Here’s a gratifying review of A Planet of Viruses, just out in the Washington Post:
Continue reading “Washington Post rave for A Planet of Viruses”
After a fairly quiet summer, I’m going to be giving some talks this fall, starting around my neighborhood and then radiating outwards. Here’s a preliminary list of public events. I may be adding extra ones as the launch of Science Ink approaches. You can find the most up-to-date information on my talks page.
Continue reading “Autumn yammerings: Where I’ll be talking this fall”
In tomorrow’s New York Times, I have a profile of Arthur Horwich, a medical geneticist who has spent a quarter century trying to figure out the workings of this beautiful molecular box. Today he won the Lasker Award, a prize for medicine that has often gone to scientists who later won the Nobel. Why all accolades for a little box? Because without it, you’d be dead. And as Horwich and others have discovered what goes on inside, they’ve helped change the way we understand the biology of the cell. Check it out.
[Image of GroEL from Molecular Chaperone Group, Birkbeck College]
The New York Times, September 12, 2011
NEW HAVEN — Medicine is a divided world. On one side are the doctors, who come face to face with illness each day and try to heal their patients with whatever tools they can get their hands on. On the other are the researchers, who explore the body’s microscopic complexity, never sure whether their discoveries will ever end up in the hands of the doctors.
Dr. Arthur Horwich, a medical geneticist at Yale University, lives in both worlds. “I’ve always been on the fence between science and medicine,” he said. “I could never make up my mind.”
Continue reading “Horwich Wins Lasker Award by Straddling Science and Medicine”
Slate, September 8, 2011
Dear Art—
Is Contagion a public health campaign? I don’t think so. The Centers for Disease Control didn’t produce it; Hollywood did. It’s a movie—but it’s a movie for which the creators talked to people who actually deal with viruses and epidemics. And for that, I give them a lot of credit. It’s rare to find a movie that tries to show what scientists actually do, rather than putting an actor in a lab coat and having him fight bug-faced aliens.