Hello, Norway! Two talks in Oslo next week

Posted on August 23, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Next Friday (August 31) I have the honor of taking part in the Kristine Bonnevie Lecture, an annual lecture held at the University of Oslo to honor the first female professor in Norway. I’ll be speaking along with Cori Bargmann of Rockefeller University, who has done hugely important research on the links between the anatomy of the brain and how animals behave. Details are here.

On Saturday (September 1) I’ll be giving a public lecture about A Planet of Virusesat Oslo’s House of Literature (Litteraturhuset). Details are here.

If there are any Loom-readers in Norway (perhaps a few?), I hope to see you in Oslo.

[Image: Wikipedia]

Darwin’s Drugs: My Article in Today’s New York Times

Posted on August 21, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Two years ago, I wrote in the New York Times about scientists exploring evolution to discover the function of our genes. We share a 1.2 billion-year-old common ancestor with fungi, for example, and it turns out that fungi (yeast in particular) have networks of genes remarkably similar to our own.

Back in 2010, the scientists I interviewed told me they hoped to use this method to find new drugs. In today’s New York Times, I write about how they’ve delivered on that promise. It turns out that a drug that doctors have used for over 40 years to kill fungi can slow the growth of tumors. It’s a striking illustration of how evolution provides a map that allows medical research to find their way to promising new treatments. Check it out.

West Nile Virus: The Stranger That Came To Stay

Posted on August 17, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

In today’s New York Times, Manny Fernandez and Donald McNeil report that West Nile virus is wreaking havoc in Dallas. This summer, 200 people have become ill in Dallas County, and 10 people have died so far. Those are worryingly high numbers in a single Texas county of 2.4 million people, and so Dallas has declared a state of emergency. The city is now swept up in a debate about the safety of widespread pesticide spraying to kill off mosquitoes, which carry the virus. Fernandez and McNeil quote public health experts who warn that it’s probably a harbinger of things to come throughout the country this year.

For many young people in the United States, West Nile virus has been a fact of life for as long as they can remember. But before 1999, there was no West Nile virus in this country. None. Its arrival and its spread are a sobering lesson in how quickly diseases can establish themselves.

To offer some background to today’s news, I am reprinting an essay from my 2011 book, A Planet of Viruses, about how West Nile came to America. Continue reading “West Nile Virus: The Stranger That Came To Stay” →

Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA

Posted on August 16, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

Continue reading “Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA” →

Good Scientist! You Get a Badge.

Posted on August 14, 2012September 16, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

Slate, August 14, 2012

Link

As a young biologist, Elizabeth Iorns did what all young biologists do: She looked around for something interesting to investigate. Having earned a Ph.D. in cancer biology in 2007, she was intrigued by a paper that appeared the following year in Nature. Biologists at the University of California-Berkeley linked a gene called SATB1 to cancer. They found that it becomes unusually active in cancer cells and that switching it on in ordinary cells made them cancerous. The flipside proved true, too: Shutting down SATB1 in cancer cells returned them to normal. The results raised the exciting possibility that SATB1 could open up a cure for cancer. So Iorns decided to build on the research.

There was just one problem. As her first step, Iorns tried replicate the original study. She couldn’t. Boosting SATB1 didn’t make cells cancerous, and shutting it down didn’t make the cancer cells normal again.

Continue reading “Good Scientist! You Get a Badge.” →