This year’s Nobel Prize in medicine or physiology was announced this morning. Barry Marshall and J. Robin Warren won for discovering that ulcers can be caused not by stress or genes but by a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori (shown here). As my fellow Corantean, Derek Lowe, observes, this story follows the classic arc from, “You’re completely bonkers” to “You’re going to Stockholm.” But it also illustrates a point that I madewhen last year’s Nobelists were announced: it demonstrates how intimately woven evolutionary biology is becoming with medicine.
Just a technical note: Corante has been upgrading to a new version of Movable Type, and they’re still working out a few glitches. Some readers have already reported trouble posting comments. You can vent any other sort of frustration in my direction, and I’ll let the powers that be know. I assume everything will be sorted out shortly.
This Wednesday, I’ll be coming to Swarthmore Collegeto give a public lecture about human evolution. I had originally planned to focus on some of the cutting-edge discoveries I include in my upcoming book, from brain genes to enigmatic hobbits. But now that the big creationism trialis scheduled to get underway a couple hours away in Dover, Pa., on Monday, I’ll talk about that as well–in particular how scientists continue to find evidence of human evolution, despite what some op-ed writing politiciansmay claim.
The National Academy of Sciences just announced its 2005 Communications Awards. Gareth Cook, Pulitzer prizewinner from the Boston Globe, won the Newspaper/Magazine/Internet category for his must-read series of articleson stem cells. I was named one of two finalists, for a group of pieces about evolution that appeared during 2005 in Discover, The New York Times, and right here. I knew I might be taking a risk by including some posts from The Loom, but I was very proud of them. It’s nice to see that blogs are taking seriously by the likes of the National Academy of Sciences.
Continue reading “Blogs: Another Sign of Semi-Respectability”
My brother Ben is now a respectable consultant for the Oxford English Dictionary, but when he was a kid, he was a puzzle freak, pure and simple. In fourth grade he’d spend hours paging through a big unabridged Webster’s, looking for obscure words that he could use to create a fiendish rebus. Little did I know that one day one of his favorite puzzles–the doublet–would become useful to me in thinking about evolution.