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Friday's Elk, February 19, 2021

Life Finding A Way

On a snowy February afternoon almost exactly a year ago, I took my final pre-pandemic road trip. I drove to Albany, where I met a pair of wildlife biologists named Carl Herzog and Katelyn Ritzko. Together we traveled on into the Adirondacks, stopping at the end of a road in the woods. Getting out of the car, we hiked a snow-covered trail until we reached a half-frozen stream. There we stopped to suit up in neoprene chest waders. We put on helmets, switched on headlamps, and stepped into the stream to make our way into a flooded graphite mine.

“Tripping and falling is the biggest threat,” Herzog said as the darkness closed around us. “You don’t ever want to touch the ceiling.”

I had come to the mine to pay a visit to its inhabitants. Clinging to the walls were bats, looking like furry pears glistening with beads of moisture. They held perfectly still in our headlamps as they hibernated. The temperature of their bodies matched the cool temperature of the mine. They had been hanging on those slick walls for over four months and would still be there weeks after my visit.

Yet the bats were different from the chunks of rocks lying on the floor of the mine, from the timbers still propping up the passageways. Inside their bodies, the molecules making up the bats were balancing each other in a delicate dance of homeostasis. In other words, they were alive.

Fortunately, I got out of the mine and back home safely. There I wrote about the trip--and what it showed me about life--in a chapter of Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means To Be Alive. I’m looking forward to sharing these experiences when the book comes out on March 9. Since my last newsletter, Booklist gave Life’s Edge a starred review, writing, “Zimmer invites us to observe, ponder, and celebrate life’s exquisite diversity, nuances, and ultimate unity.”

Next month I’ll be having a series of live events where I’ll be talking about the book. On March 10 at noon PST / 3 pm ET, the Commonwealth Club in San Francisco will host a conversation about Life’s Edge between me and environmental reporter Rachel Becker. You can sign up here.

There’s still time to enter the Goodreads giveaway. Visit this page by March 1 and click the “Enter Giveaway” button for a chance to win one of fifteen finished hardcover copies of Life’s Edge. (Only U.S. residents are eligible, I’m afraid.) If that kind of uncertainty is just too much to handle, you can pre-order it here.

Brain Organoids as Evolutionary Time Machines

The cover of Life’s Edge features another strange form of life called brain organoids. These pea-sized spheres, made of hundreds of thousands of neurons that develop from a single cell, can produce electrical impulses much like brain waves.

I first wrote about brain organoids back in 2018, and I explore them further in Life’s Edge. A lot of our notions about human life are wrapped around our brains. Brain death is the legal definition of death, for example. Now brain organoids tangle up those definitions in fascinating ways.

Last week I wrote in the New York Times about a new frontier in brain organoid research: scientists are using them to explore our evolutionary past. Researchers have edited a gene in brain organoids, turning it back into the form it had in our ancestors over half a million years ago. Remarkably, the brain organoids turn out very different from normal ones. That difference may hold clues to how we became uniquely human.

Biden Versus the Variants

The continued drop in new Covid-19 cases in the United States is heartening. In early January, the country was averaging over 250,000 new cases at the peak. Now the daily average has fallen below 73,000--a seventy percent drop.

But it’s easy to lose sight of just how bad things remain. We’re closing in on half a million deaths from Covid-19. Before this horrific third wave, the previous record for average daily cases had been over the summer. But the summer peak never reached 67,000 cases a day on average--6,000 cases below the rate that seems so encouraging now. This pandemic is still out of control.

There aren’t enough vaccinated people to explain the drop over the past several weeks. It’s likely a post-holiday shift in behavior that deserves the credit. People may be taking masking seriously. They may be cutting down on the visits to restaurants and house parties that were driving super-spreader events in late 2020. We can hope that these efforts continue, and that cases continue to drop. But variants are becoming a looming threat, with the potential to reverse that progress.

B.1.1.7, first discovered in the United States at the end of December, is now exploding just as it did earlier in the United Kingdom where it was first found, as well as Denmark, Switzerland, and other countries. I recently reported on a study that found B.1.1.7 is doubling every ten days in the U.S. Preliminary studies hinted the variant was not just more contagious but more lethal. More research is now supporting that view.

Two other variants, called B.1.351 and P.1, are also worth concern--not just because they seem to be more contagious, but because they can dodge some of the antibodies produced by vaccines. And more variants are gaining new mutations all over the world. I wrote about the discovery of seven variants in the United States alone, all gaining a mutation at the same spot in their genome.

All this evolution is making it more and more challenging to keep track of the variants, so Jonathan Corum and I have created a variant and mutation tracker to help you keep these critters sorted.

Just a couple months ago, coronavirus variants were a theoretical concern. Now they are front and center. Vaccine makers are preparing to test out B.1.351 boosters. Others wonder if maybe vaccines could have a broader impact, so that we don’t have to continually play catch-up with evolution. Indeed, there are other coronaviruses lurking in animals that may spill over in years to come. I wrote about some preliminary research into the possibility of a “pancoronavirus” universal vaccine--one shot to rule them all.

The first step, scientists agree, is to get a better fix on the variants. Until now, the United States has done relatively little genome sequencing necessary to track their origin and spread. The efforts are going on in a patchwork of underfunded labs. My colleague Noah Weiland and I wrote Wednesday about an announcement from the White House of a $200 million “down payment” on variant surveillance. The Covid-19 relief package making its way to a vote in Congress has another $1.75 billion in funding to set up a far more massive program. It’s likely that we’ll need it not just to get through the next few months, but to handle the emergence of new variants for years to come.

The Vaccine: Conquering Covid

Last night, the Discovery Channel aired a 90-minute documentary about the scramble for a Covid-19 vaccine. My favorite part was the deep backstory on mRNA vaccines, featuring Katalin Karikó and Drew Weisman, a pair of scientists who toiled in obscurity for years on the concept. Now they might well win a Nobel Prize, plus the satisfaction of watching millions of people get protected thanks to their work.

I provide some commentary along the way from my backyard. Nobody who’s not in my pod is going to hang out inside my house until we’re all vaccinated--not even a film crew!

The show is streaming now on discovery+.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#139

February 18, 2021

Friday's Elk, February 6, 2021

We’re getting down to the one-month-left mark before my new book comes out on March 9. It’s called Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means To Be Alive.

The book is a travelogue across the familiar territory of life as we know it into the strange borderlands between the living and the non-living. It features a huge cast of characters, including slime molds that solve mazes, hibernating bats deep in graphite mines, hungry pythons, tardigrades abandoned on the moon, and the enigma that is Covid-19. Publisher’s Weekly calls Life’s Edge “a pop science tour de force.”

Goodreads is running a giveaway for Life’s Edge this month. Visit this page by March 1 and click the “Enter Giveaway” button for a chance to win one of fifteen finished hardcovers. (Only U.S. residents are eligible, I’m afraid.)

I’ll have more updates on radio appearances and other events for LIfe’s Edge that I’ll share in upcoming newsletters. In the meantime, you can pre-order it here.

The Vexing Variants

A year ago, we were just getting to know a single strain of coronaviruses, SARS-CoV-2. Now its evolutionary tree has branched into thousands of lineages of variants. A few of them are now posing daunting challenges to the world’s efforts to get ahead of the pandemic. I spent a lot of the past month trying to keep up with this astonishing episode of evolution in action.

The variant that we know best was first found in England. Nicknamed “the UK variant” or the “Kent strain” by some, it officially goes by the name B.1.1.7. Jonathan Corum and I took it apart (visually at least) to show what we know about how its mutations turned it into a fast-spreading version of the coronavirus.

B.1.1.7 is still mutating, and scientists are worried that it may gain new mutations that will make it not only more contagious, but harder to control. In England, scientists have found samples of B.1.1.7 that have gained a new mutation that experiments suggest could make it harder to rein in with vaccines or treat with monoclonal antibodies.

It’s difficult to tell right away just how dangerous these new variants are. In California, for example, one lineage of coronaviruses has swiftly become more common in places like Los Angeles. Scientists are still figuring out if it has some biological features that makes it more contagious, rather than just getting spread more by chance. I’m keeping an eye on this variant, known as B.1.429, and will let you know if it’s a variant of serious concern.

Unfortunately, as these mutants zoom across the world, the United States and many other countries are not well-equipped to track them. We don’t have a federal mandate or a nationally organized system for getting coronavirus samples quickly sequenced and analyzed. We’re flying blind into a storm of variants. Fortunately, the new director of the CDC is ramping up more sequencing, but experts say we still need to do a better job.

Even as variants emerge, vaccines remain an essential weapon for fighting the pandemic. Experiments suggest that vaccines can work well against B.1.1.7. And Israel is offering some real-world support for that view. B.1.1.7 is already predominant there, but an aggressive vaccination campaign has led to marked declines in cases and hospitalizations among people over 60, the first group to get vaccinated.

But another variant first found in South Africa, called B.1.351, could prove more challenging. Johnson & Johnson and Novavax both found that the protection from their vaccines wasn’t quite as strong in South African trials than elsewhere.

It’s important to stop and marvel at the fact that in about a year, vaccine designers have demonstrated that eight different vaccines can protect people against Covid-19. The efficacy of the vaccines varies enormously, from about 50 percent to 95. But they’re all vastly better than zero.

The blazing success that scientists have experienced over the past year can make us complacent about how hard it is to make a vaccine. Johnson & Johnson has demonstrated their vaccine has an efficacy rate of 72 percent in the United States and is widely expected to get emergency authorization by the end of February. But it’s not clear yet how many doses they’ll be able to deliver right after that--at a moment when the country is desperate for as many doses as it can get.

We should also offer a tip of the hat to Merck, which abandoned not one but two vaccines after early clinical trials delivered disappointing results in January. Along with the University of Queensland and Sanofi’s failed attempts, that comes to four abandoned vaccines on the path out of the pandemic.

As more and more vaccines start getting injected into millions of people each day, Jonathan Corum and I have created a set of illustrations to show how they work.

While vaccines have the potential to rein in the pandemic, we desperately need better drugs to stop infections early--and will continue to need them in the months to come. A year after the pandemic started, the race for a potent antiviral has proven frustrating compared to the success of vaccines.

On the front page of last Sunday’s paper, I explored why the two lines of research have turned out so differently. It’s hard to make a new drug from scratch, and it can also be challenging to test existing drugs to see if they can be repurposed for Covid-19. But the struggle has been hampered by a lack of organization, leading to lots of small trials that often fail to recruit patients and a paucity of big, well-designed trials that can settle once and for all whether potentially promising drugs actually work. But some new initiatives from NIH and the FDA could spur the development of potent new drugs and the start of potent trials for old ones.

