In 1941, a rose killed a policeman.

Albert Alexander, a 43-year-old policeman in Oxford, England, was pruning his roses one fall day when a thorn scratched him at the corner of his mouth. The slight crevice it opened allowed harmless skin bacteria to slip into his body. At first, the scratch grew pink and tender. Over the course of several weeks, it slowly swelled. The bacteria turned from harmless to vicious, proliferating through his flesh. Alexander eventually had to be admitted to Radcliffe Hospital, the bacteria spreading across his face and into his lungs.

Continue reading “When You Swallow A Grenade” →

Welcome to the Loom. I’d like to use my first post here to introduce myself and my blog, as I set up camp at National Geographic.

My relationship with National Geographic goes way back–back to a prehistoric era when I didn’t even know what blogs were. My first story for the magazine appeared in 2001. It was an exploration of the ways scientists figure out how old things are–the universe, the Earth, the animal kingdom, our own species. It was the first article I wrote as a freelance writer, having just left Discover, where I had been on staff for ten years. I’m forever grateful to National Geographic for welcoming me into the uncertain world of freelance journalism with journeys to mountaintop observatories and to the oldest patches of Earth still exposed on the planet’s surface.

Continue reading “Moving Day” →

Yesterday I went to Rutgers University to give a talk about medical ecology. Afterwards, I got a delightful surprise: Amy Chen Vollmer, the president of the Waksman Foundation for Microbiology, got on stage to announce I had won the Byron H. Waksman Award for Excellence in Public Communication of Life Sciences.

Continue reading “A Very Special Tree of Life” →