Enlisting a Computer to Battle Cancers, One by One

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The New York Times, March 27, 2014

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When Robert B. Darnell was a graduate student in the early 1980s, he spent a year sequencing a tiny fragment of DNA. Now Dr. Darnell is an oncologist and the president of the New York Genome Center, where the DNA-sequencing machines can decode his grad-school fragment in less than a ten-thousandth of a second.

As an oncologist, Dr. Darnell is firmly convinced that this technological advance will change how cancer is treated. “It’s inspiring for me, and it’s inspiring for lots of doctors,” he said in an interview.

The idea is simple. Oncologists will get a tumor biopsy and have its genome sequenced. They will identify the mutations in the cancer cells, and they will draw up a list of drugs to treat each patient’s particular mix of mutations.

Continue reading “Enlisting a Computer to Battle Cancers, One by One” →

Darwin in the City: My Talk About Humans Driving Evolution

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CENTRAL PARK, 1930. ORREN LOUDEN, NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC

Yesterday I delivered the Director’s Lecture at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum. Speaking as I was at a lovely green island in a venerable city, I decided to talk about how life evolves in our human-dominated world. My talk ranged from New York City mice to HIV to GM-crop-feasting insects to climate-driven extinctions.

I’ve embedded the video below the fold. The lighting on my is fairly dim, but the slides show up fine and the sound is clear. Below the video, I’ve also embedded the slides for easy viewing. Continue reading “Darwin in the City: My Talk About Humans Driving Evolution” →

Flying Through Inner Space

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GLASS BRAIN PROJECT, ADAM GAZZALEY, UCSF HTTP://NEUROSCAPELAB.COM

It’s hard to truly see the brain. I don’t mean to simply see a three-pound hunk of tissue. I mean to see it in a way that offers a deep feel for how it works. That’s not surprising, given that the human brain is made up of over 80 billion neurons, each branching out to form thousands of connections to other neurons. A drawing of those connections may just look like a tangle of yarn.

As I wrote in the February issue of National Geographic, a number of neuroscientists are charting the brain now in ways that were impossible just a few years ago. And out of these surveys, an interesting new way to look at the brain is emerging. Call it the brain fly-through. The brain fly-through only became feasible once scientists started making large-scale maps of actual neurons in actual brains. Once they had those co-ordinates in three-dimensional space, they could program a computer to glide through it. The results are strangely hypnotic. Continue reading “Flying Through Inner Space” →

A Moss From King Arthur’s Court and the New Science of Resurrection Ecology

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A SCIENTIST DRILLS INTO A MOSS BANK ON SIGNY ISLAND. PHOTO: P. BOELEN

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Over the past year, I’ve been writing a lot about scientists bringing back life from the distant past–including viruses, water fleas, and–theoretically–mammoths. For my “Matter” column this week in the New York Times, I report on another revival: moss that has started growing after spending 1500 years in a bank of permafrost. As more species return from the past, some scientists think it’s time to establish a new scientific field which they call “resurrection ecology.” In my column, I consider some of the things that resurrection ecologists can learn about the past and the future. Check it out. Continue reading “A Moss From King Arthur’s Court and the New Science of Resurrection Ecology” →

The Mystery of the Sea Unicorn

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ONE OF THESE IS REAL. FROM PIERRE POMET’S HISTOIRE GENERALE DES DROGUES, TRAITANT DES PLANTES, DES ANIMAUX, & DES MINERAUX… (PARIS, 1694). VIA NEW YORK ACADEMY OF MEDICINE

In 1577, the English explorer Martin Frobisher led an expedition of 150 men to the northern reaches of Canada, in search of a passage to India and a fortune in gold. As they surveyed the islands near the coast, they came across something Frobisher could never have anticipated: a unicorn fish.

“Upon another small island here,” Frobisher wrote in his journal, “was also found a great dead fish, which, as it would seem, had been embayed with ice, and was in proportion round like to a porpoise, being about twelve foot long, and in bigness answerable, having a horn of two yards long growing out of the snout or nostrils. This horn is wreathed and straight, like in fashion to a taper made of wax, and may truly thought to be the sea-unicorn.”

When Frobisher returned to England, he presented the horn to Queen Elizabeth, who commanded that it be kept with the crown jewels. Continue reading “The Mystery of the Sea Unicorn” →