Genetics, Roundly Humbled and Wildly Ambitious

I’ve a story at Slate today about how genetics

stands in a bizarre but lovely state of confusion—taken aback, but eager to advance; balanced tenuously between wild ambition and a deep but troubling humility.

It includes some discomfiting tweets from last week’s big human genetics conference in Boston; a walk around the campus of Cambridge University with a brilliant young geneticist named Daniel MacArthur, now at Harvard; a couple pints at The Eagle, the pub where Watson and Crick first announced they’d discovered the structure of DNA; and a cameo by Michelangelo’s David. Plus the speed gene that sorta wasn’t.

Genetics’ Rite of Passage, at Slate.

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Photo: David, by jay8085, some rights reserved.