Paul Allen
1953 - present
The Singularity Isn't Near
Paul Allen is the co-founder of Microsoft with Bill Gates. He owns the Seattle Seahawks and the Portland Trail Blazers. His relevance to the journey, however, is that he is the founder and chief benefactor of the Allen Institute for Brain Science.
Understanding the possible future of Homo sapiens, including possible speciation events investigated in this book, is highly informed by the study of two major biological systems: the genome and the brain. The Allen Institute for Brain Science is playing a major role in brain studies. The Allen Mouse Brain Atlas is one of several on-line tools made available on the Internet by the Institute. It is an on-line resource to researchers studying the connectome of the mouse brain and gene expression in the mouse brain bringing together research findings from around the world. Studies of the mouse brain provide valuable insights into the human brain because of similarities of the mammalian mouse brain as well as the mouse genome to the human brain and human genome. Experimentation can be performed on mice and other animal models that are not ethically possible on humans.
I also met up with Paul Allen in the journey through an article co-authored by him and another computer scientist, Mark Greaves. The article is "The Singularity Isn't Near" which is a rebuttal to some of the projections of Ray Kurzweil.
Click on links to other players in my journey below.
Ardi * Aubrey de Grey * Bill Joy * C. Owen Lovejoy * Carl Linneaus * Charles Darwin * CRISPR *
Daniel E. Koshland, Jr * Elizabeth Kolbert * Ernst Mayr * Eugene E. Harris * Gregor Mendel * Henry Markram *
Ian Tattersall * Jean-Baptiste Lamarck * John Markoff * Katherine Pollard * Kevin de Queiroz * Lucy *
McBrearty and Brooks * Miguel Nicolelis * Paul Allen * Paul Berg * R.A.Fisher * Scott Blois * Singularity *
Stephen Jay Gould * Svante Pååbo * Sydney Brenner * Terry Sejnowski * Theodosius Dobzhansky *