It was kind of crazy to look at last week's issues and see stories I had written or helped to write on the front page three days in a row. I will be quite happy to move deeper into the newspaper. That will be a sign that the pandemic is finally behind us all.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#138

February 5, 2021

Friday's Elk, January 1, 2021

I never looked forward to the first Friday's Elk of the year like this one. When I reread 2020's first newsletter, it feels as if it comes from an alternate universe, where tales of human evolution and monarch butterflies weren't crowded out by a planetary shock brought on by a virus. It's weird to realize that by the time I was writing that newsletter in January 2020, the coronavirus was a few months old, spreading through China and beyond. It didn't even have a name yet, but the die for 2020 was already cast.

I spent December 2020 reporting on the pandemic, as I have since March. This final month of the year gave me a chance to reflect on where we've come in Year One C.E. (Covid Era), and what Year Two C.E. will be like.

When I started the coronavirus vaccine tracker with Jonathan Corum back in June, it felt like a convenient way to keep tabs on assorted projects just getting underway. But it quickly evolved into a combined chronicle and encyclopedia of what will be remembered as one of the most important episodes in the history of science. One by one, vaccines went into clinical trials. Some stalled, and one was abandoned.

But others progressed to the large-scale Phase 3 studies that can show if they're safe and effective. In November, Pfizer and BioNTech provided the first evidence that a vaccine could indeed fight the coronavirus. Moderna soon followed, as did AstraZeneca. In Russia, Sputnik V showed promise, while China's Sinopharm and Sinovac candidates looked as if they might work--although the detailed data from their Phase 3 trials have yet to come out. Country after country began granting emergency authorization or outright approval.

Jonathan kept deploying new design skills to keep up. We added maps to show where people are getting the vaccines. We created a collection explanatory illustrations to show how each vaccine works. (Here's AstraZeneca, Johnson & Johnson, Moderna, Novavax, Pfizer-BioNTech, Sinopharm, and Sinovac.)

December brought photographs of people getting vaccinated across the United States and in other countries. I had dreamed of such a moment in the spring, but I considered it a fantasy to indulge rather than a firm prediction. Incredibly, though, the vaccines turned out to work very well.

At least they worked in the careful confines of a clinical trial. But vaccines don't save lives. Vaccination campaigns do. The first three weeks of vaccinations have fallen catastrophically short of promised targets. Last month Operation Warp Speed leaders said that 20 million people would be vaccinated across the United States by now. As of December 30, the CDC has recorded fewer than 2.8 million Americans getting a shot.

Strained public health care systems are one reason for the delay. It's a bizarre waste of resources to spend over ten billion dollars developing vaccines, and then set aside just a few hundred million to help with distribution. It didn't help matters that the first vaccines to get authorized required ultracold freezing.

When it comes to distribution and cost, there are better vaccines in development--vaccines that only require one shot instead of two, that cost only a few dollars per dose, that can be kept refrigerated instead of frozen, that come in pills or sprays instead of shots. In 2021, I'll be following these up-and-comers on the vaccine tracker. But they have yet to go through trials to prove they're safe and effective. Going into 2021, we have to ask, who will want to risk getting a placebo rather than lining up for the real thing? If we're lucky--again--it may be possible for vaccine developers to skip the placebos and measure the success of new vaccines with nothing but a blood test.

Meanwhile, the virus has rebounded to spring-like levels both in the United States and beyond. More people getting sick means more replicating viruses. More replication means more mutations. And more mutations mean more opportunities for the coronavirus to change in dangerous ways.

In December, a variant emerged in the United Kingdom with 23 mutations distinguishing it from the first SARS-CoV-2 samples found in Wuhan a year ago. Some of those mutations appear to have turned it into a far more contagious virus. I've been helping cover the spread of B.1.1.7, which was first detected this Tuesday in the United States. It could potentially lift the winter surge to even greater heights, requiring even stricter controls to slow its spread. Dramatically increasing vaccination could potentially spare many future victims of B.1.1.7. But if our slow rollout so far is any guide, we may not be up to the challenge.

I'm still guardedly optimistic that summer 2021 will bring back some of the joys we learned to do without in 2020. I think prognostications from reporters like Donald McNeil Jr. and Ed Yong are well considered. But this virus has exploited our assumptions and our wishful thinking so many times already that I am not buying airplane tickets any time soon. For the next few months, I will instead stay at home and continue to help chronicle the exhaustingly interesting news.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#137

December 31, 2020

Friday's Elk, December 5, 2020

It's just a few weeks since I sat down to write my last newsletter, and yet it feels like another century of history has elapsed. The United States is skyrocketing back to the worst rates of hospitalizations and deaths of the spring. On December 3 alone, 2,857 Americans died. That's just shy of the total number of people who died on 9/11--a disaster that still scars us 19 years later. As winter sets in and people stay inside more, things are only going to get worse. I have no idea how deep the scars from this pandemic will run.

It is deeply disorienting to spend this terrible time reporting indisputably good news. When I sent out November's newsletter, Pfizer had just announced that the efficacy of its vaccine was over 90 percent, which was pretty staggering. Since then, a subsequent analysis of more cases of Covid-19 in their trial zeroed in on a figure of 95 percent. Moderna's vaccine turned out to have an efficacy rate at 94.5 percent. The newest look at the trial for Sputnik V from Russia puts theirs at 91 percent. AstraZeneca, at least in one version of its dosing, is 90 percent.

It looks like we may have a lot of vaccines that work well. On the vaccine tracker at the New York Times, I'm following 58 vaccines now in clinical trials, and at least 87 more that are in active preclinical studies. Scientists are starting to figure out what markers in vaccinated people's blood could indicate that the vaccine will protect them. It may turn out that even mediocre vaccines provide good coverage. That would open the way for vaccines that are easier to distribute and take--such as vaccines that require one dose instead of two, that can sit around at room temperature, that come in a pill or spray instead of a shot.

I have been talking a lot recently on the radio and elsewhere about how things are going. Here's my conversation with Brian Lehrer at WNYC. And here's another with Sacramento's Capradio. Here's a chat with CBSN, which got me and my cat Mick a tiny bit of glory: appearing on Room Rater's Twitter account.

We're the Placebos!

As vaccine trials start delivering preliminary results, an ethical quandary is emerging: what to do about the people who got placebos? Scientifically speaking, it would be good for them to stay unvaccinated, up until their trial is over. But with people likely to start getting vaccinated within weeks--long before trials are over--some experts have argued that the placebo recipients are owed some priority into get the vaccine early. Noah Weiland and I explored the arguments that scientists and ethicists are having right now.

By coincidence, a vaccine trial participant named Judith Munz reached out to the Times while I was working on the story, asking what happens to people who get the placebo. (She doesn't know for sure, but suspects she got one, while her husband got the real deal.) I gave her a call, and our conversation provided the story with a valuable human dimension--plus a striking portrait of the couple by Adriana Zehbrauskas.

Evolution Never Stops

The coronavirus is the product of evolution, and it’s going to keep evolving. We need to keep an eye on that change to ensure our vaccines keep working. Here's a look at what might happen, by Jim Gorman and me. Jim took my first story pitch for the Times sixteen years ago as an editor, but this is the first time we've collaborated.

Efficacy ≠ Effectiveness

As the news turns its eye to clinical trials--and in particular at their ending--we're seeing a phrase pop up more and more: efficacy. It's a tricky concept, but also a vital one to understand as we try to make sense of just how good these new vaccines are. Here's a piece I wrote about efficacy rates.

Life's Edge: Three Months Away

In the craze of reporting on the pandemic, I sometimes forget that I've written a book. And it's coming out pretty soon! Life's Edge will be published on March 9. I'm delighted to share a couple early endorsements:

“Carl Zimmer shows what a great suspense novel science can be. LIFE’S EDGE is a timely exploration in an age when modern Dr. Frankensteins are hard at work, but Carl’s artful, vivid, irresistible writing transcends the moment in these twisting chapters of intellectual revelation. Prepare to be enthralled.” –Jennifer Doudna, Nobel Laureate, co-author of A Crack in Creation

“Profound, lyrical, and fascinating, LIFE’S EDGE will give you a newfound appreciation for life itself. It is the work of a master science writer at the height of his skills—a welcome gift at a time when life seems more precious than ever.”—Ed Yong, staff writer at the Atlantic, author of I Contain Multitudes

If you're interested in maze-navigating slime molds, ravenous pythons, tardigrades on the moon, and what it means to be alive, please consider pre-ordering now.

Best wishes for 2021. May it be a corner-turning year.

You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#136

December 4, 2020

Friday's Elk, November 13, 2020

First Draft of History!

I was planning to send out the November issue of this newsletter on the first Friday of the month, as I typically do. But nonstop cable-news viewing got in the way. And as soon as I could pry my eyes away from the electoral drama, there was vaccine news to report. Not just another vaccine going into clinical trials, but the first trial to deliver preliminary data about whether a coronavirus vaccine works.

And it looks like it does!

Pfizer and BioNTech reported that an analysis of 94 cases of Covid-19 in their volunteers led to an estimate that their vaccine is over 90 percent effective. Yes. 90. Now, it's entirely possible that the true effectiveness of the vaccine will be lower. But no one knew if coronavirus vaccines would work at all, and many folks who did were saying that 50 percent efficacy would be nice. So, at one of the worst stages of this pandemic (163,402 new cases on November 12 alone), this is some truly good news.

Here's the story of the announcement, which I co-authored with David Gelles and Katie Thomas. Thomas and I followed up the following day with answers to some of the questions people are asking about these results, and the state of vaccine trials more generally. A couple days later, I talked with Michael Barbaro on The Daily about what this milestone means for getting vaccines for the coronavirus.

The Pfizer results have, I suspect, popped the vaccine news cork. On Wednesday, two days after Pfizer's announcement, Russia announced their Sputnik V vaccine was just as effective, based on...just 20 cases. With Andrew Kramer, The Times's Moscow bureau chief, I tried to make sense of the announcement. And I expect starting next week, we will have even more vaccine trial news--stay tuned!

"Chaos and Confusion"

While I'm happy to help deliver good news, it's also important to keep our eyes wide open to the shortcomings in our search for a vaccine and the trouble we may face in the months to come. Here's a story I wrote about the last time the United States rolled out a pandemic vaccine--for a new strain of influenza in 2009--and how we have lost a lot of the leadership that was so essential to making sure it was safe. In another story, I wrote about how we all need to prepare for "chaos and confusion"--the words of one vaccine expert--when coronavirus vaccines roll out this spring.

The Coronavirus Unveiled

Structural biology is the study of living shapes. It's a pretty esoteric field, but the pandemic has suddenly brought it to the world's attention. Scientists are unveiling the shape of the coronavirus down to individual atoms. Here's a feature I wrote on what we're learning and how it could lead to new vaccine and treatments for Covid-19. It's graced with gorgeous videos and pictures that will give you a grudging admiration for this tiny killer.

A Nobel for CRISPR

Just a few years ago, I struggled to get magazine editors as excited as I was about a new DNA-editing technology called CRISPR. But it soon soared to fame. And now this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two pioneers of CRISPR--Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier. Here's the Times story on the win, which I co-authored with Katherine Wu and Elian Peltier.

