Nathaniel Comfort, “Genes Are Overrated”: Mukherjee gives us a Whig history of the gene, told with verve and color, if not scrupulous accuracy. The gene, he tells us, was first described by the Augustinian friar Gregor Mendel, in the mid-19th century. Tragically, no one noticed—not even the great Charles Darwin. “If Darwin had actually read” the reference […]
Continue reading →As Jezebel notes elsewhere, this bomb-throwing freelancer revenge rant burns bridges with admirable abandon. Been a while since I’ve read one quite so fun and strange. It’s a tough trick to write this, for instance: We left Paris and went to the south of France to write the piece that I had promised would be 10,000 words. […]
Continue reading →Psychology, biomedicine and numerous other fields of science have fallen into a crisis of confidence recently, after seminal findings could not be replicated in subsequent studies. These widespread problems with reproducibility underscore a problem that I discussed here last year — namely, that science is really, really hard. Even relatively straightforward questions cannot be definitively […]
Continue reading →The Kevin Folta/GMO/Monsanto/Right-to-Know/conflict-of-interest variety show and bazaar — a saga about a food scientist who took $25,000 from Monsanto without disclosing he did so but seems to have thought that was probably more or less okay — just got more bizarre, as Brooke Borel describes in a strange and deftly told story in Buzzfeed. This is conflict-of-interest as tragicomedy. I […]
Continue reading →“Like his father, he saved every totem that touched his hand.” “Hemingway was someone who felt the talismanic power of objects, of things, of the materiality of experience,” Declan Kiely, who is a young and genial Englishman with Irish roots, said when I visited “Between Two Wars.” “If something happened to him, he hung onto it.” The […]
Continue reading →This post got an upgrade: The revised, expanded version is now at The Atlantic. Many thanks to the folks at The Atlantic for picking it up. If you need a teaser: One night in 2002, Sara Bostock woke in the night thinking she’d heard a bump in her kitchen. When she went to investigate, she found […]
Continue reading →Roberta Payne, author of the superb memoir Speaking to My Madness, did the cover art on the current issue of Schizophrenia Bulletin. The issue also runs an essay she wrote about “schizophrenic art.” I once drew on poster-size paper a gracefully diagonal, writhing black eel. So far, conventional structure that any artist might have planned. But the eel’s […]
Continue reading →We’re actually talking about killing our neighbors. Late this month the Supreme Court is expected to rule on King v Burwell, a suit financed by the conservative right that seeks to use some trivial inconsistencies in phrasing to gut Obamacare in 37 states and possibly cripple it nationwide. That SCOTUS even agreed to hear the suit is […]
Continue reading →A bit late to my own story here, as a reporting trip intervened, but but a couple weeks ago I wrote an essay for Buzzfeed about the overselling of medical genomics, which goes beyond hype in a way that distorts funding, science, and the public’s ideas about genetics. We live in an age of hype. […]
Continue reading →Robin Marantz Henig is at her superb best in “The Last Day of Her Life,” a NY Times Magazine feature about a remarkable woman, Sandy Bern, who decides she’ll end her life before she loses her self to Alzheimer’s. At one point, as Bern’s power fades, her daughter, Emily, gives birth to Bern’s first grandchild. Little Felix makes Bern think there might be some things her […]
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