I am very much of Helen Branswell’s mind that the world’s effort on Ebola, including that of the United States, should be focused on West Africa. That’s the fire; the U.S. patient is a spark. To stop sparks, snuff the fire. In the meantime, however, the U.S. response to the appearance in Dallas of what is essentially our Patient […]
Continue reading →From Hawks: Jeff Leach, at the “Human Food Project”, has written pungently about a bout of microbiome self-experimentation: “(Re)Becoming Human: what happened the day I replaced 99% of the genes in my body with that of a hunter-gatherer”. AS THE SUN set over Lake Eyasi in Tanzania, nearly thirty minutes had passed since I had […]
Continue reading →Because in a complicated world, we need such things.
War photographer Tyler Hicks on how he gets the goods (but no pictures of Hamas). A Q&A with James Estrin at the NY Times Lens blog. This is a war fought largely behind the scenes. Hamas fighters are not able to expose themselves. If they were to even step a foot on the street they […]
Continue reading →Anne Fausto-Sterling is killing it lately on the brain and gene beat. She does so again here with On Maggots and Brain Scans What do brain images really tell us? What critical questions can a layperson ask to avoid being sucked into a brain vortex or wowed by new words such as “connectome”? Can we really […]
Continue reading →An unprecedently large genetic study of schizophrenia has linked a bunch of new genes to this confusing ailment. This’ll take years, decades maybe, to sort out, partly because if you repeated the study with a different set of 36,989 people, you might find a different set of 80 genes associated. NIMH director Tom Insel says […]
Continue reading →The modern idea of stress began on a rooftop in Canada, with a handful of rats freezing in the winter wind. This was 1936 and by that point the owner of the rats, an endocrinologist named Hans Selye, had become expert at making rats suffer for science.… What was interesting to Selye was that no […]
Continue reading →As my own review of Nicholas Wade’s book suggested, his treatment of genetics has many deep and fundamental problems. And as my blog post noted, many others have called some of those out. I want to call out here a particularly clean such account, which came from evolutionary biologist Michael Eisen a few weeks ago. He cuts […]
Continue reading →Today the New York Times Book Review published its advance online version of my review of Nicholas Wade’s A Troublesome Inheritance. (It will appear in print this Sunday.) Others have already reviewed this book elsewhere, with particularly sharp takes coming from Jennifer Raff, Eric Johnson, Michael Eisen, H. Allen Orr, Jerry Coyne, and, also at the Times, Arthur Allen. You’ll find a fuller […]
Continue reading →Best of the Week: Developmental Plasticity and the “Hard-Wired” Problem. by Patrick Clarkin. We’ve built a wall between genes and environment. Clarkin tears it down. And in Does Nature Need to be Nurtured?, Eric Johnson shows why such questions are important. The Racism Beat, by Jefferson Cord. Important and heartbreaking. Lean Out: The Dangers for Women […]
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