Read this superb interview at Edge with W. Daniel Hillis about radical new ideas for looking at what cancer does:

Instead of saying, ‘I have cance’", we should say, "I am cancering.’ The truth of the matter is we’re probably cancering all the time, and our body is checking it in various ways, so we’re not cancering out of control. Probably every house has a few leaky faucets, but it doesn’t matter much because there are processes that are mitigating that by draining the leaks. Cancer is probably something like that.

Who’s Hillis?

Danny Hillis, an inventor, scientist, engineer, author, and visionary, pioneered the concept of parallel computers that is now the basis for most supercomputers, as well as the RAID disk array technology used to store large databases. He broke the von Neumann bottleneck and changed the way we think about, and use, computation. Hillis’s contributions affect nearly every scientific discipline, not to speak of the daily lives of most people on the planet.

What’s so striking about what Hillis says here is the way he links different aspects of learning and insight to look at problems in new ways:

There are techniques, for instance, where we can actually look within a cell, and see where a protein is within the cell. We can actually do microscopy below the wavelength of light now, which is a fantastic advance, by using basically little flashes of light, and computing on top of it.

For us mere ignorant beneficiaries of this genius it is impossible to imagine the sustained discipline and rigour and honesty required to invent these machines, and then create them and get meaningful results, then translate those scientific results into new techniques available to to the general public.

This is what civilisation is. Human creativity operating freely within an institutional and legal framework which protects discipline, honesty and accuracy.

What is the moral component of what Hillis does for us? Should we be grateful?

If he invents a process which transforms the lives of millions of people and each of those people gives him £1 or buys a drug he’s helped create, he’ll be a millionaire. Maybe a billionaire.

Is that unjust or unfair? Divisive? Greedy? Is he exploiting us by virtue of becoming so successful? How do we nurture the cleverness of such people – and of people honourably aiming that high who might well not be successful?

These questions lie at the heart of Atlas Shrugged, written about the idea that large numbers of brilliant people like Hillis (in the book’s case industrialists) get revolted by the way ‘society’ takes them for granted and accuses them of exploitation. They go on strike:

The book has many failings and eccentricities. But the implications of the simple, startling premise – that most people are selfishly living off the brilliance of others and too often sneering at those others – is analysed unflinchingly.

More generally, what should we make of those ranks of crass authoritarian regimes at the UN sneering day after day at Western achievements and integrity, when they are all too ready to ‘demand’ that we roll out those achievements to them too when they have done nothing at all to deserve them?

Should we go on strike too one day?