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.

Continue reading “Of Protocells and Warm Little Ponds” →

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).

Continue reading “Third Time’s A Charm: Science-Writing Workshop At Yale” →

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.

Continue reading “Can E. coli Save the World?” →