Via Tara Smith, I learned of the passing of Joshua Lederberg. I came to appreciate the full scope of Lederberg’s work while working on my book Microcosm; by discovering the secret sex life of E. coli, he helped build the science of molecular biology. It’s sad to observe the passing of this scientific cohort who together uncovered some of the fundamental secrets of life, including Lederberg’s wife Esther, Seymour Benzer, and Francis Crick. Today we live in an age of big biology; Lederberg won his Nobel prize in large part for the work he did in near solitude as a graduate student. We may not see their likes again.
Author: Lori Jia
I’ve got some more talks coming up that I want to let you know about–especially those of you around Lincoln, Nebraska or Sarasota, Florida–as well as those of you who like to go to meetings about parasites…
1. DARWIN DAY: I’ll be doing my part to celebrate, at the University of Nebraska. My talk will be this Friday. I’ll be talking about what bacteria could have taught Darwin about evolution–drawing in part from my upcoming book, Microcsom. Here’s the UNL link with details (Facebook event).
Continue reading “Darwin, Microbes, Whales, and Pop Parasites: More Talks!”
A quick favor from anyone who has read any of my books. If there’s a passage–sentence to paragraph range–that you’re fond of, can you let me know? I’m working on a project that requires a bunch of them. You can leave them in this post’s comment thread or over on a discussion thread I set up on my Facebook writer’s page, or–if you’d prefer not to air such things in public–you can email me. Thanks!
Originally published February 2, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
University of Washington paleontologist Peter Ward and I are talking again on bloggingheads–this time about aliens. Ward explains why science fiction writers hate him, and why we need to breed tiny astronauts if we ever want to get out of our solar system. Check it out.
Poster from Wikimedia Commons, Headline Defiled From Shelley
Originally published February 2, 2008. Copyright 2008 Carl Zimmer.
I’m always learning something from the readers of the Loom. Yesterday, I wrote about how scientists had inserted their names into a synthetic genome, and how such signatures would erode away like graffiti inside real organisms. But how about the opposite case–what if evolution has produced sequences of DNA that happen to form words?
In the comment thread, Peter Ellis asked,
What actually is the longest word (in any language) encoded by the reference human genome? If I had the time and computer power I’d have a look…
Continue reading “The Genome As Word Puzzle: Who’s Ready to Play?”