In today’s New York Times, Manny Fernandez and Donald McNeil report that West Nile virus is wreaking havoc in Dallas. This summer, 200 people have become ill in Dallas County, and 10 people have died so far. Those are worryingly high numbers in a single Texas county of 2.4 million people, and so Dallas has declared a state of emergency. The city is now swept up in a debate about the safety of widespread pesticide spraying to kill off mosquitoes, which carry the virus. Fernandez and McNeil quote public health experts who warn that it’s probably a harbinger of things to come throughout the country this year.

For many young people in the United States, West Nile virus has been a fact of life for as long as they can remember. But before 1999, there was no West Nile virus in this country. None. Its arrival and its spread are a sobering lesson in how quickly diseases can establish themselves.

To offer some background to today’s news, I am reprinting an essay from my 2011 book, A Planet of Viruses, about how West Nile came to America. Continue reading “West Nile Virus: The Stranger That Came To Stay” →

I have been meaning to read a book coming out soon called Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves. It’s written by Harvard biologist George Church and science writer Ed Regis. Church is doing stunning work on a number of fronts, from creating synthetic microbes to sequencing human genomes, so I definitely am interested in what he has to say. I don’t know how many other people will be, so I have no idea how well the book will do. But in a tour de force of biochemical publishing, he has created 70 billion copies. Instead of paper and ink, or pdf’s and pixels, he’s used DNA.

Continue reading “Want to Get 70 Billion Copies of Your Book In Print? Print It In DNA” →