Brain technologies raise unprecedented ethical challenges.

a caricature of science that I do not recognize. Why do social scientists find science so difficult to fathom? In my experience, most working scientists have a much better appreciation of the power — and the limitations — of the scientific method than Collins is prepared to allow. Most have a robust understanding of Karl Popper's idea of falsification, of the impact of experimental error and the need for reproducibility in generating convincing evidence for a new hypothesis. Crucially, most would never assume that their findings represent an impregnable truth, or anything other than a work in progress. Where I might agree with Collins is that science still struggles to make its authentic voice heard on many important issues that affect society. In part, that is because some of these issues, such as climate change, are complex and attract the attention of powerful vested interests. But it is not clear what social scientists aim to contribute to solving this problem. What is needed is a broader channel of communication between scientists and society, both directly and through the news media, so that the real nature of the scientific process and the value of its output are made more accessible to citizens and policy-makers. This is already emerging, independently of the musings of social scientists. Much of the initiative is coming from scientists, teachers, bloggers and other science communicators, with the open-access movement providing an interesting new dimension. For anyone who ever said there's no such thing as a poetic gene SIR — Art encoded in living cells has a long and illustrious history obvious reasons, the focus has been to decode naturally existing biological codes (proteins or DNA) in the context of art, instead of coding new art into a biological system. the emergence of de novo gene-synthesis technology now makes the tools available to build poetry directly into coding genes. In 2005, our organization made a gene encoding the first verse of the poem Tomten by Viktor Rydberg (50 words, or 8000base pairs). The verse was rewritten using the single-letter amino-acid code where O (no amino acid) was replaced by Q (glutamic acid) and spaces omitted. The protein sequence was backtranslated to DNA using the codon bias of reindeer (Rangifer tarandus). The gene was synthesized and cloned behind an Escherichia coli promoter in a pUC-derived vector. The construct was then lyophilized on filter paper and sent out as a …