By coincidence, I had just finished writing a review about a new book on CRISPR, Editing Humanity, for the New York Times Book Review. They published it later the same day. Warning: it's hard to review a book about gee-whiz science in the middle of a pandemic that is showing us that science--on its own--can't save us from ourselves. The Center for Genetics and Society went so far as to call my review "peevish." It's the first time I've had a review of a review!

That's it for now. Stay safe. Zoom your family for Thanksgiving. Let's not make things any easier for this virus.

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#135

November 12, 2020

Friday's Elk, October 3, 2020

...and here we are in October, with the President of the United States hospitalized for Covid-19. Not the timeline I would have expected us to follow back in March.

It looks as if the President's infection was involved in one way or another with a superspreading event at the White House last Saturday. No one should be surpised that the coronavirus can spread this way. Scientists have been warning us for months now. Here's a story I wrote back in June.

And if you're curious about the various treatments President Trump is getting, including monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, and zinc, check out the New York Times Treatment Tracker. These are far from panaceas.

On Wednesday, I'll be speaking about all this with the Science Writers of New York. The title of the talk is: "President Trump has COVID-19. Now what?" I really have no idea what exactly we'll be discussing on Wednesday, given that a year's worth of news happens every day now.

On a separate note: with the gift-giving season coming up, I'm clearing some shelf space. I've signed some copies of She Has Her Mother's Laugh, which you can buy on Amazon. You can go to here for hardbacks and here for paperbacks. Look for the entry with the seller listed as "Carl Zimmer-Author."

On the reporting front, it was all vaccines for me this month. We are moving into the final stages of testing for four different vaccines. Here's my coverage of Astra-Zeneca and Pfizer, Johnson & Johnson, and Novavax. As remarkable as this progress has been, however, kids may not get vaccines till the fall 2021--or even later. Sorry, parents.

I summed up the vaccine story as of now on Radio Times. Listen here. If you're looking for something covid-related to watch, here's the video recording of a recent panel I participated in, "Preprints and Peer Review in a Pandemic." And here's my recent panel, "Science Journalism During a Pandemic and Beyond."

Coming up on October 5 at 4 pm ET, I'll be speaking at One Day University. The title of my talk will be "Understanding Heredity: What We Know, And What We Don’t." (Membership required.)

On November 2, I'll be speaking with author Mark Honigsbaum about his book The Pandemic Century. (Here's my review of the book in the New York Times Book Review.) The talk will be hosted by the Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival. Details here.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#134

October 2, 2020

Friday's Elk, September 5, 2020

September greetings! It's bizarre to think it's been six months since I joined the huge ranks of full-time Covid-19 reporters. At the time, I found it hard to believe that for the foreseeable future I'd be writing about just one virus. But SARS-CoV-2 has blasted reporters with a firehose of news unlike anything we've encountered before. There is simply too much about this virus to write about.

Here's what I did manage to write since the previous issue of Friday's Elk. Recently, I looked back at the start of the American epidemic. I wrote about a group of researchers who have closely studied how the virus arrived in Boston in February. They found that a single meeting at the end of that month may have led to tens of thousands of infections around the city and far beyond. It's likely that many other superspreading events also spread the virus in equally explosive ways.

I've also continued to track the global effort to find a Covid-19 vaccine. For months, I was aware that there were lots of vaccines still in preclinical research, and recently I decided to sit down and check every project I could find, confirming which ones were still in the works. So far, I've confirmed 92 active preclinical vaccine studies, 69 of which are slated to go into clinical trials between this fall and the end of 2021. This search allowed me to update the New York Times vaccine tracker to include all of these preclinical studies.

I then started calling some of these vaccine developers to find out why they're still pushing ahead, despite the fact that there are 37 vaccines already in clinical trials--8 of which are already in the final stage of Phase 3 testing. Here's what I learned about the second wave of vaccines. They might be even better than the first wave--more potent, less expensive, or both.

The first wave, meanwhile, is getting closer to potential approval. By next month, for example, Pfizer says it may know whether its vaccine works. Working with my colleague Katie Thomas, I answered some questions about what we may expect over the next few months.

Meanwhile in Russia, researchers are starting to share some preliminary details about the vaccine Putin celebrated last month. We don't know if it's safe and effective yet--but that's true of all the vaccines in the works. And, unfortunately, it's very hard to determine which vaccine is best because researchers are not testing them according to the same standards. One vaccine expert summed up the problem in this succinct complaint: "We have long been suffering from the apples-versus-oranges scenario, but now we’re into fruit salad territory, and it drives me bananas trying to figure it all out."

Switching gears: here is a rundown of some recent talks I gave that you can listen to, as well as some other talks I will be giving--

I talked with Steven Johnson on his podcast, Fighting Coronavirus, about the vaccine scramble.

Here's my conversation with the writer Samanth Subramanian about his biography of the great biologist JBS Haldane, A Dominant Character.

And here's a talk between me and Emily Anthes about her latest book, The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness.

Looking ahead, I'll be taking part in a discussion on Friday, September 11, at 2 pm ET called "Preprints and Peer Review in a Pandemic." We'll be talking about how science is changing as a result of Covid-19--and how science journalists are changing the way we write about it. I'll be joining Howard Bauchner, MD, the Editor-in-Chief, the Journal of the American Medical Association (who has an excellent covid podcast, by the way); Emily Gurley, an epidemiologist at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health and the co-founder of Novel Coronavirus Research Compendium, which offers fast reviews of new research on the virus; and Harlan Krumholz, a cardiologist at the Yale School of Medicine who founded the preprint service Medrxiv. You can find more details and register here.

On September 16 at 7 pm, I'll be speaking about A Planet of Viruses at the American Chemical Society. I will talk about some of the big messages of the book, and my work towards a third edition, which will be coming out in the spring. You can register here.

On September 24 at 1 pm ET I'll be taking part in another discussion, called "Science Journalism During a Pandemic and Beyond." I'll be joining Buzzfeed's Azeen Ghorayashi, 538's Maggie Koerth, and British journalist and author Angela Saini. The event is a celebration of the 75th year of the AAAS Kavli Science Journalism Awards, which the four of us have received. Register here.

On October 2 at 7 pm ET, I'll be giving a talk called, "Can Science Save Us from Covid-19?" It's part of Oregon State University's Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology Seminar Series. You can join the zoom session here. The entire line-up looks great, starting with David Quammen on September 25. You can download a pdf of the whole series here.

On October 5 at 4 pm ET, I'll be speaking at One Day University. The title of my talk will be "Understanding Heredity: What We Know, And What We Don’t." (Membership required.)

On October 27 at 6 p.m., I'll be in conversation with David Rand, a cognitive scientist at MIT, about fake pandemic news and the science of misinformation. Our talk will be hosted by the Franke Program in Science and the Humanities at Yale. I'll send out details in the next email, or you can check my web site.

On November 2, I'll be speaking with author Mark Honigsbaum about his book The Pandemic Century. (Here's my review of the book in the New York Times Book Review.) The talk will be hosted by the Charleston to Charleston Literary Festival. Again, I'll send out details in the next email, or you can check my web site.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#133

September 4, 2020

Friday's Elk, August 12, 20121

I discovered over the past week that there's something special about a hurricane blackout in the middle of a pandemic. Your friends can offer you Wifi and an extension cord, but you have to stay outside on the porch, so that no viruses jump from host to host.

Aside from the weather, things still feel oddly stable in Connecticut. Since last month's email, our daily cases have remained relatively low. Right now the seven-day average of daily new cases is 72. We're averaging 1 death a day. That's good compared to Florida, with 6440 daily new cases and 160 deaths a day.

When I wrote last month, the United States was seeing an overall surge in cases but not in deaths. Some people touted that as a sign that things were getting better. In reality, it was just the result of the lag between diagnosis and death. Now the situation has flipped: the nationwide total of cases has dropped slightly (although 53,730 new cases a day is still terrifyingly high compared to other countries). Meanwhile, the death rate has more than doubled since its lowest level in July, with over a thousand people dying on an average day.

School and cooler weather are coming, and with them the risk of things getting even worse. But we could get this pandemic under control--as many other countries have already--and we could do it in a matter of weeks, if we acted with organization and resolve. The New York Times Editorial Board lays out a plan here.

Over the past month, I've been working with the science desk at the New York Times to report on scientific advances in the fight against the coronavirus. The vaccine work has been, frankly, extraordinary. Never in history have so many vaccines moved so fast into advanced trials.

We've kept up with the progress on the vaccine tracker I helped launch in June. There are now seven covid-19 vaccines in Phase III large-scale clinical trials (plus other vaccines against other diseases being investigated to see if they offer protection against covid, too). Meanwhile, a wave of new vaccines have moved from studies on animals into safety trials in humans. The teams who are developing them are not just in the United States and Europe, but China, India, Russia, Taiwan, Singapore, and other countries.

Over the past few months, I followed one team closely--a group of researchers at Beth Israel Medical Center and at Johnson & Johnson. They have been creating a vaccine based on a virus that normally causes a mild cold. They had no idea in January what exactly they were getting themselves into--helping to bring a global catastrophe to an end. Now they're starting clinical trials.

These new trials include vaccines that are based on a wide range of platforms. Katie Thomas and I wrote last week about encouraging results from the first clinical trials on a protein-based vaccine. While no one has yet shown that a vaccine is effective in humans, I wrote about two vaccines that have had good results in challenge trials in which monkeys were vaccinated and then deliberately infected.

All these vaccines still need careful testing before they can be used on entire countries. But yesterday, Putin announced the approval of a Russian vaccine before any large-scale testing. I found that vaccine experts were universally alarmed at the recklessness of the move. "This is all beyond stupid," one expert told me.

For those who get sick, doctors don't have a lot of effective treatments. But a huge number of drugs and devices are under investigation. Working with Katie Wu and Jonathan Corum, I helped create a second tracker, this one for treatments. We're following some exciting developments with monoclonal antibodies, antivirals, and other ways to fight the coronavirus. But we're also keeping track of treatments that are proving to be disappointing, and others that are actually not treatments at all but things to be avoided. Like the vaccine tracker, we'll be keeping it up to date in months to come.

This past month, I also wrote about some intriguing new discoveries about Covid-19. For example, the evidence is leaning away from blood type being a risk factor for getting sick. While the blood type gene may not matter, another chunk of DNA now looks to plays a part in people's risk of getting severely ill. And that chunk was inherited from Neanderthals.

While I'm grateful to be able to do all this reporting on covid, it can get exhausting. I took a break this past month to write about a fascinating genetic study hinting that Polynesians may have reached South America.

Finally, looking forward: If you have a little free time this month, I hope you'll join me for conversations with two great authors.

On Thursday August 13 (tomorrow), I'll be speaking to the writer Samanth Subramanian about his wonderful biography of the great biologist JBS Haldane, A Dominant Character. You can register here to watch.

Then, on Monday, August 24, Harvard Book Store is hosting a talk between me and Emily Anthes about her latest book, The Great Indoors: The Surprising Science of How Buildings Shape Our Behavior, Health, and Happiness. You can register to join us here.

