James Watson's The Double Helix is one of the most famous pieces of science writing in the last century, despite its personal, idiosyncratic, and often unkind view of the people involved with the discovery of the structure of DNA. Watson was, of course, one of the two winners of the Nobel...
Category: DNA
James Watson's The Double Helix is one of the most famous pieces of science writing in the last century, despite its personal, idiosyncratic, and often unkind view of the people involved with the discovery of the structure of DNA. Watson was, of course, one of the two winners of the Nobel Prize for that discovery, along with Francis Crick.
Now Simon & Schuster has published a new, annotated and illustrated edition of The Double Helix that reproduces many letters and documents that bear on Watson's story. In a review at boingboing.net, Maggie Koerth-Baker says that if you're going to read The Double Helix, this is...
A little more than a year ago, I wrote in these pages (these pixels?) that the public radio show On the Media was not paying much attention to science coverage. It covers Hollywood, and politics, and the...
A little more than a year ago, I wrote in these pages (these pixels?) that the public radio show On the Media was not paying much attention to science coverage. It covers Hollywood, and politics, and the web, and a variety of things--and it covers them with intelligence and good humor--but it rarely ventures into science coverage.
I was happy to hear that it did so over the weekend, with a report on coverage of a French study said to link genetically modified foods to cancer. Last week, the author and science writer Carl Zimmer ...
I admit, I have no evidence of an imminent Zombie attack. Maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers would have been a better sociocultural reference. In any case, here's the news: Researchers have found male DNA in the brains of women that appears to have come from male fetuses they carried when...
I admit, I have no evidence of an imminent Zombie attack. Maybe Invasion of the Body Snatchers would have been a better sociocultural reference. In any case, here's the news: Researchers have found male DNA in the brains of women that appears to have come from male fetuses they carried when pregnant.
Melissa Healy in the Booster Shots blog at The Los Angeles Times calls the story "astonishing," and I agree. Here is her nice, evocative lede:
For decades after a woman has carried a male child in her womb or shared her mother's womb with a brother, she carries a faint but unmistakable echo of that intimate bond: male fetal DNA that lodges itself in the far recesses of her brain.
Note the mention of an...
Andrew Pollack reports in The New York Times this week on a new kind of genetic testing that can reveal more...
Andrew Pollack reports in The New York Times this week on a new kind of genetic testing that can reveal more abnormalities than the standard tests done to examine fetuses during pregnancy.
The test uses a gene chip to scan for a wide variety of potential problems, he reports, but "it is not always possible to tell whether a small abnormality detected by the chip will be harmful to a child, or if so, how severe such a problem will be." It's a solid story, and nobody else seems to have written it (with one exception; more about that in a minute). This appears to be a scoop by the Times.
But it isn't. Pollack reports that the findings, which he says have not yet been published, were presented in February at a meeting of the...
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