complete with the financial backing of heavy-hitter investors like Reynolds Metals, Barclays and Prudential.
Initial talks with the FDA went well, Harvey reported. But the night before the company's launch in 1974, the FDA got cold feet. The food was an additive, the government agency now decried, and in order to sell their product, Harvey would have to run the miracle berries through many more years of expensive testing. The new directives proved too extensive for the fledgling company to bear.
But as Harvey prepared to shelve his idea, he realized he was not the only one watching Miralin's door's close. As he told the BBC:
A few weeks later, things turned sour. A car was spotted driving back and forwards past Miralin's offices, slowing down as someone took photographs of the building. Then, late one night, Harvey was followed as he drove home. "I sped up, then he sped up. I pulled into this dirt access road and turned off my lights and the other car went past the end of the road at a very high speed. Clearly I was being monitored. I honestly believe that we were done in by some industrial interest that did not want to see us survive because we were a threat. Somebody influenced somebody in the FDA to cause the regulatory action that was taken against us.
Whether Harvey was in fact being tailed by Big Sugar, or just a disgruntled ex-lab mate -- who knows. But I'm willing to bet the farm that these new findings have tickled the sweet tooth of a commercial entity somewhere out there, in one way or another.
Photo via Flickr /
Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.
Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.
Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.
The incredibly shrinking sensor
Even if you only got a whiff of the product demo sessions at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week, you noticed: sensors are getting smaller, cheaper, and more closely integrated into tools we already use.
Even if you only got a whiff of the product demo sessions at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco this week, you noticed: sensors are getting smaller, cheaper, and more closely integrated into tools we already use.
Consider Pulse Sensor, a dime-sized device that uses a beam of light to measure a person’s heartbeat. For $25, customers get a sensor kit that plugs directly into an Arduino microcontroller, the staple device of any DIY hardware hacker. Attach the sensor to an earlobe or fingertip and the light beam measures changes in tissue volume to gauge a person’s pulse. To date, the company has already raised over $18,000 on Kickstarter.
The other demo that caught my eye was the Google+ health challenge app from a group at CTIS, the winners of the Body Media challenge. Through their armband devices, Body Media uses a number of sensors to figure out how much someone moves and sweats during activity, giving an accurate read on how much energy is burned during the day. (I reviewed this product for Wired magazine back in June 2010). To win the challenge, CTIS built an extension to the Google+ platform that allowed users to create custom health challenges between a group of friends or colleagues, such as competitions to see who loses the most weight over 30 days, or who bikes the most miles in a week.
The idea of creating online health challenges isn’t new. But really, who needs to visit *another* website to track their health challenges? As we’re seeing with news, shopping, and entertainment, people want their online experience streamlined. The fact CTIS built their app into another social platform is key. Zynga has more or less cornered the Facebook game market; I’m waiting to see who will step to the plate with health apps.
Photo via Flickr / Magnet 4 Marketing dot Net
Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.
Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.
Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.
Sharing data on social media
People use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites as channels for self-expression. But whether updating or uploading, people are telling their social stories with only two tools: text and images.
People use Facebook, Twitter, or other social media sites as channels for self-expression. But whether updating or uploading, people are telling their social stories with only two tools: text and images.
But what if social media wasn’t confined to words and pictures, but instead, allowed users to uploaded graphs or tables? In other words, could data, pure data, become a token in our social currency?
That’s the thought contributed during a panel session at the Health 2.0 Conference in San Francisco by Gary Wolf, contributing editor at Wired, and an organizer of Quantified Self, a community whose users meticulously track certain aspects of their lives, some down to infinitesimal levels, such as how they spend every minute of the day (no joke).
Wolf’s comment followed a presentation by Stead Burwell, the CEO of Alliance Health Networks, who demoed Diabetic Connect an information and community site for patients battling diabetes. Alliance spent a great deal of time (read: money) on creating user profiles that would allow visitors of the site to connect with their peers, patients who share similar experiences. But that connection, they found, was key. As Burwell said in his presentation, users not only like to receive badges and virtual rewards, they like to hand them out as well.
Noting how willingly people update their status on social media sites like Facebook, sometimes with unrestrained detail, Burwell wondered how to bottle this social energy to get patients to openly share personal health data.
In my opinion, the limitations aren’t technical. After all there is nothing preventing users on Facebook from uploading a JPEG charting the number of miles they ran in a given month. Sure, social media sites could make tools available to users to facilitate the process, but that’s the easy part – there are already a number of product-related sites, such as Nike+, that do just this. The shift that Wolf describes, and that Burwell hopes for, is more philosophical, a change in the type of information we feel comfortable sharing with our friends, families, and colleagues.
