The LASERs (Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous) are an international program of evening gatherings that bring artists and scientists together for informal presentations and conversation with an audience. See the program for the whole international series and the dates for the Bay Area.
Send an email to "scaruffi at stanford dot edu" if you want to be added to the mailing list for the LASERs.
Where: on Zoom.
Click here to register
or here.
Program (the order of the speakers might change):
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Antony Jose (Univ of Maryland) on "Heredity constrains the nature of living systems"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
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Curtis Suttle (Univ of British Columbia) on "Viruses and their Role in the Environment"
If you missed this presentation, you can view it by clicking on the image:  .
- The art talks have been moved to their own separate LASER due to the number and location of speakers: November 8, also online.
Bios:
- Antony Jose is a biologist working on heredity. He is an Associate Professor at the University of Maryland, which he joined in 2011 after a PhD from Yale University and postdoctoral research at Harvard University. He is a National Academy of Sciences Kavli Fellow and was selected as Graduate Faculty Mentor of the Year, UMD. His research group is supported by grants from the National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation. His group used the simple nematode C. elegans to demonstrate that RNA from neurons can cause specific gene silencing that lasts for more than 25 generations. They were the first to visualize extracellular RNA crossing generational boundaries in an animal. Their current work addresses how all heritable information is encoded in a cell and passed on from one generation to the next. These findings have implications for our understanding of the origins of inherited diseases, the course of evolution, and the synthesis of new life.
- Curtis Suttle is Distinguished University Scholar and Wall Scholar at the University of British Columbia. His research focuses on viruses and their diversity, evolution, and function in the global system, with an emphasis on the oceans. As a frequently invited speaker at Universities and International symposia, as well as a commentator in print, video and television, he makes a persuasive case that viruses encompass much of the genetic diversity on Earth and are major drivers of global biogeochemical cycles. His work has helped shift the paradigm from viruses being enemies and agents of death, to the perspective that viruses are essential to life on Earth. His scholarship has been recognized by being appointed to the Order of Canada, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada and American Academy of Microbiology, as well as appointments with the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research, the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Research, and the Institute for Advanced Studies at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology. He is a recipient of the A.G. Huntsman, Timothy R. Parsons and G. Evelyn Hutchinson Medals in Marine Science.
- Piero Scaruffi is a cultural historian who has lectured in three continents and published several books on Artificial Intelligence and Cognitive Science, the latest one being "The Nature of Consciousness" (2006). He pioneered Internet applications in the early 1980s and the use of the World-Wide Web for cultural purposes in the mid 1990s. His poetry has been awarded several national prizes in Italy and the USA. His latest book of poems and meditations is "Synthesis" (2009). As a music historian, he has published ten books, the latest ones being "A History of Rock and Dance Music" (2009) and "A History of Jazz Music" (2007). His latest book of history is "A History of Silicon Valley" (2011). The first volume of his free ebook "A Visual History of the Visual Arts" appeared in 2012. His latest book is "Intelligence is not Artificial" (2013). He has also written extensively about cinema and literature. He founded the Leonardo Art Science Evening Rendezvous (LASER) in 2008. Since 2015 he has been commuting between California and China, where several of his books have been translated.
Photos and videos of this evening
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