Hallam Stevens

I am an historian of science and technology specializing in the history of the life sciences and the history of information technology. My first book, Life out of sequence: a data driven history of bioinformatics (Chicago, 2013), examined the transformational role of computers and databases in recent biology. I am also the author of Biotechnology and society: an introduction (Chicago, 2016) and the co-editor (with Sarah Richardson) of Postgenomics: Perspectives on Biology After the Genome (Duke, 2015).

Sam Altman
AI/Machine Learning

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has a new manifesto of AI utopia – and it has some massive blind spots

- September 27, 2024 4 MIN READ

By now, many of us are probably familiar with artificial intelligence hype. AI will make artists redundant! AI can do lab experiments! AI will end grief Even by these standards, the latest proclamation from OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, published on his personal website this week, seems remarkably hyperbolic. We are on the verge of… Read more »

Vow meatball, mammoth, cultured meat
Opinion

Mammoth dreams: Why the future of lab-grown meat will more boring than exotic and wildly problematic

- April 11, 2023 3 MIN READ

Last week, an Australian “cultured meat” company called Vow made headlines with a meatball made from the flesh of a woolly mammoth – or something very much like it. Combining the technologies of lab-based cell culture and “de-extinction,” Vow scientists grew muscle proteins based on DNA sequences from the long-dead proboscideans. The meatball was not… Read more »