A little more horn-tooting: The Loom has just been named a winner of the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s 2004 Science Journalism Award. The judges considered three pieces: Hamilton’s Fall, Why the Cousins Are Gone, and My Darwinian Daughters. Here’s the press release. Thanks to the judges–it’s gratifying to see that it’s possible for a little blog to swim with the big online sharks.
Soul Made Flesh made Amazon.com’s Editor’s Pick list of the ten best science books of 2004. It’s an honor, although it seems a little premature to call 2004 over!
Thanks to Wired for excerpting my post on what DNA has to say about one-man-one-woman marriage. When the editors told me that they were going to run the excerpt, I thought at first that it might be a bit stale by the time the magazine came out. But it seems today that the proper form of marriage is on the nation’s mind again…
It’s obvious from yesterday’s vote that embryonic stem cells will continue to split the country (California versus Washington DC, for one thing). But in an ironic bit of timing researchers at the Reproductive Genetics Institute have just published some results at Reproductive BioMedicine Online that could–possibly–short-circuit some of the arguments against using embryonic stem cells.
Scientific American, October 31, 2004
By page 77 of The God Gene, Dean H. Hamer has already disowned the title of his own book. He recalls describing to a colleague his discovery of a link between spirituality and a specific gene he calls “the God gene.” His colleague raised her eyebrows. “Do you mean there’s just one?” she asked.
“I deserved her skepticism,” Hamer writes. “What I meant to say, of course, was ‘a’ God gene, not ‘the’ God gene.”
Of course. Why, the reader wonders, didn’t Hamer call his book A God Gene? That might not have been as catchy, but at least it wouldn’t have left him contradicting himself.