I'll have more talks to share next month. But that's all for now. Stay safe!

My next book is Life's Edge: Searching for What It Means to Be Alive. It's coming out in March 2021, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my thirteen other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#132

August 11, 2020

Friday's Elk, July 3, 2020

The pandemic continues, but let me kick off this edition of Friday's Elk by sharing some personal good news. My next book has a cover!

One of the long-running threads in my career as a writer has been a fascination about the fundamental nature of life. What does it mean to be alive? Is there even such a thing as life? Each of us knows what life is from the inside, but how can we turn that intuition into science? For my new book, Life's Edge, I explored the border zones of life, where it becomes clear how much we have to learn. The book features Covid-19, tardigrades on the moon, hungry pythons, and much more.

The book won't be coming out till March 2021. But you can already pre-order your copy. (There's also an audio book available for pre-order.)

I've said it before and I'll say it again: pre-ordering a book is one of the best ways to support an author. You're not just buying a copy of the book itself. Lots of people in the book world keep tabs on pre-order numbers. Good numbers build buzz, and buzz will draw more attention to a book when it publishes.

Right now, March 2021 feels like centuries hence. Let's hope that it's an improvement on July 2020, when more than 128,000 people have died of Covid-19 in the United States alone. Here in the northeastern United States we are currently experiencing unsettling calm. Connecticut reached a peak of Covid-19 cases in April, with 2,109 people testing positive in just one day. But then the cases started to gradually fall. On July 3 Connecticut only had 71 new cases. So far, 4,326 people have died in our state, but over the past week the daily death count hasn't risen above the single digits.

Elsewhere in this country, however, the virus is raging. In Arizona, California, Florida, and Texas--places that seemed to dodge the northeast's devastation--new cases are climbing steeply every day. The climb far outstrips the increase in testing, indicating that this is a real outbreak and not a statistical artifact. The rise in hospitalizations tells the same heart-breaking story.

This surge has not yet led to a surge in deaths; in fact the daily death rate across the country has fallen from over 2,300 in April to 722 on July 2. That may be the result of younger people getting infected these days while older people--who are more likely to die--are taking better precautions. It may also be the result of American hospitals getting better at fighting this new virus, using new combinations of drugs and abandoning old treatments that worked for more familiar diseases. But another factor is the lag of several weeks between surges in cases and surges in deaths. It can take a while for this virus to kill. And so the death rate will almost certainly rise again this month.

Even if it doesn't, that's hardly cause for wild celebrations. Europe has crushed its curve, while we have failed. Tens of thousands of deaths so far were almost certainly preventable. And it's also becoming clear that surviving Covid-19 is not like bouncing back from a cold. For some people, it leaves enduring damage, whether lung scars, heart damage, strokes, enduring fatigue, or diabetes. Since we're only a few months into this pandemic we don't yet understand extent of these impacts, but it would be grotesque to sweep them away in false optimism.

Right now, I worry that peaceful places like Connecticut are getting complacent. This virus can be particularly devious, spreading even before people show symptoms. And one infected person can, in the right place, infect dozens of others. Last week I wrote about what scientists are learning about these superspreading events, and how we might use that knowledge to fight the virus without having to go into blanket lockdowns.

On a brighter note, I worked with some of my Times colleagues this month to track the many efforts going on worldwide to make a vaccine for Covid-19. We started with 20 projects--all the clinical trials that had already started, plus some of the promising efforts that have not yet led to tests on people. Less than a month has passed since the tracker launched, but we've added ten more vaccines now in clinical trials, including ones being tested in Japan, India, and other countries. We will keep updating it with progress (and failure) until this race is done.

Finally, here's a video of a conversation I had recently with Scientific American editor-in-chief Laura Helmuth about science writing in the age of Covid-19. I hope you enjoy it. Someday I look forward to giving talks in person, but Zoom will have to do for now.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My award-winning book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is available in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my 13 books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#131

July 2, 2020

Friday's Elk, June 5, 2020

Each month brings another grim harvest. When I last sent out a newsletter on May 1, the United States had suffered 64,203 deaths from Covid-19. Today the total has reached 108,708. As researchers probe the overall death rate, the full toll of the pandemic continues to come into sharper focus.

Countries and states that went into lockdown over the past couple months are now starting to loosen their controls. It seems as if a lot of people think this means that the pandemic is over. But there are still plenty of new covid-19 cases every day, and these folks could potentially infect a lot of other people if they board a bus, teach a yoga class, join a choir practice, or do any number of other things that have been shown to let the virus spread quickly from person to person.

In the past month, we have also learned that only a few percent of people in most hard-hit states and countries have gotten infected, which means that there are many potential hosts left. The combination of vulnerable people and rushing back to life as normal could very well create new spikes as high or higher than this spring's. Unfortunately, we may not notice these resurgences until they're well underway and hard to stop.

I've kept myself busy with covid reporting over the past month, except for the occasional snake...

On May 2, I helped write a story on the state of the global vaccine race.

As part of my next book on life, I got really interested in how snakes eat. Here is a dispatch from the world of weirdly big meals.

On May 20, I reported a bunch of news on vaccines: the results of a trial on monkeys, an infographic on the different kinds of vaccines in development, and another co-authored overview of the state of the global vaccine race (which changed a lot over the 18 days since our first take!).

A week later, I wrote about a new study that sheds more light on how the coronavirus spread from China to Europe and North America. January and February saw a lot of false starts before the outbreaks took off--showing the full scale of the tragedy that let us miss the pandemic's onset.

On the first day of June, I offered some advice on how to read a scientific paper about covid-19.

Finally (so far), here's a piece on some of the first genetic variations that look like they may make some people more prone to getting really sick with covid-19. I was none too pleased to learn that my own blood type, A, may make me at greater risk.

Off the printed page, I had a great chat with Alan Alda on his podcast Clear+Vivid about parasites, belly button bacteria, and all sorts of other stuff. (This episode may sound strange, because we recorded it in the before-times, when covid-19 did not loom over us all.) I was also a guest on WNPR to talk about what we know about the disease, and talked at a New York Times Event about what we'll need to get this pandemic behind us.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My award-winning book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is available in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my 13 books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#130

June 4, 2020

Friday's Elk, May 1, 2020

It's been another hard month. When I last sent out a newsletter on March 29, the United States had suffered 2,201 deaths from Covid-19. Today the total has reached 64,203.

That is the official count, but the full count is far higher. In cities like New York, the total number of deaths has jumped well above the average rate for this time of year. There aren't enough tests to go around, so we're not getting a full count of the sick. Many people are dying at home.

Still, if we hadn't gone into lockdown, many more people would have died. Unchecked, the coronavirus can spread from each infected person to three or more new hosts. That should lead to a steep exponential curve of new cases. Thanks to the lockdown and social distancing, the outbreak went through an initial burst and then flattened.

Nevertheless, far more people have died than had to. South Korea and the United States confirmed their first cases of Covid-19 on the same day in late January. Since then, South Korea has throttled its outbreak. Seoul, which is about the size of New York, has had only two deaths from Covid-19. New York has had 18,399. And hundreds of New Yorkers are still dying every day.

I suspect one reason for the difference is the bad experiences South Korea already had with coronaviruses. In 2003, they were close by the explosion of SARS in China. In 2015, another coronavirus--MERS--was imported into South Korea from the Near East. It roared through Korean hospitals, killing 38 people.

The country responded by preparing for the next pandemic, knowing it would come sooner or later. And when Covid-19 came, South Korea immeditately began testing aggressively and protecting health care workers with lots of masks and other equipment.

In the United States, we went on with life--with spring break, with Mardi Gras, and the rest of our late winter normalcy. For weeks, only people who were very sick and had traveled to China got tested. A glitch in the government's test made things worse. Large-scale testing of both people with and without symptoms would have revealed the true landscape of the disease in the United States. Instead, we assumed the few confirmed cases in February meant that there were few actual cases.

That was a staggering blunder. I've been working with other writers at the New York Times to figure out what happened while we let our guard down.

Here's a story I wrote about how scientists can read the history of Covid-19 in the virus's genome--from its origin in bats, to its spillover in China, to its spread to Europe and the United States. It turns out that a number of people in February were arriving in New York carrying the virus and then spread it around the city. Most of them, the genomes show, arrived from Europe.

That article garnered me a dubious honor: the president of the United States tweeted an error-laden attack on it. Who every thought that viral phylogeography would become a political flashpoint?

I responded by laying out the key points of the story. I doubt the president bothered to read them, but I take some consolation that a lot of people saw my tweets ended up reading the article.

On a more hopeful note, researchers are continuing to search for new ways to treat Covid-19. On Thursday, I wrote a piece on scientists who are using a method called drug repurposing. It turns out that old drugs for schizophrenia, arthritis, and other conditions can stop the virus in its tracks, at least in cells. Now researchers are going to test some of these out in animals and people.

I also wrote about some surprising research showing how the sewers may help us decide when to reopen—and when to shut down a neighborhood instead of a whole city.

I've also continued to collaborate with the amazing designer Jonathan Corum on visual explanations of Covid-19. Here is a gene-by-gene breakdown of what we know about how the virus works its sinister magic on our cells. This Thursday, we put together a visual explanation of how the virus mutates and why we shouldn't freak out about it.

If you'd like to hear me talk about the search for Covid-19 cures, I'll be speaking at a special New York Times event on Tuesday, May 5, at 4 pm ET. Sign up here and send us your questions!

And finally, if you're a little burned out on Covid-19 coverage, check out this Radiolab episode in which I help tell the story of Ignaz Semmelweis, the patron saint of keeping germs off your hands. I also spoke about She Has Her Mother's Laugh at the annual meeting of the National Academies of Sciences over the weekend--over Zoom instead of in person.

That's all for now. Stay safe!

My award-winning book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#129

April 30, 2020

Friday's Elk, March 29, 2020

Greetings from lockdown.

Four weeks ago, I wrote in shock about 100,000 cases of Covid-19 around the world. As of today, there are 691,867. The United States has overtaken China as the nation with the most cases (125,313), and the exponential curves in states across the country foretell many, many more cases to come. So far, 2,201 people have died of Covid-19. More will die. How many is in part up to us.

As a country, we failed to take this virus seriously in a timely fashion. Closing off travel from China bought us some time, but then we did little with it. We didn't quickly roll out aggressive testing like South Korea and other countries, where this knowledge has allowed them to keep their outbreaks under far better control. We didn't deploy huge amounts of protective equipment in advance to the health care workers who would be facing a vast wave of infected patients. Now, in the richest country in the world, they're resorting to garbage bags. Rather than get ahead of the outbreak with lockdowns, we waited until the outbreak was impossible to ignore. That's like ignoring a sofa on fire because it would be more convenient to wait till the whole living room is in flames before doing anything.

Now we have to resort to drastic measures across much of the country. If we stick with them for the necessary duration, they will flatten the curve. But there's no question that economic devastation has come with them. Still, trying to go back to business as usual before the curve flattens and before we have a better way to track new infections would spell even greater economic hardship.

