Here’s a gratifying review of A Planet of Viruses, just out in the Washington Post:
Continue reading “Washington Post rave for A Planet of Viruses”
Author: Matt Kristoffersen
After a fairly quiet summer, I’m going to be giving some talks this fall, starting around my neighborhood and then radiating outwards. Here’s a preliminary list of public events. I may be adding extra ones as the launch of Science Ink approaches. You can find the most up-to-date information on my talks page.
Continue reading “Autumn yammerings: Where I’ll be talking this fall”
In tomorrow’s New York Times, I have a profile of Arthur Horwich, a medical geneticist who has spent a quarter century trying to figure out the workings of this beautiful molecular box. Today he won the Lasker Award, a prize for medicine that has often gone to scientists who later won the Nobel. Why all accolades for a little box? Because without it, you’d be dead. And as Horwich and others have discovered what goes on inside, they’ve helped change the way we understand the biology of the cell. Check it out.
[Image of GroEL from Molecular Chaperone Group, Birkbeck College]
Slate, September 8, 2011
Dear Art—
Is Contagion a public health campaign? I don’t think so. The Centers for Disease Control didn’t produce it; Hollywood did. It’s a movie—but it’s a movie for which the creators talked to people who actually deal with viruses and epidemics. And for that, I give them a lot of credit. It’s rare to find a movie that tries to show what scientists actually do, rather than putting an actor in a lab coat and having him fight bug-faced aliens.
Last year, while I was working on a profile for the New York Times of a virus hunter named Ian Lipkin, he told me he was consulting on a Hollywood movie about the outbreak of a new pathogen. Kate Winslet would be an epidemiologist. Lawrence Fishburne would work at the Centers for Disease Control. He was hanging out with Gwyneth Paltrow. The director was Steven Soderbergh.
I had a hard time picturing all this.
Continue reading “On Slate–Contagion: A dialogue about movies, viruses, and reasonable fear”