Oct 05 2011
Lone Frank, the award-winning Danish science writer, claims to be shy, but I don’t believe her. In a world where consumers are increasingly getting access to their own genetic data, Frank turns to genetics for answers about her ancestry, her traits and her risks for diseases, and her prickly personality, bearing all in her entertaining and enlightening new book My Beautiful Genome: Discovering Our Genetic Future One Quirk at a Time.
Jul 01 2011
Marcus Wohlsen is on to something. An Associated Press science and biotechnology writer, Wohlsen is the author of the book BioPunk: DIY Scientists Hack the Software of Life. The book, which came out in April, outlines the parallels between the current community of upstart amateur scientists working in makeshift kitchen labs and garages with the [...]
Nov 24 2010
Even as a curious scientist and a 23andMe employee, I hesitated before opening my genetic test results and wondered…Do I really want to know? Misha Angrist asks himself a similar question in his new book, Here is a Human Being. Then again, he had a really good reason to give pause. As subject number four [...]
Oct 07 2010
Taken individually, the letters A, G, T, and C seem relatively harmless. However, when arranged three billion strong into a human genetic code, these letters have instilled fear of discrimination, disease risk, and a genetically engineered super race of humans (à la the 1997 film “GATTACA”). Once only a subject for science fiction movies, whole [...]
Apr 29 2009
I spent the better part of my undergraduate career lugging around massive biology textbooks. General biology, genetics, embryology: It didn’t matter, they all weighed a ton. I pored over endless chapters of text, highlighting the important sentences, always wishing for more photos, more diagrams, more graphs. A single well-made diagram or image was easier to [...]
Feb 20 2009
Almost since the 1871 publication of “The Descent of Man,” in which Charles Darwin applied his theory of natural selection to the human species, biologists have argued over whether the dramatic series of evolutionary events that led to the emergence of Homo sapiens continues to this day. Some have argued that culture and technology have [...]
Sep 04 2008
For more than a century anthropologists have studied the multitude of cultures and ethnicities that exist across the globe, delving deep into the various ways that populations develop their own unique identities. With the development of genetic anthropology over the last 15 years, scientists have begun to examine whether these cultural identities align with a [...]
Nov 02 2007
People often talk about genes as if they were directly related to specific diseases, as in “the breast cancer gene” or “the gene for alcoholism.” But the fact of the matter is that genes aren’t so simple. They tend to work together in intricate networks, so any one gene’s function only contributes a small part [...]
