Matthew Cobb

speaker

579 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 7 Dec

Matthew Cobb’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 1.

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Ground Truths · The Story of Francis Crick, a new masterpiece biography by Matthew Cobb · 7 Dec 2025 podcast

I mean, he ended up... I mean, again, he was lucky.

He was in the right place at the right time, just like he was in Cambridge.

Because he was in San Diego, that was the site of something called the Parallel Distributed Program Group, which was a set of information scientists, computer scientists, psychologists...

who tried to bring all this together.

And this is the embryo of today's AIs.

And Geoffrey Hinton, who co-won the Nobel Prize, and John Hopfield, who co-won the Nobel Prize in 2024 for their work,

They were intimately linked with Crick and with this broader group.

And he wasn't involved in doing any of the program.

I found a rather sad letter from him saying he was trying to learn BASIC when he was about 70.

And it was really, really hard and he couldn't do it, you know.

But he would be sitting there.

They'd have these meetings in San Diego and at the university.

And he'd sit at the back on a sofa and he'd kind of be very annoying and saying, well, this is very well, but what about the biology?

So one of the issues that we still have today was being played out there with Crick on the sofa saying, look, if you want this to tell you about the brain, it's got to be biologically significant.

And if you're relying on ways of these

I mean, I think that's his experience with the children's encyclopedia comes out because the letter is just so clear.

I mean, he was lucky, right?

One of the things about DNA that people forget is that most molecular structures tell you nothing.

It's impossible to see what the function is, right?

If you see a hemoglobin molecule, you cannot look at it and go, aha, that's carrying oxygen.

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