I’m back from Pittsburgh, where the blogging-meet-science writing workshop went very well. Science writers are definitely curious, although you could hear some moans about the end of dead-tree publishing (a bit premature, in my opinion). Amy Gahran, my fellow panelist, is going to post a podcast on her blog, Contentious. I will update the post with a link when it is available.
I’m going to be part of two workshops in the space of a couple weeks that will deal with the intersection of blogging and science writing. The first will be this Saturday at the annual meeting of the National Association of Science Writers in Pittsburgh, and the second will be hosted Tuesday November 1 by the Science Writers of New York at the New York Academy of Sciences.(There’s no link yet to the New York event, but Link here.) The panel will include Sarah Tomlin from Nature and Sreenath Sreenivasan, Columbia’s resident tech journalism guru.
There was a time not that long ago when sequencing a single gene would be hailed as a scientific milestone. But then came a series of breakthroughs that sped up the process: clever ideas for how to cut up genes and rapidly identify the fragments, the design of robots that could do this work twenty-four hours a day, and powerful computers programmed to make sense of the results. Instead of single genes, entire genomes began to be sequenced. This year marks the tenth anniversary of the publication of the first complete draft of the entire genome of a free-living species (a nasty little microbe called Haemophilus influenzae). Since then, hundreds of genomes have emerged, from flies, mice, humans, and many more, each made up of thousands of genes. More individual genes have been sequenced from the DNA of thousands of other species. In August, an international consortium of databases announced that they now had 100 billion “letters” from the genes of 165,000 different species.
Finally, more brains.
Continue reading “Whose Brain Is It Anyway? (The Further Hobbit Adventures)”