Feng Zhang Quotes

You must realize from your studies, Miss Feng, with the complexity of our MEG society, algorithms have become indispensable for analysis and decision making in our data-saturated environment. Digitization creates information beyond the processing capacity of Human intelligence, yet provides a stable mental environment powered by a set of logical rules. That is how we keep order in Toronto MEG.” “Excuse me, Mr. Zhang,” Ke Hui said, somewhat uncomfortably, “but the invisibility of algorithmic systems and the obscurity of their operations hint at a society where algorithms do not reflect the public interest. Issues involving ethics and values I mean, from my reading of MEG history, challenge the assumptions of the neutrality of algorithmic systems. Would this not undermine democratic governance through reliance on technocratic resolutions?

Charpentier and Doudna had liberated this technology. It was no longer restricted to the world of bacteria. The two women were highly attuned to the implications of their findings, speculating in the Abstract of their paper that their finding ‘highlights the potential to exploit the system for … programmable genome editing’. But to be truly useful, the system would need to work inside cells. Just seven months later, a paper from the lab of Feng Zhang was published in the same journal, which demonstrated that this new approach did indeed work in cells, including human ones.11 The ability to hack the code of life had truly arrived.

You better move,” he told Zhang Zhizhong’s chief of staff. “Otherwise you’ll get bombed.” Shortly after his visit, Feng left for Shanghai in a car. He had not even got two miles before a swarm of Japanese planes appeared over his head, flying in the direction of Suzhou. Seconds later he saw clouds rise over Zhang Zhizhong’s command post. Zhang survived the bombing, but he had received a lesson. “The Japanese knew right from the start where Zhang’s headquarters was,” Feng said.

No matter how fast a daughter runs, a mother can always catch up, Yuan Feng realized, with a bitterness bordering on despair. A mother’s love knows neither timing nor boundaries and will always make itself known—one can rest assured—in the wrong place and at an inopportune moment.