The New York Times, June 29, 2009

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Newsweek, June 27, 2009

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Ten years ago, the human genome was medicine’s holy grail. Playing the part of King Arthur’s knights were rival teams of biologists racing to sequence all the genetic instructions required to make a human being. And just as the actual Holy Grail was believed to have miraculous healing powers, some promised that the genome would change medicine forever. Biotech companies raced to cash in—Human Genome Sciences, for instance, filed patents on 100,000 genes and, in 1999, saw its stock quadruple. But genomic science didn’t deliver fast breakthroughs. Today Human Genome’s stock price is down below $3, and its vast patent portfolio looks like overkill, considering that a human has only about 20,000 genes altogether.

Continue reading “The Gene Puzzle” →

Newsweek, June 26, 2009

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Ten years ago, the human genome was medicine’s holy grail. Playing the part of King Arthur’s knights were rival teams of biologists racing to sequence all the genetic instructions required to make a human being. And just as the actual Holy Grail was believed to have miraculous healing powers, some promised that the genome would change medicine forever. Biotech companies raced to cash in—Human Genome Sciences, for instance, filed patents on 100,000 genes and, in 1999, saw its stock quadruple. But genomic science didn’t deliver fast breakthroughs. Today Human Genome’s stock price is down below $3, and its vast patent portfolio looks like overkill, considering that a human has only about 20,000 genes altogether.

Continue reading “Biologists Struggle to Make Sense of Genomics” →

Science Magazine, June 25, 2009

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We’re halfway through the Origins series of essays in honor of Charles Darwin’s 200th birthday, and I’d wager that the other writers who have contributed to it will agree that it’s a guaranteed recipe for glorious failure. The origin of life in 2000 words? That’s just enough room to give a taste of the wide range of research going on these days but hardly enough to set up a proper banquet. The same goes for my latest essay, on the origin of sex. There, I focused on the intriguing question of why eukaryotes (animals, plants, fungi, and protozoans) have so much sex when it seems to come at a high cost compared with just cloning yourself. But there’s an equally intriguing question that I didn’t have room to address: Do bacteria have sex, too?

Continue reading “Sex: a solution to microbial invasion?” →

Discover, June 15, 2009

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I am going to do my best to hold your attention until the very last word of this column. Actually, I know it’s futile. Along the way, your mind will wander off, then return, then drift away again. But I can console myself with some recent research on the subject of mind wandering. Mind wandering is not necessarily the sign of a boring column. It’s just one of the things that make us human.

Everybody knows what it is like for our minds to wander, and yet, for a long time psychologists shied away from examining the experience. It seemed too elusive and subjective to study scientifically. Only in the past decade have they even measured just how common mind wandering is. The answer is very.

Continue reading “Stop Paying Attention: Zoning Out Is a Crucial Mental State” →