So what do we do? We can't turn back time. The best we can do right now is roll out a plan to restore public health and then revive the economy. Just this morning (March 29), a team of experts including former FDA commissioner Scott Gottlieb, and Johns Hopkins public health scholars published one such road map. Whether anyone in power pays attention to these carefully considered plans remains to be seen.

For science writers, this is a strange time. Suddenly, people have developed a fierce appetite for news about virus biology. At the same time, getting out good information has become even more difficult than normal because of all the nonsense circulating on social media. Some of it is no doubt delivered by people with bad intentions. But I suspect that most of it is spread by people who desperately want to help their friends and family. In these trying times, a Facebook post from a friend of a friend of a friend who's a doctor in Taiwan about holding your breath to see if you have covid-19 may seem legit. But it's not.

If you have some free lockdown down tomorrow, Monday March 30 at 12pm EDT, you can join me and two fellow science writers for a Reddit AMA on these issues. I'll be with Helen Branswell, disease reporter extraordinaire at Stat, and Laura Helmuth, science/health editor at the Washington Post and incoming editor in chief at Scientific American. You can ask us anything about journalism in the age of the coronavirus.

As for myself, I've spent much of the past four weeks pitching in with the coronavirus coverage at the Times:

How Coronavirus Hijacks Your Cells. It was a privilege to work with the amazing designer Jonathan Corum on this visual explainer. We will be doing more.

Hundreds Of Scientists Scramble To Find A Coronavirus Treatment. I take a close look at one of the more ambitious attempts to probe the biology of the coronavirus to find an antiviral drug that can stop it.

Scientists Identify 69 Drugs To Test Against The Coronavirus. This is the sequel to the previous piece. I spoke to Brian Lehrer on WNYC about it (and took a lot of listener questions about covid-19).

Welcome To The Virosphere: SARS-CoV-2, the cause of covid-19, is just the latest virus to get a name. There may actually be trillions of species of viruses left to be discovered. Perhaps one of them will cause the next covid-19. It might make sense to get to know it first!

A Kids' Guide to Coronavirus. The Daily, the podcast of the Times, has been doing lots of great covid-19 episodes. On Friday, I joined host Michael Barbaro to answer questions from children about the virus. Kids know how to get to the heart of the matter...

Here are three of my own favorite pieces by other journalists (there are so many to choose from):

What we’ve learned about the coronavirus — and what we still need to know. Helen Branswell, Stat.

The Lost Month: How a Failure to Test Blinding the U.S. to Covid-19. Michael D. Shear, Abby Goodnough, Sheila Kaplan, Sheri Fink, Katie Thomas and Noah Weiland. The New York Times.

How the Pandemic Will End. Ed Yong, The Atlantic.

That's all for now. Wash your hands, stay at home, keep six feet from others, and stay safe.

My award-winning book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#128

March 28, 2020

Friday's Elk, March 7, 2020

Things have certainly changed since the last Friday's Elk. The world has experienced over 100,000 infections of Covid-19, caused by a virus, SARS-CoV-2, that we didn't even know about till a few weeks ago.

At first, we Americans complacently looked at the news as just another overseas disaster. As of this afternoon, there are 370 confirmed cases in the United States (one just a thirty-minute drive from where I live in Connecticut). Because our testing program is a mess, it's certain there are many more--and transmission will bring more in weeks to come.

Anyone who says that no one could imagine this happening is ignorant or lying. Virologists have been tracing the origin of new human diseases from animal hosts for decades. The new virus, SARS-CoV-2, belongs to a lineage of bat viruses that has already produced two worrisome human diseases, SARS and MERS, in the past two decades. We know a fair amount now how viruses circulate in other species, how they spill over into ours, and then how they spread--either a little or a lot. You didn't have to read virology journals to know about this. We science writers have been writing this story over and over again.

When I started out in journalism, my senior colleagues were writing about emerging diseases like Ebola and Four Corners Disease and HIV. Laurie Garrett published the far-sighted book The Coming Plague in 1994. Other books followed. I later wrote a short primer, A Planet of Viruses, in which I emphasized that viruses have always been with us, indeed even making up a sizable part of our genome. But even as we triumphed over smallpox and rinderpest, we were coming to appreciate just how many viruses we might run up against as we continued to devastate the natural world. David Quammen's 2012 Spillover documented this threat in vivid detail.

So here we are, facing a new virus with which we have no experience whatsoever--both scientifically and immunologically. Scientists are working hard to estimate the key variables about this virus--such as how quickly it spreads from person to person and how likely an infection is to turn fatal. Those are not fixed values like the mass of an electron or the speed of light. Viruses spread more slowly when public health systems put up barriers between their hosts. Viruses can be deadlier when people can't get decent medical care.

Roughly speaking, Covid-19 is much less deadly than SARS, but much more deadly than seasonal flu. While SARS had trouble spreading outside of hospitals, Covid-19 is spreading readily on cruise ships, within families at home, and among the elderly in long-term care facilities. While everyone seems vulnerable to infection, children typically only develop mild symptoms, while older people are at greater risk for serious illness or death.

For most people who get the virus, it will be a mild infection. But according to one rough estimate from Marc Lipsitch at Harvard, 20 to 60 percent of all adults may get infected. That could translate into a terrible toll, not just in terms of deaths but in terms of patients who need ventilators to stay alive. If thousands of cases hit American hospitals at once, it's not clear how well the healthy system will hold up.

We don't know if the virus will keep spreading into the spring and summer, or if it will fade as other winter respiratory viruses do. If it ebbs, chances are it will come back in the fall, perhaps in a roaring second wave. Vaccines won't be ready till next year at the earliest. It's possible that an effective antiviral may emerge in the coming months, which might help the desperately ill.

But for now, the best weapons against this virus are the classic ones. Social distancing, including school closures, may help to slow the coming wave so that fewer people need help at any moment. And washing hands keeps the virus from using them as a springboard to get into your mucous membranes--and ultimately your lungs.

So let us give thanks to Ignaz Semmelweis! Washing hands may seem tediously obvious as a way to stop diseases, but it wasn't until the mid-1800s that Semmelweis noticed that doctors themselves could spread fevers from patient to patient. If you find yourself looking for books to read during self-imposed quarantine, let me recommend The Doctor's Plague by Sherwin Nuland, a short, potent account of Semmelweis's struggle to make hand-washing our best weapon against enemies we can't see and struggle to understand.

Check in on the CDC Covid-19 page for updated information on the disease and what to do about it.

If you still find yourself hankering for something to read--perhaps something not about viruses--I have a feature in the Atlantic this week about one of the strangest stories of the nuclear age. We released a vast pulse of radiocarbon into the atmosphere in the 1950s, which has infiltrated the biosphere ever since, including our own brains and bones. I've written a biography of the "bomb spike," and what it has told us about our world.

Usually at the end of these emails, I list my upcoming talks. I'm going to skip them this time around because I'm honestly not sure how much traveling I'm going to do for the next few months. I'd rather not help spread SARS-CoV-2 any further than it's going to get without me. I'll update as the situation clarifies.

Stay well!

My award-winning book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#127

March 6, 2020

Friday's Elk, February 1, 2020

Happy Groundhog Day's Eve!

I wanted to start off with a note to Friday's Elk readers in the Los Angeles area. On Thursday, February 6, I will be speaking in the Aloud Series at the Library Foundation of Los Angeles. I'll be in conversation with Sean Carroll, Caltech physicist, author, and podcaster extraordinaire. We'll be at the Mark Taper Auditorium-Central Library. Hope to see you! You can register here.

Evolution Near and Far
This past month, I took a look at evolution's imprint on us, as well as a great step that took place two billion years ago to our level of complexity.

Air Pollution, Evolution, and the Fate of Billions of Humans. Air pollution--whether from coal-fired plants or climate-change-driven wildfires--can be devastating to our health. Along with lung damage, it's also being linked to diseases ranging from diabetes to Alzheimer's. But we have been breathing in airborne toxins for millions of years. I write about how our evolutionary history may provide clues to our current state of health.

This Strange Microbe May Mark One of Life’s Great Leaps How did our cells get complex two billion years ago? Here’s my story about the epic struggle to grow a weird microbe from the ocean floor that offers crucial clues.

Ancient DNA from West Africa Adds to Picture of Humans’ Rise Five years ago I wrote about the first ancient human DNA found in Africa. Scientists have come a long way, discovering a mysterious lost people they call the “Ghost Modern.”

Neanderthal Genes Hint at Much Earlier Human Migration From Africa. I write about a new look at the DNA of Neanderthals and ourselves. It reveals that our histories are intertwined further back in time than previously thought--and that everyone on Earth today is a little bit Neanderthal.

Heredity at the Movies
I spoke recently about She Has Her Mother's Laugh at the Coolidge Theater in Brookline, Massachusetts. It was part of the national Science on Screen series, which pairs talks about science with screenings of great old movies. I chose Flirting With Disaster, a movie that you can tell was made in the 1990s because they never mention DNA. You can watch my talk here.

My award-winning book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#126

January 31, 2020

Friday's Elk, January 3, 2020

(Image-Wikipedia)

Best wishes to you for the new year and the new decade!

2019 was busy for those of us who write about biology. Human evolution alone took up much of my time. When it comes to human origins, we had an entirely new species of Homo to contend with, new glimpses at our Denisovan cousins from Siberia and (amazingly) Tibet, and an ancient skull of our species in Europe over 210,000 years ago.

Looking to our biology today, scientists made some surprising discoveries. They investigated mysterious rings of DNA in our cells, along with a protein we make that could potentially shield us from dementia or even boost cognition.

Beyond our own species, there were zombie-making fungi to contend with, along with mind-shaping microbes, contagious cancer cells spreading to shellfish around the world, staggering migrations of insects, electric grids made of bacteria, mysterious fossils of what might be the first animals, and clues in fossils of fungi and genomes of algae for how life colonized land up to a billion years ago.

Scientists expanded our concepts of biology, creating extra letters for the genetic alphabet, using CRISPR to give flies the ability monarch butterflies have to withstand poison, reprogramming bacteria to attack tumors, building miniature versions of human brains called organoids, and rewriting an entire genome,

Unfortunately, writing about biology these days also means writing about the beginning stages of what may prove to be the sixth mass extinction of the past half billion years. And unlike the previous five, we're responsible for this one.

For my last column of 2019, I wrote about how scientists have resurrected the genome of the extinct Carolina parakeet, a beautiful parrot found across the eastern United States until early 1900s. The genome may help scientists figure out how exactly we rendered them extinct. One possibility is that a pathogen on a chicken farm. Another human-borne pathogen--this one a fungus--has been driving frogs extinct in recent decades, and this year scientists realized it was a lot worse than previously thought.

Along with diseases, we are also devastating wildlife by doing things such as fragmenting their habitats, and scientists are figuring out why fragmentation is more dangerous in some parts of the world than others. And while it's always an honor to write a front page story for the New York Times, it's a grim one when the subject is the vast die-off of birds across the United States.

Looking back over a decade, the stories of science have also been mixed. We should mourn the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people felled by malaria each year, for example. But we should also rejoice that its devastation has dropped.. In 2018, the World Health Organization estimated that 405,000 people died of malaria in 2018, but that's down from 585,000 in 2010. It's possible that vaccines and other innovations may help drive down that number even more in the decade to come.

On the other hand, the climate story was bad in 2010, and ten years later it's a lot worse. The concentration of carbon dioxide was 389 parts per million in 2010, and 410 parts per million at the end of 2019. The impacts of all this heat-trapping gas seemed far away in 2010, but now we're living through them. If we can manage to cut carbon emissions dramatically in the decade to come, we can spare ourselves the worst that climate change has to offer. But right now the world is heading in the opposite direction. I hope that in 2030 there will be better news to report.

On the book front, I felt very grateful for what 2019 brought. The third edition of the evolution textbook I co-authored with Doug Emlen came out, complete with cute snowshoe hare cover. I got to talk to more audiences about She Has Her Mother's Laugh, in Australia, Denmark, and across the United States. Conversations with folks such as Annalee Newitz, Bill Nye, and David Quammen were particular pleasures. And I was deeply honored to accepted prizes for the book from the National Academy of Sciences and the National Association of Science Writers.

In 2020, I will be spending a lot of time working on my next book. It's on life--what it is, what it can be, and why it's so hard to define. For a sample of the stuff I've been exploring, you can check out this podcast series I released earlier this year. If all goes according to plan, it will come out in 2021. I'll post updates (cover, etc.) as they come.

Upcoming Talks

January 20, 2020 Los Angeles, Aloud (with cosmologist Sean Carroll). Details to come.

More talks to be announced.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#125

January 3, 2020

Friday's Elk, December 6, 2019

December greetings!

Looking back at the past month of writing, I found myself reflecting about how science works. When we journalists write an article, we need to offer readers a hook that lets them know why a story is coming out today. That's all well and good, but it's always important to remember that a new scientific paper is never the whole story.

Science is the work of careers, of generations. Debates churn on year after year, often resolving only when researchers realize they all had a piece of the truth, but only a piece.

These four columns allowed me to dip back into research that I've been following for many years. None of the new studies that served as my story hooks are the last word on anything. Instead, they were four fortunate opportunities to dive into rivers of questions.

Humans Shipped an Awful Cargo Across the Seas: Cancer.

How Did Plants Conquer Land? These Humble Algae Hold Clues

Scientists Are Just Beginning to Understand Mysterious DNA Circles Common in Cancer Cells

Is This the First Fossil of an Embryo?

Fractured Forests Are Endangering Wildlife, Scientists Find

Here's looking forward to more rivers of questions in 2020!
Upcoming Talks

January 20, 2020 Los Angeles, Aloud (with cosmologist Sean Carroll). Details to come.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#124

December 5, 2019

Friday's Elk, November 1, 2019

For my November edition of Friday's Elk, I've got a couple videos to offer from talks I gave in October.

I first went to Harvard Medical School, where I gave a talk at a meeting of the Allen Frontiers Symposium. It was entitled "Braided History: Reporting on Human Origins." I talked about the enduring old visions of human evolution--missing links, marches of progress, and so on--and how we need to transcend them to understand new fossils and genetic evidence. You can watch it here.

Later in the month, I headed to San Francisco, where I had a conversation with the writer Annalee Newitz about She Has Her Mother's Laugh before a live audience. You can watch it here.

Halloween Biology
It's been nearly 20 years since I published Parasite Rex, a love letter to nature's most under-appreciated life form. And every year since, I've come across some wild new research to explore.

Here's a feature I wrote for the New York Times about a fungus that manipulates ants in a manner crying out for a Hollywood adaptation. It features amazing photographs, including the one above, from one of the parasitologists I wrote about, João Araújo.

I did not expect this strange obsession of mine to morph into a meme, but so it went:

Recently Read
Here are some pieces you may find interesting...

E.P.A. to Roll Back Rules to Control Toxic Ash from Coal Plants. Lisa Friedman, New York Times

Long-awaited cystic fibrosis drug could turn deadly disease into a manageable condition. Carolyn Johnson, Washington Post

Intense monitoring and care lift mountain gorilla numbers. Christina Larson, AP

The new science fossil fuel companies fear. Zack Colman, Politico

Deaf couple may edit embryo’s DNA to correct hearing mutation. Jon Cohen, Science

How Measles Leaves Kids Exposed to Other Diseases. Megan Molteni, Wired.

Controversial ‘gay gene’ app provokes fears of a genetic Wild West. Amy Maxmen, Nature

‘Broadband’ Networks of Viruses May Help Bacteria Evolve Faster. Jonathan Lambert, Quanta.

Lyme Vaccines Show New Promise, and Face Old Challenges. Cassandra Willyard, Undark

Greenland's Dying Ice. Paul Voosen, Science

Deadspin’s Public Execution Reveals A Media Industry Dying From The Inside, Andy Campbell, Huffpost

Upcoming Talks

November 9, 2019 Charleston, SC. Charleston To Charleston Literary Festival

December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Chancellor Lecture Series.

NEW--> January 20, 2020 Los Angeles, Aloud (with cosmologist Sean Carroll). Details to come.

More 2020 talks to come!

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is available from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#123

October 31, 2019

Friday's Elk, October 4, 2019

Happy October. Since my last newsletter, I've done some intense reporting for the New York Times--first on some pretty scary news, and then on some research that lets us all delight in the workings of nature.

First the bad news. Across the United States and Canada, the population of all birds has declined 29 percent since 1970. There are lots of other animals than birds we should be mindful of, of course, but birds speak to people in a special way. Even in the middle of cities, they can visit us from the natural world. And those visits are getting rarer, probably thanks to a number of human factors, from cats to industrial farming.

Monarch butterflies are a lot like birds--they are familiar to backyards across North America, but they're under threat from intense human pressure. They're also evolutionary marvels, having gained the ability to eat a poisonous plant. Researchers have uncovered their evolutionary path, by genetically engineering vulnerable flies into "monarch flies."

Learning about evolution isn't just fascinating in and of itself. It also gives us clues for our own technological advances. I wrote a column about how leaf-cutting ants have managed to avoid a catastrophe of antibiotic resistance--unlike us.

Live in San Francisco with Annalee Newitz!
I'm looking forward to a live conversation with science-fiction and science-fact writer Annalee Newitz on October 23 in San Francisco. Bay Area folks, please join us!

2019 Science in Society Journalism Award
Thanks to the National Association of Science Writers for giving this year's book award to She Has Her Mother's Laugh! And congratulations to all the winners--I'm proud to be in your ranks.

Science Writing: Guidelines and Guidance
I'm very grateful to have been able to teach writing at Yale for the past several years. Teaching requires that I put into words the vague intuitions I've developed in my own work. Recently I realized that I needed to organize my notes in a better way for my students. I've posted them on my web site and on Medium, if you'd like to check them out.

Liz Neeley and Ed Yong: Why Storytelling Matters to Science
I was delighted to host Liz Neeley, executive director of Story Collider, and Ed Yong, staff writer at the Atlantic, for a talk in front of a packed house at Yale. You can watch their funny, fascinating talk on YouTube.

What if parents could CRISPR their babies?
"What the IF?" is a new podcast where hosts Philip Shane and Matt Stanley explore science fiction scenarios with real science. I talked to them about a future in which parents (or governments) tinkered with their children's DNA. Listen here.

Upcoming Talks

October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books.

October 16, 2019 Boston, MA. Allen Frontiers Symposium. Keynote address.

October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF--in conversation with author Annalee Newitz.

October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium.

November 9, 2019 Charleston, SC. Charleston To Charleston Literary Festival

December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Chancellor Lecture Series.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#122

October 3, 2019

Friday's Elk, September 15, 2019

Greetings! I wanted to get this update out in time to let folks in Washington DC know that I'll be speaking about She Has Her Mother's Laugh at the Smithsonian Institute on Tuesday. I'll be in conversation with Kirk Johnson, the director of the National Museum of Natural History. Please join us! Details can be found here.

Mini-Brains in Space and More
Here are a few things I wrote for the New York Times since my last newsletter:

"Scientists Find the Skull of Humanity’s Ancestor, on a Computer "

"Why Aren’t Cancer Drugs Better? The Targets Might Be Wrong"

"Organoids Are Not Brains. How Are They Making Brain Waves? "

Upcoming Talks

September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.”

October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books.

October 16, 2019 Boston, MA. Allen Frontiers Symposium. Keynote address.

October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF--in conversation with author Annalee Newitz.

October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium.

November 9, 2019 Charleston, SC. Charleston To Charleston Literary Festival

December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Chancellor Lecture Series.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for all my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#121

September 15, 2019

Friday's Elk, August 15, 2019

Happy news! She Has Her Mother's Laugh won the 2019 Communications Award from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine. You can read about all this year's winners here.

Here Comes The Third Edition
Different kinds of writing bring different pleasures. Over the years, I've published two textbooks about evolution: The Tangled Bank (for non-majors) and Evolution: Making Sense of Life (for majors, co-authored with biologist Doug Emlen). In both cases, I've relished the challenge of writing a textbook that students would actually want to read, rather than have to read. That's hard, but it's made a little easier by the fact that textbook publishing allows for do-overs. As you go from one edition to the next, you have the chance to rework old material and bring a book up to date with new research.

Doug and I are now very pleased to present the third edition of Evolution, hot off the presses. The front and back covers feature the snowshoe hare, both as an example of adaptation and--in an age of rapid climate change--maladaptation.

Inside, we have improved explanations of important concepts in evolutionary biology and have revised a number of chapters. For example, my reporting on human evolution in recent years made me appreciate just how much of our old understanding of our origins has been overwritten by new discoveries--both by fossils of previously unknown species and by chunks of our DNA that record a complex past.

This is our first new edition of Evolution since our original publisher was acquired by Macmillan. That move has enabled us to offer more resources online, including a series of videos shot by Doug. You can find out more about it here. Both books are also available at fine booksellers such as Amazon (Tangled Bank, Evolution).
Hallucinating Mice and More News
Here are a few things I wrote for the New York Times since my last newsletter:

"A Skull Bone Discovered in Greece May Alter the Story of Human Prehistory" Homo sapiens got to Europe 210,000 years ago!

"Why Are These Mice Hallucinating? Scientists Are in Their Heads"

"In the Ethiopian Mountains, Ancient Humans Were Living the High Life"

PLUS...
Here are some of the stories that stuck with me over the past month

Farewell David Corcoran, Dearest of Editors, by Christie Aschwanden (The Last Word on Nothing)

U.S. Significantly Weakens Endangered Species Act, by Lisa Friedman (The New York Times)

2°C: Beyond the Limit. Extreme climate change has arrived in America, by Steven Mufson, Chris Mooney, Juliet Eilperin, and John Muyskens (Washington Post)

Under Brazil’s Far-Right Leader, Amazon Protections Slashed and Forests Fall, by Letícia Casado and Ernesto Londoño (The New York Times)

Scientists glimpse oddball microbe that could help explain rise of complex life, by Jonathan Lambert (Nature)

A Cure for Ebola? Two New Treatments Prove Highly Effective in Congo, by Donald G. McNeil Jr. (The New York Times)

The largest bird in North America was nearly wiped out. Here’s how it fought its way back, by Reis Theibault (Washington Post)

Quantum Darwinism, an Idea to Explain Objective Reality, Passes First Tests, by Philip Ball (Quanta)

Upcoming Talks

August 31, 2019 Decatur, GA. Decatur Book Festival. In conversation with Frans de Waal.

September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.”

October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books. Details to come.

October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF.

October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium.

NEW--> November 9, 2019 Charleston, SC. Charleston To Charleston Literary Festival

December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Details to come.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is available from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#120

August 14, 2019

Friday's Elk, July 5, 2019

Happy Fourth of July weekend! Recently, I taped a conversation with Bill Nye and his co-host Corey Powell on their new podcast, Science Rules, about She Has Her Mother's Laugh. My daughter Charlotte first got the science bug in grade school by watching DVDs of Bill Nye the Science Guy. So I invited her to join me on the trip down to New York to meet her icon (knowing that she'd never forgive me if I went solo).

Once we got there, the producers invited her to join the conversation, since we were going to talk about heredity. I know I'm totally biased, but I think she did great. Charlotte's heading to college this fall with plans to major in astrophysics--but maybe she should keep radio in mind. You can listen here.

Our Electric Planet
On the cover of this week's Science Times, I wrote about microbes that build wires to transmit electricity. There can be miles of wires in a square inch of mud, researchers have found. And it may be possible to borrow these filaments to build green electronics. (Art by Gordon Studer)
Trojan Horses Against Cancer
Last year I wrote about how scientists were reprogramming bacteria to treat a hereditary disease that wreaks havoc on our metabolism. This week I wrote about another engineered bug. This one was retooled to attack cancer. It seeks out tumors, slips inside, and then explodes with tailor-made toxins. Check it out.

Siberian Roots for Native Americans
Researchers are extracting DNA from ancient human skeletons in Siberia. Some of them belong to a population that were the closest relatives of today's Native Americans. (Photo by Elena Pavlova)

Of Parrot Fevers and Chimp Viruses
Here's my review of historian Mark Honigsbaum's new book, The Pandemic Century, for the New York Times Book Review. (Art by Tim Enthoven)

Tentacles and Arms: A Deep Homology
Our arms are built with the help of genes that tell cells where they are--close to the fingers or the shoulder, to the left side or the right, and so on. Turns out, tentacles and other limbs on cephalopods--octopus, squid, and cuttlefish--are built by the same genes. It's a delightful example of deep homology that scientists are finding across the animal kingdom. (Art from Wikipedia)

The Invisible Armies
When insects migrate, their vast clouds can look like thunderstorms on weather radar. In June, I wrote about scientists who are tracking these migrations. They're finding that the bugs move in staggering numbers. One group of insects called hoverflies surges into southern England by the billions. (Photo by Will Hawkes)

PLUS...
Here are some of the stories that stuck with me over the past month

White House blocked intelligence agency’s written testimony calling climate change ‘possibly catastrophic,' by Juliet Eilperin, Josh Dawsey, and Brady Dennis (Washington Post)

Facebook Removes Conspiracy Site Natural News, by Kelly Weill (Daily Beast)

Russian biologist plans more CRISPR-edited babies, by David Cyranoski (Nature)

Planet is entering ‘new climate regime’ with ‘extraordinary’ heat waves intensified by global warming, study says, by Jason Samenow (Washington Post)

Climate Change Poses Major Risks to Financial Markets, Regulator Warns , by Coral Davenport (New York Times)

Trump directs agencies to cut advisory boards by 'at least' one-third, The Hill

Rising Temperatures Ravage the Himalayas, Rapidly Shrinking Its Glaciers, by Somini Sengupta (New York Times)

America Could Spend $400 Billion on a Wall to Hold Back the Rising Seas—and It Might Not Be Enough by Brian Kahn (Earther)

Agriculture Department buries studies showing dangers of climate change, by Helena Evich (Politico)

Smartphones aren’t making millennials grow horns. Here’s how to spot a bad study, by Nsikan Akpan (PBS News Hour)

The Last of Its Kind, by Ed Yong (The Atlantic)

Tourist Trap, by Daniel Engber (Slate)

Genealogy Sites Have Helped Identify Suspects. Now They’ve Helped Convict One, by Heather Murphy (New York Times)

Farmers Are Losing Everything After “Forever Chemicals” Turned Up In Their Food, by Nidhi Subbaraman (Buzzfeed)

Tree planting 'has mind-blowing potential' to tackle climate crisis, by Damian Carrington (The Guardian)

Upcoming Talks

July 13, 2019 New York. Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism Keynote Address

August 31, 2019 Decatur, GA. Decatur Book Festival.

September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.” Details to come.

October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books. Details to come.

October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF. Details to come.

October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium. Details to come.

December 3, 2019 Nashville. Vanderbilt University. Details to come.

My latest book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh, is now out in paperback. You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#119

July 5, 2019

Friday's Elk, June 4, 2019

Today's the day! She Has Her Mother's Laugh is now available in paperback.

You can order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

I've been hearing from a number of book groups who've chosen the book to read, and I've even spoken at a few of their meetings, either in person or via Skype. Dutton, my publisher, has put together a free discussion guide. Check it out.

I'm giving a burst of new talks around the paperback launch. Last week I spoke at the Bloom Festival in Copenhagen. You can watch the video of my talk about the past and future of heredity on YouTube. Check out the talk list at the bottom of this email for more events.

Speaking of speaking--back in February, I spoke with David Quammen at the Harvard Museum of Natural History on the joys and challenges of writing books about science. Now our conversation is up on Youtube, too.

The Billion-Year-Old Fungus
Fungi are nature's invisible giants. Now, with the discovery of fossils in Canada, their record on this planet has more than doubled. A billion years ago, it seems, fungi had already evolved and might have been growing on land. But land plants, their key partner today, did not yet exist. They would not evolve for hundreds of millions of years. So what were the fungi up to? Here's my story for the New York Times on this thrilling discovery/mystery.

Also this month, I wrote about a milestone in synthetic biology. Scientists in England have synthesized a genome for bacteria from scratch.

Finally, here's my "Matter" column on a quest to bring Big Data to ordinary medicine--led by a scientist who invented "the narcissome."
PLUS...
Here are some of the stories that stuck with me over the past month:

Gene edits to ‘CRISPR babies’ might have shortened their life expectancy, by Sara Reardon (Nature)

How a Chinese Scientist Broke the Rules to Create the First Gene-Edited Babies, by Preetika Rana (Wall Street Journal)

Plenty of Fantasy in HBO’s ‘Chernobyl,’ but the Truth Is Real, by Henry Fountain (New York Times)

One million species face extinction, U.N. report says. And humans will suffer as a result, by Darryl Fears (Washington Post)

A million threatened species? Thirteen questions and answers, by Andy Purvis (IPBES)

Children Change Their Parents’ Minds about Climate Change, by Lydia Denworth

Saving Ecosystems to Protect the Climate, and Vice Versa: a Global Deal for Nature, by Sabrina Shankman (Inside Climate News)

Trump Administration Hardens Its Attack on Climate Science, by Coral Davenport and Mark Landler (New York Times)

E.P.A. Plans to Get Thousands of Pollution Deaths Off the Books by Changing Its Math, by Lisa Friedman (New York Times)

How a Half-Inch Beetle Finds Fires 80 Miles Away, by Jennifer Frazer (Scientific American)

Navigating Newsrooms as a Minority, by Kendra Pierre-Louis (The Open Notebook)

Huge Racial Disparities Found in Deaths Linked to Pregnancy, by Roni Caryn Rabin (The New York Times)

U.S. Fossil Fuel Subsidies Exceed Pentagon Spending, by Tim Dickinson (Rolling Stone)

Eugenics, Anti-Immigration Laws Of The Past Still Resonate Today, Journalist Says (Fresh Air, NPR)

Viruses Can Scatter Their Genes Among Cells and Reassemble, by Viviane Callier (Quanta)

The devastating biological consequences of homelessness, by Amy Maxmen (Nature)

Shrinking Success, by Scott Stossel (The American Scholar)

The domino effect, by Raychelle Burks (Chemistry World)

Threats By Text, A Mob Outside The Door: What Health Workers Face In The Ebola Zone, by Nurith Aizenman (Goats and Soda, NPR)

Fighting Ebola When Mourners Fight the Responders, by Joseph Goldstein (The New York Times)

"5-HTTLPR: A Pointed Review," by Scott Alexander (Slate Star Codex) [Since it's not a great headline, here's a snippet to whet your appetite: "How many of our scientific edifices are built on air? How many useless products are out there under the guise of good science? We still don’t know."]

Upcoming Talks

June 13, 2019 Harvard Club of New York

June 23, 2019 Providence, RI. Society for the Study of Evolution. Vice Presidential Symposium: Politics, the Public, and Science: Navigating the New Reality”

July 2, 2019 Lausanne, Switzerland. World Conference of Science Journalists

July 13, 2019 New York. Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism Keynote Address

August 31, 2019 Decatur, GA. Decatur Book Festival.

September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.” Details to come.

NEW--> October 12, 2019 Morristown, NJ. Morristown Festival of Books. Details to come.

October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF. Details to come.

October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium. Details to come.

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#118

June 3, 2019

Friday's Elk, May 3, 2019

Book alert! She Has Her Mother's Laugh is coming out in paperback on June 4. I'm delighted to share the snazzily updated cover:

You can pre-order it now from fine book mongers, including Amazon, Barnes and Noble, BAM, Hudson Booksellers, and IndieBound.

Seven Misconceptions about Heredity

In the cover story for the May/June issue of Skeptical Inquirer, I explore some of the biggest misconceptions about heredity. With the ongoing explosion of DNA testing, it's urgent that we understand what the results of those tests can and cannot tell us.

So long, Denisova
Eight years ago, I had the privilege to introduce a new word into the New York Times lexicon: Denisovan. I was writing about the discovery of human-like DNA in a fossil tooth in a Siberian cave called Denisova. It represented a new lineage of humans, which the researchers named after the cave.

As the years passed, archaeologists found more Denisovan remains in the cave, spanning over 200,000 years. But they didn't find any Denisovans anywhere else, despite compelling--albeit indirect--evidence that they lived across much of Asia, and perhaps beyond.

