We have the dubious privilege of observing a new disease in the midst of being born. The disease could go on to spread around the world, stall out as a minor, local blight, or disappear altogether. Scientists have been observing its emergence for a year now, and while they know more than they did in 2012, they still can’t predict quite what will happen. Part of their uncertainty stems from the fact that they still don’t know much about its past.
A couple weeks ago I wrote about the great work at Retro Report in looking back at news stories that were in the headlines decades ago. It was especially gratifying to see all the science they’ve delved into. This morning, they unveiled another fascinating look at the history of science. It’s on the drug thalidomide, which caused dramatic birth defects to children’s arms and legs in the 1950s and led to the modern regulation of medicine.”The Shadow of Thalidomide” features interviews with the victims of the drug and scientists who discovered new medical uses for it.
Continue reading “Retro Report Looks At the Afterlife of Thalidomide”
Just over half a billion years ago, the animal kingdom went through a remarkable flowering that lasted somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 million years. During the so-called Cambrian Explosion, the first known fossils of many major groups of living animals appear. It’s a chapter of evolutionary history that has captivated many scientists ever since Darwin. And in recent years researchers have gathered a lot of fresh evidence about different factors that might have been the trigger to this evolutionary big boom. Today in the New York Times, I talk to Paul Martin, the director of the Oxford Museum of Natural History, who has co-authored a new synthesis of ideas about the Cambrian Explosion. Rather than looking for just one cause–such as rising sea levels–he argues for a tangled web of feedback loops. Check it out.
Continue reading “Rising Seas, Burrowing Worms, and Nasty Jaws: Weaving Together Animal Evolution”
The New York Times, September 19, 2013
The name Myllokunmingia may not ring a bell, but it is worth knowing. This 520-million-year-old creature was the size of a guppy, with a tiny swordfish-like fin running high over its back. The fossils it has left behind preserve traces of a skull.
Humans have a skull, too. This and a number of other traits we share with Myllokunmingia reveal it to be one of the oldest, most primitive vertebrates yet found. It is, in other words, a hint of where we came from.
Myllokunmingia emerged during one of the most important phases in the history of life, an evolutionary boom known as the Cambrian explosion (named for the geological period when it took place).
Continue reading “New Approach to Explaining Evolution’s Big Bang”
In a mosaic portrait, many tiles, each a little different from the other, add up to an entire person. Genetically speaking, we can be living mosaics, too. As our cells divide, they sometimes mutate, creating distinct populations within us. Many of us carry the genomes of other people inside our bodies.
Scientists have known about these phenomena for a long time, but it was hard to know whether they were more than odd flukes. Now that scientists can sequence genomes from individual cells, they can now start to get at an answer. They are more widespread than was previously thought. The growing significance of chimeras and mosaicist has implications for our sense of genetic identity, as well as for treating diseases. Our many personal genomes are the subject of a feature I’ve written for today’s New York Times. Check it out.
Continue reading “Chimeras and Mosaics: My New York Times Feature on Our Personal Genome*s*”