I can still remember back in 1997 being shocked that a team of scientists had managed to extract a few hundred bases of DNA from a 40,000 year old Neanderthal fossil. Neanderthal DNA! In the years that followed, scientists made huge advances in recovering ancient DNA, with the entire Neanderthal genome published in 2010. But for all that amazement, I had to learn to be resigned that scientists probably wouldn’t get human DNA older than about 100,000 years. Beyond that vintage, the DNA was just too busted up to be recoverable.

Wrong. Very wrong.

Continue reading “An Ancient, Mysterious Scrap of Human DNA” →

Many hospitals and medical practices are shifting from paper to computers, as they convert to electronic medical records. While the technology has been touted mainly as a way to cut costs and improve medical care, it turns out it has an unexpected side benefit: scientists can probe electronic medical records to find hidden connections between genes and diseases. This week in my “Matter” column for the New York Times, I look at this new tool for exploring to our DNA.

Continue reading “Genetic Secrets in Our Medical Records: My New Column for the New York Times” →

There was a time when the Laysan albatross might seem a perfect icon for the virtues of marriage. When naturalists visited the bird’s nesting grounds in the Pacific, they’d find males and females bonded in pairs for life. Each breeding season the pairs of birds would nuzzle their heads together and perform other adorable courtship rituals. After they mated, the female would lay an egg. Both the male and female would take turns sitting on the nest to incubate it, taking three week shifts. After the chick hatched they’d rear it together until the end of the breeding season. The birds would then fly out to sea in different directions, but they’d return the following year and start up their partnerships all over again. The albatrosses would repeat this behavior for life–which, in their case, can last for many decades.

Continue reading “Same-Sex Mothers: Letting Albatrosses Be Albatrosses” →

A few weeks ago I went to my local drug story a got a flu vaccine. So far <knock on lab bench> I’ve had a pretty healthy flu season. But there’s a fair chance I may get the flu anyway this winter, because flu vaccine effectiveness is modest compared to vaccines for many other diseases. What’s more, I’ll need to head back next year to the store to get another shot. That’s because flu vaccines today are still based in some fundamental ways–in their production in chicken eggs and in the molecules they target on viruses–on World War II-era science.

I’ve written an article for the December issue of the Atlantican article for the December issue of the Atlantic about how we got into this strange situation, and how scientists are trying to bring our fight against flu into the twenty-first century. Check it out.

Continue reading “The Future of Fighting the Flu: My Feature in The Atlantic” →