Friday’s Elk, March 4, 2016

Greetings–

This week brings a virus double-header about strange ways to fight those pesky buggers…

A Virus With Its Own Immune System?

Over at Stat, I wrote about giant viruses, the weirdest viruses of all. For one thing, these viruses are so big, they get infected by their own viruses. This week giant viruses got even weirder, when scientists reported that they may have an immune system of their own to fight their viral enemies. (Image courtesy of American Scientist)

Our Inner Viruses Switch On Our Antiviral Genes

We get sick with viruses too, of course, and our cells fight them by switching on lots of defensive genes. It turns out that many of the switches for those genes came from viruses. I tell that twisted tale in my column this week for the New York Times.

Another New Talk–Should We Re-Engineer Humanity?

I’m thrilled to join the historian of science Daniel Kevles (author of In the Name of Eugenics) to talk about past and future dreams of human genetic engineering. We’ll be at the fantastic Strand Bookstore in New York on March 24. Details here.

The Talks
March 15: Cooper Union, New York.A conversation with biologist Sean Carroll

NEW–> March 24: Strand Bookstore, New York: Should We Re-engineer Humanity? With Daniel Kevles. Details here.

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

The End
As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there’s always carlzimmer.com.

Best wishes, Carl