Greetings–
These days, I’m working on a book about heredity. This week I spent some time digging through the archives a historical society and came across this crazy pedigree from the early 1900s. At the time, the rediscovery of Mendel had set everyone abuzz, and a lot of scientists believed that everything was genetic–even boat building. (Note how some relatives were merely artistic, musical, mechanical, or literary. Heterozygotes, I guess…)
Scientists can detect smaller and smaller amounts of DNA. While this advance has enabled scientists to study genes in greater detail, it also raises the risks of false positives. And when that false positive points to a criminal suspect, the stakes can be huge. I take a look at the controversy over trace DNA for my New York Times column this week. [Photo by Petra Fritz]
Here’s a portrait of Stat as a young publication. (Sorry, James Joyce.) Thanks to Columbia Journalism Review for the attention.
Hippo Reads has published an excerpt from my chapter in Science Blogging: The Essential Guide. I offer up a personal history of science blogging over the last 15 years.
I wanted to elaborate about the new entry in my talks below. On March 15, I’ll be at Cooper Union in New York to have a conversation with evolutionary biologist Sean B. Carroll. Carroll has done important studies on how new forms of animals evolve, and these days he is also vice president for science education at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Somehow, he finds time to write books, too, and really good ones at that–so good that he won this year’s Lewis Thomas Prize for Writing About Science. Carroll and I will be talking about his latest book, The Serengeti Rules: The Quest to Discover How Life Works and Why It Matters. We’ll be talking about everything from cancer to wildebeest. The talk is free–details are here.
March 15: Cooper Union, New York.A conversation with biologist Sean Carroll
June 23-25: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Durham North Carolina. Here’s the meeting site.
July 31: Keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
Originally published February 26, 2016. Copyright 2016 Carl Zimmer.