So here’s my request: If you track any aspect of your life, whether your weekly running mileage, calories consumed by food, weight fluctuations, or daily blood glucose readings, share your data with your social network. Let’s see what happens.
Photo via Flickr / Sean MacEntee
Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.
Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.
Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.
Storm Surge
The idea that climate change is linked to the spread of a disease is not new. Some bacteria and viruses, after all, piggyback on an animal or insect, and the infectious advance depends on the host's reaction to climbing temperatures. Consider dengue, a disease once anchored to tropical climates by its host's penchant for heat and humidity, which is now pushing further north with its mosquito transits as the upper latitudes get warmer. But according to a study published this past June in PNAS, it's not only climbing temperatures that are worrisome; in the past, even heavy rains have altered the course of disease, though often in divergent directions.
The idea that climate change is linked to the spread of a disease is not new. Some bacteria and viruses, after all, piggyback on an animal or insect, and the infectious advance depends on the host's reaction to climbing temperatures. Consider dengue, a disease once anchored to tropical climates by its host's penchant for heat and humidity, which is now pushing further north with its mosquito transits as the upper latitudes get warmer. But according to a study published this past June in PNAS, it's not only climbing temperatures that are worrisome; in the past, even heavy rains have altered the course of disease, though often in divergent directions.
During the third plague pandemic (China, 1850-1964), researchers found that, for better or worse, the seasonal rains were a strong predictor of how the disease spread. There, storms governed Pestilence's toll, prodding the disease in the arid north, and quelling it in the humid south.
Rats are the primary host for the bubonic plague, and in general, the more that infected rats move, the more the disease will spread. In the dry north, they figure, the rains quenched the parched landscape, causing the rats, and the disease, to stir. In the southern part of the country, the rains only served to make the humidity worse, perhaps forcing the rats to sit tight.
Keeping tabs on the spread of infectious disease is one thing; understanding the interaction of pathogens, hosts, and behavior is yet another.
Photo via Flickr / Yorick_R
Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.
Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.
Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.
The value of the meet-up
The brilliance of Wikipedia is that anyone, at any time, can contribute to the project, and in doing so, the collective knowledge of the world's largest encyclopedia keeps improving and expanding. In last week's issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins brought up an interesting point about Wikipedia worth sharing; one that anyone interested in dealing with virtual communities should absorb.
The brilliance of Wikipedia is that anyone, at any time, can contribute to the project, and in doing so, the collective knowledge of the world's largest encyclopedia keeps improving and expanding. In last week's issue of The New Yorker, Lauren Collins brought up an interesting point about Wikipedia worth sharing; one that anyone interested in dealing with virtual communities should absorb.
To put it simply: in the burgeoning world of virtual communities, there is still a good reason to bring people together in real life. In the course of a few hours on a Saturday afternoon in June, with a group of its curators and 20+ Wikipedia volunteer contributors, the British Library was able to update over 30 of the online encyclopedia's topics tied to collections housed within its walls. Something tells me this would have been difficult to do with a scattered online group.
I think this example also shows how an organization can harness and direct crowdsourced work in a way that's a win for both sides. Here, the British Library staff was able to get the content that mattered to the organization updated in Wikipedia for free. And the volunteers? Rather than feeling like they were being exploited, they were empowered by their own sense of accomplishment, and powerfully rewarded by the recognition they received from the library curators and their peers. (And I guess getting mentioned in The New Yorker doesn't hurt either.)
*Side note: This wasn't a central theme of the story, but Collins also points out a site called Wikipedia Vision, where visitors get a real-time snapshot of what's being edited at Wikipedia, and by whom. Text bubbles briefly superimpose on the site's world map, showing the location of the editor, and what they're working on. Even people who monitor traffic on websites with analytics tools like ChartBeat, like I do at PLoS Blogs, will appreciate Wikipedia Vision's slick interface and open nature.
Photo via Flickr / nojhan
Brian Mossop is currently the Community Editor at Wired, where he works across the brand, both magazine and website, to build and maintain strong social communities. Brian received a BS in Electrical Engineering from Lafayette College, and a PhD in Biomedical Engineering from Duke University in 2006. His postdoctoral work was in neuroscience at UCSF and Genentech.
Brian has written about science for Wired, Scientific American, Slate, Scientific American MIND, and elsewhere. He primarily cover topics on neuroscience, development, behavior change, and health.
Contact Brian at brian.mossop@gmail.com, on Twitter (@bmossop), or visit his personal website.