Of Protocells and Warm Little Ponds

Posted on by Lori Jia

This year Science magazine will be celebrating Darwin’s big year with, among other things, a monthly series of essays on major evolutionary questions. The editors asked me to kick things off with an essay on the Big Kick Off–the origin of life. They’ve just posted my piece. Here’s how it starts:

An Amazon of words flowed from Charles Darwin’s pen. His books covered the gamut from barnacles to orchids, from geology to domestication. At the same time, he filled notebooks with his ruminations and scribbled thousands of letters packed with observations and speculations on nature. Yet Darwin dedicated only a few words of his great verbal flood to one of the biggest questions in all of biology: how life began.

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Third Time’s A Charm: Science-Writing Workshop At Yale

Posted on by Lori Jia

On January 26 and February 2, I’ll be teaching a workshop for science graduate students at Yale on writing about science for non-scientists. This is the third time for me, and I think I’ve got the hang of it. Of course, things have changed a lot since the last time around (see under Twitter), so I’m doing a little rethinking. That’s how you sprout new neurons, right?

Information about the workshop and registration can be found on the Yale Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology web site (flyer pdf).

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Can E. coli Save the World?

Posted on by Lori Jia

2009 may be the year in which synthetic biology finally goes mainstream.

There have been plenty of articles about synthetic biology–reprogramming cells by inserting new genes and tweaking the connections between their own genes–over the past few years. (Here is one of mine.) But apparently most people are not paying attention. In a recent poll, most Americans said they had no clue what synthetic biology is.

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The High-Tech Search for a Cleaner Biofuel Alternative

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Yale Environment 360, January 5, 2009

Link

Craig Venter is ready for his next incarnation.

In the 1990s, Venter became familiar to the world as a maverick who would sequence the human genome faster and cheaper than a huge team of government scientists. Six years ago he made headlines by announcing his plan to synthesize an entire genome from scratch, insert it into a cell, and manufacture a new species. In both cases, Venter has followed up his promises with some hard results. He published the first gold-standard sequence of an individual’s complete genome (his own). And while he hasn’t made an artificial life form yet, he and his colleagues at the J. Craig Venter Institute have achieved a series of landmarks, from synthesizing large chunks of DNA to performing the world’s first “genome transplant” on a microbe.

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