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Andreas Wagner is a professor in the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, Switzerland, and external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. Wagner Lab’s uses powerful computers to map how trillions of possible mutations occur, and how it is that an organism finds the one it needs. He says that for every new environmental change that requires a mutation in an organism’s metabolism or genome, say, a new source of food, there is a ‘hyperastronomical’ number of possible mutations capable of exploiting the new circumstances while keeping the organism alive.

Associate professor Zachary Lippman leads the Lippman lab at the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, New York,  exploring how mutations in regulators of the flowering transition in crop plants, such as the tomato, can be exploited to improve crop productivity. He says that despite hundreds of years of traditional cross-breeding, variants that can maximize crop yields may not exist in natural populations. He has found that tomato productivity can be optimised by mutating the genes which control the balance between vegetative growth and flowering.

Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg is a designer, artist and writer. She works as design fellow on Synthetic Aesthetics, Stanford University/University of Edinburgh, and is developing experimental design approaches to help us imagine alternative ideals around technology. For instance, what might happen if we engineer entirely new forms of life through synthetic biology, based on, say, six-base, ‘orthogonal’ DNA, rather than on the conventional four-base one.

Photo: Harry Borden

Are new ideas always the sure way to a better future? Alexandra Daisy Ginsberg says that sometimes, instead of coming up with new ideas, we should sift through old ideas, the things that went wrong, that did not take off first time around, to see if we have missed something. Perhaps the timing was wrong or the context meant the idea did not survive. In addition to documenting the things that worked, we should have encyclopaedias of bad ideas, to see how we might improve on them, and to make sure we do not repeat the same mistakes again.