This post was originally published in “Download the Universe,” a multi-author blog about science ebooks edited by Carl Zimmer.
Adventures in Synthetic Biology. Story by Drew Endy, Isadora Deese, and the MIT Synthetic Biology Working Group; art by Chuck Wadey. Originally published in 2005.
Reviewed by Carl Zimmer
March 28, 2013
A few days ago, CNS News (“The right news. Right now.”) discovered that the National Science Foundation has been funding a study on the evolution of waterfowl genitalia.
When someone brought this item to my attention, I was puzzled. After all, this is not breaking news. I should know–I wrote about it for the New York Times almost six years ago.
Today I dropped by CBS This Morning to talk about my story in National Geographic on the quest to bring species back from extinction. I’ve embedded the video below; here’s the link.
Originally published March 23, 2013. Copyright 2013 Carl Zimmer.
Last June, a sixty-year-old man in Saudi Arabia fell ill with pneumonia. His disease, it turned out, was caused by a virus no one had seen before. It was a coronavirus–in other words, it belonged to a lineage of viruses that includes ones that cause colds as well as ones that cause SARS. But this new virus was genetically distinct enough to be considered a species in its own right. Scientists now refer to it by the dreary, unpronounceable abbreviation HCoV-EMC. Eleven days after being admitted to a Jedda hospital, the man infected with this new virus died.
A single death from a new virus is hardly unheard of. But over the past few months, virus-watchers have gotten increasingly anxious about HCoV-EMC. So far, 15 people have been diagnosed with the virus, and nine have died. While some victims have turned up as far away as England, everyone with HCoV-EMC has had some connection to the Arabian Peninsula. Some victims belonged to the same family, suggesting that the virus can spread from one person to the next.
Continue reading “Listen Closely To The Bats and You Can Hear the Viral Chatter”
On Friday, I was down in Washington to speak at (and mostly watch) TEDxExtinction, a day-long meeting dedicated to exploring the possibility (and advisability) of bringing extinct species back into existence. The meeting coincided with the publication my story in the new issue of National Geographic on the subject. I invited readers to ask questions raised by either the story or the meeting, and then on Monday, National Geographic hosted a tweet chat on Twitter, which became an hour-long rapid-fire volley. So I’m only now getting a chance to write this long-promised post. Here are some answers to a few of the questions posted on the Loom and on Twitter–first on the logistics of de-extinction, and then the ethics.