Friday’s Elk April 20, 2018

Posted on April 20, 2018November 26, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

The Voyage of the Sweet Potato

I had no idea that the origins of sweet potatoes were so mysterioius until I dug into a new study on their DNA. Turns out, it helped inspire Thor Heyerdahl’s famous voyage on the Kon-Tiki. He wanted to test the idea that sweet potatoes got from the Americas to remote Polynesian islands through pre-Columbia contact. The new study claims instead that the sweet potatoes spread across thousands of miles of ocean on their own. Here’s my New York Times story on the ongoing debate.

National Library of Medicine

Resurrection by Biography

I’ve written a third post about books on my Facebook author page. This time I take a look at a fine biography of Rosalind Franklin, who did pioneering work on DNA only to sink into obscurity. (Here’s a previous post on Stalin and the Scientists, and here’s one on Being Mortal.)

“A wide-ranging and eye-opening inquiry into the way heredity shapes our species.”

Booklist gives a starred review to She Has Her Mother’s Laugh. It’s the third star for the book, coming after one from Publisher’s Weekly and one from Kirkus Reviews.

Episode Two of “The Code”–Can We Cure Diseases By Altering Our DNA?

Watch it here!

TalksApril 27, 2018 “The Library of Babel: On Trying to Read My Genome” Yale University, Applied Data Seminar

May 2, 2018 “From Ebola to Dinosaurs to 23andMe: Writing about the Science of Life” Columbia School of Journalism

May 3, 2018 MIT, Knight Science Journalism seminar

May 17, 2018 “Exploring the Complexity and Controversy of Heredity” Keynote Lecture, Bio-IT World, Boston

May 21, 2018 “Biotechnology and Its Future Impact on Greater Boston” (panel discussion) Boston Athenaeum

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

NEW–> June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas (details to come)

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

She Has Her Mother’s Laugh will be published on May 29, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

Friday’s Elk, March 22, 2018

Posted on March 22, 2018November 26, 2021 by Matt Kristoffersen

A Visit to An Ancient DNA Lab

Many of the remarkable studies about human history I’ve been reporting on in recent years have come from the Harvard laboratory of David Reich. Recently I took a trip to Boston to see how Reich’s team rescues DNA from bones dating back thousands of years, and how they then use those genetic fragments to reconstruct the movements of people across the planet. Here’s my profile of Reich, in Tuesday’s New York Times. I was delighted that the Times’s graphics wizard Jonathan Corum created a map for the story, adapted from Reich’s new book, Who We Are and How We Got That Way.

A “DNA Autopsy” of a Mysterious Mummy

Some UFO fans make a great deal out of a miniature mummy discovered in the early 2000s in a ghost town in Chile. A team of Stanford scientists got hold of some of its tissue and have reconstructed its genome. Proving it was human was just the start of their research; they’ve found mutations that could account for its ET-like anatomy. Here’s my column on what one expert is calling a “DNA autopsy.”

Book News: A Star from Kirkus and an Interview about Heredity

Kirkus Reviews published a starred review of She Has Her Mother’s Laugh on Monday: “A thoroughly enchanting tour of big questions, oddball ideas, and dazzling accomplishments of researchers searching to explain, manipulate, and alter inheritance.” You can read the full review here.

Meanwhile, Publisher’s Weekly asked me some questions–

What was the most surprising thing you learned while working on this book?

I was surprised by how so many animals have to inherit bacteria from their ancestors in order to survive. Cockroaches, for example, carry bacteria that have to infect their eggs so that the next generation can use them to survive. It’s a parallel kind of heredity happening all around us—and maybe even inside us, too.

You can read the full interview here.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity, comes out in May. You can pre-order it here. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl