How Lives Become Long

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National Geographic, March 28, 2014

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It is easy to feel sorry for the gastrotrich. This invertebrate animal, the size of a poppy seed and the shape of a bowling pin, swarms by the millions in rivers and lakes. After it hatches, it takes only three days to develop a complicated body, complete with a mouth, a gut, sensory organs, and a brain. Having reached maturity in just seventy-two hours, the gastrotrich starts laying eggs. And after a few more days, it becomes enfeebled and dies of old age.

To squeeze a whole life into a week seems like one of nature’s more cruel tricks. But that’s only because we are accustomed to measure our lives in decades.

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Personalized Medicine: Taming the Big Data Ocean

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A DIAGRAM OF PROTEINS THAT FORM A CHEMICAL PATHWAY IN A CELL–AND WHICH CAN BE DISRUPTED BY A CANCER-CAUSING MUTATION. PHOTO: IBM

The idea of personalized medicine is very simple. Your doctor peruses your genome to tailor your medical treatment. If you get cancer, she compares the genome of your tumor cells to your ordinary genome.

But in between idea and practice are rough waters yet to be crossed. That’s because the genome doesn’t speak for itself. Instead, we will probably need the help of computers with a human-like power to learn. Continue reading “Personalized Medicine: Taming the Big Data Ocean” →

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.

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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” →