A number of the newest cancer drugs can give a few months of extra life to people in advanced stages of the disease. The drugs attack the cancer cells with pinpoint accuracy and wipe out the tumors. And then, months later, the tumors come right back. In my “Matter” column today, I take a look at the work of cancer biologists and evolutionary biologists to understand how this rebound happens, and how doctors might stop it. Check it out.

Originally published June 27, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

From time to time, I get letters from people thinking seriously about becoming science writers. Some have no idea how to start; some have started but want to know how to get better. I usually respond with a hasty email, so that I can get back to figuring out for myself how to be a science writer. I thought it would be better for everyone—the people contacting me and myself—to sit down and write out a thorough response. (I’m also going to publish a final version of this on my web site, here.)

First a caveat: I am probably the wrong person to ask for this advice. I stumbled into this line of work without any proper planning in the early 1990s, when journalism was a very different industry. The answer to “How do I become a science writer?” is not equivalent to “How did you become a science writer?”

Continue reading “A Note To Beginning Science Writers” →

I’ve updated yesterday’s post on the “dark matter” of the genome with replies from a co-author of the paper I wrote about.

Originally published June 22, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.

One of the great triumphs of twentieth-century biology was the discovery of how genes make proteins. Genes are encoded in DNA. To turn the sequence of a gene into a protein, a number of molecules gather around it. Reading its sequence, they produce a single-stranded version of it made of RNA, called a transcript. The transcript gets shipped to a cluster of other molecules, the ribosome, which picks out building blocks to construct a protein that corresponds to the gene. The protein floats off to do its job, whether that job is to catch light, digest food, or help generate a thought.

We have about 20,000 protein-coding genes. If you tally up the amount of DNA they constitute, you get less than 3 percent of the human genome. Which naturally raises the question of what’s in the other 97 percent.

Continue reading “Listening to the Genome: Music or Noise?” →