Now, at last, a Denisovan beyond Denisova has come to light. The irony is that the fossil was actually discovered 40 years ago in Tibet. You can read my story about this remarkable development here.
PLUS...
Here are some of the stories I enjoyed reading this past month--

Reassessing Seal Rescue, by Cathleen O'Grady (Hakai)

Jakarta Is Sinking, by Matt Simon (Wired)

US Science Academy Leaders Approve Plan to Expel Sexual Harassers, by Sara Reardon (Nature)

Permafrost Collapse Is Accelerating Carbon Release, by Merritt R. Turetsky et al (Nature)

U.N. Issues Urgent Warning on the Growing Peril of Drug-Resistant Infections, by Andrew Jacobs (New York Times)

Scientists Discover Nearly 200,000 Kinds of Ocean Viruses, by Jonathan Lambert (Quanta)

The World Lost a Belgium-sized Area of Primary Rainforests Last Year, by Mikaela Weisse and Elizabeth Dow Goldman (World Resources Institute)

How Kenya’s Push for Development Is Threatening Its Famed Wild Lands, by Adam Welz (Yale e360)

USDA orders scientists to say published research is ‘preliminary’ By Ben Guarino (Washington Post)

‘I Want What My Male Colleague Has, and That Will Cost a Few Million Dollars’, by Mallory Pickett (New York Times)

Scientists Partly Restore Activity in Dead-Pig Brains, by Ed Yong (The Atlantic)

Facing Up to Injustice in Genome Science, by Giorgia Guglielmi (Nature)

Upcoming Talks

May 16, 2019 Ames, Iowa. Genome Writer’s Guild

May 25-26, 2019 Copenhagen: Bloom Festival.

June 23, 2019 Providence, RI. Society for the Study of Evolution. Vice Presidential Symposium: Politics, the Public, and Science: Navigating the New Reality”

July 2, 2019 Lausanne, Switzerland. World Conference of Science Journalists

July 13, 2019 New York. Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism Keynote Address

August 31, 2019 Decatur, GA. Decatur Book Festival.

NEW--> September 17, 2019 Washington, DC. Smithsonian. “An Evening With Carl Zimmer.” Details to come.

NEW--> October 23, 2019 San Francisco. Arts & Ideas at the JCCSF. Details to come.

NEW--> October 24, 2019 San Francisco. The Exploratorium. Details to come.

November 21, 2019 Paris. TimeWorld 2019

You can find information and ordering links for my books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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May 2, 2019

Friday's Elk, April 12, 2019

I held off on the April edition of Friday's Elk for a couple late-breaking pieces I've been working on. Here they are, plus some interesting reading from other writers if you're looking for something to feed your mind. And be sure to check out the new entries in my speaking schedule at the end of this email. (Even more talks to come!)

An Astronaut, Down to His Molecules
Today, I had a full-page story about an exceptional piece of science: the NASA Twins Study. During Scott Kelly's 340 days aboard the International Space Station, scientists monitored practically every aspect of his existence, from the expression of his genes to his microbiome to his performance on cognition tests. It's a vast, data-rich profile of a person, made all the more compelling by the fact that scientists compared his results to tests on his twin brother Mark. Some researchers looked at the results and saw a dire warning about any dreams of going to Mars. But how much can we ever know about human biology from a single person? Would ten astronauts studied so carefully give some clearer answers?

Meet Homo luzonensis
This week researchers announced the discovery of a new species of our genus in a cave in the Philippines. About 50,000 years ago, a tiny human-like species lived on the island of Luzon. It's the second case of island "Hobbits"--are there more for scientists to dig up?

The Lost History of the Biosphere
In Arizona, there's a remarkable sealed building called Biosphere 2. What's even more remarkable is that eight people lived inside of it for two years in the early 1990s, trying to grow their own food and drink recirculated water. I've been fascinated by Biosphere 2 ever since it was first built. In the Sunday Review, I took a look at its turbulent history, which included dead hummingbirds, triumphant cockroaches, and a cameo by Steve Bannon.

Klotho: The Ethics of Enhancement
For years, scientists have been puzzling over a protein made in our brains known as Klotho (named for one of the Greek fates who measures the thread of life). It appears to shield the brain from some of the devastation Alzheimer's, and it seems to enhance learning and memory in healthy brains. Now there are two companies trying to create Klotho-based treatments, and bioethicists are grappling with the prospect of a double-edged drug. Here's my feature in the Times.

As If the Frog Plague Could Be Any Worse
For years, one of the biggest, scariest stories on the conservation biology beat has been the relentless spread of a frog-killing fungus around the world. Now, it turns out that this catastrophe is actually far worse than scientists previously estimated. I take a look at the first global survey of the damage done.

The Deep History of a Place
The ancient DNA revolution is enriching our understanding of history. The latest demonstration of this is a pair of new studies on genetic material extracted from skeletons found in Spain and Portugal, dating back as far as 11,000 years. They show how Iberia has been a crossroads since the Ice Ages, a place where people from different regions--even different continents--come together and mix their genes. This figure, taking from the original paper, does an excellent job of communicating the complexity of one place's history.

Why Would an Animal Trade One Body for Another?
Metamorphosis is a marvel that any child can appreciate by watching a butterfly emerge from its chrysalis or a tadpole turn into a frog. But why should they have all the fun? I wrote about the scientific paradox posed by the evolution of metamorphosis, and about the ideas scientists are exploring to understand how it came to be so common in the animal kingdom.

Talking Heredity
On my recent trip to Australia, I talked with Radio National about She Has Her Mother's Laugh.

And on DNA Today I talked about how you can be more closely related to some of your full siblings than others (genetically speaking)..
PLUS...
‘As Native Americans, We Are in a Constant State of Mourning’ By Chip Colwell, New York Times

The absurdly high cost of insulin, explained. Julia Belluz, Vox.

Domestic cats (Felis catus) discriminate their names from other words Saito et al, Scientific Reports

Last time CO2 levels were this high, there were trees at the South Pole. Damian Carrington, The Guardian

The remarkable impact of bivalent HPV vaccine in Scotland. Julia Brotherton, BMJ

There was actually a study to determine if red wolves are wolves. The answer could have doomed them. Darryl Fears, Washington Post.

Death By 1,000 Clicks: Where Electronic Health Records Went Wrong. Fred Schulte and Erika Fry, Kaiser Health News

DeepMind and Google: the battle to control artificial intelligence. Hal Hodson, 1843 Magazine

Goop Is Making a Killing Off Women Who Want More Than a Doctor's Advice. Riley Griffin, Bloomberg

The Fertility Doctor’s Secret, by Sarah Zhang, The Atlantic

Antibiotics set to flood Florida’s troubled orange orchards. Maryn McKenna, Nature

After Two Decades, a Fishy Genetic Mystery Has Been Solved. Ed Yong, The Atlantic

Climate change making storms like Idai more severe, say experts. Matthew Taylor, The Guardian.

An Elusive Whale Is Found All Around the World, by Karen Weintraub, The New York Times

In blow to climate, coal plants emitted more than ever in 2018. By Chris Mooney and Brady Dennis, Washington Post

EPA Science Panel Considering Guidelines That Upend Basic Air Pollution Science. Rebecca Hersher, NPR

YouTube Executives Ignored Warnings, Letting Toxic Videos Run Rampant. By Mark Bergen, Bloomberg

Upcoming Talks

NEW--> May 2, 2019 Genspace, New York. DNA Day talk. Details to come

NEW--> May 16, 2019 Ames, Iowa. Genome Writer’s Guild

May 25-26, 2019 Copenhagen: Bloom Festival

NEW--> June 23, 2019 Providence, RI. Society for the Study of Evolution. Vice Presidential Symposium: Politics, the Public, and Science: Navigating the New Reality”

NEW--> July 2, 2019 Lausanne, Switzerland. World Conference of Science Journalists

NEW--> July 13, 2019 New York. Northeast Conference on Science and Skepticism Keynote Address

NEW--> August 31, 2019 Decatur, GA. Decatur Book Festival.

NEW--> November 21, 2019 Paris. TimeWorld 2019

My newest book is She Has Her Mother's Laugh. If you've read it and liked it, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#116

April 11, 2019

Friday's Elk, March 8, 2019

Happy March! Here's a late-winter selection of updates...

Doubling DNA, Twins CSI, and Mice in Conversation
Since the last Friday's Elk, I wrote three pieces for the New York Times on three rather different topics.

1. Your DNA is spelled out in an alphabet of four "letters." Now scientists have added another four, and found that this new eight-letter DNA can still work as a way to store genetic information. Perhaps we will use this molecule to store movies and spreadsheets someday. Leading the effort is a scientist named Steven Benner. You can listen to Benner and me talk about just how weird life can get in this episode of my podcast, "What Is Life?"

2. Identical twins are not exactly identical, even though they descend from a single fertilized egg containing a single genome. Mutations arise in embryos as their cells divide, and when twin embryos split apart, one may end up with a few mutations that the other lacks, and vice versa. Forensic scientists have wondered for many years if a DNA test could ever tell twins apart. I tell the story of the long search for such a test--and puzzle over why it isn't being used right now to solve cold cases.

3. Our power of language may be one of the most important features that sets our species apart from all other living things. But language's building blocks may have been evolving for 100 million years. I write about a strange singing mouse that seems to communicate in conversations--and uses some of the same brain circuitry we use to do so. (Mouse photo by Christopher Auger-Dominguez)

What's In Your Genome?
The newest episode of Radiolab takes a look at that bizarre attic that is our genome. I talked with producer Pat Walters about some of the junk that, with a little evolutionary altering, has become downright useful--even essential. Take a listen. (Here's a story I wrote for the New York Times Magazine about junk DNA, and here's a blog post I wrote about the viral gene without which none of us would be born.)

By coincidence, a couple other podcasts have just posted interviews about She Has Her Mother's Laugh: Point of Inquiry and Curiosity Daily.

Cold, Hot, Cold
As spring approaches, I'm starting to scramble again, traveling hither and yon to give talks. This past week, I headed to snowy Cambridge, Mass., for a conversation with David Quammen, then journeyed to the sultry city of Adelaide in Australia for their writers festival, and finally returned to the snow to give a lecture at the University of Illinois.

Here is a nice write-up in the Harvard Gazette of my conversation with Quammen about the tree of life, writing about nature, and more. The video will be available within a few weeks; I will keep you posted.

From Bellybuttons to the Roman Empire
Tim Flannery, an Australian biologist and author of many fine books, wrote a gratifying review of She Has Her Mother's Laugh for the New York Review of Books. (First time I've been reviewed in their pages!)

Snip:

“A grand and sprawling book that investigates all aspects of inheritance, from ancient Roman law to childhood learning, and on to the bacteria that inhabit our belly buttons (which are surprisingly varied among individuals). Along the way, the book provides many amusing historical anecdotes and important scientific insights…Some of the most fascinating material Zimmer covers concerns the phenomena of mosaicism and chimerism, in which individuals are made up of cells with differing genetic inheritances.”

Upcoming Talks

More talks coming soon...

March 15, 2019 Brookline, MA. “Science On Screen” at the Coolidge Theater. (A double-feature: a talk about heredity and a screening of the heredity-based comedy, Flirting With Disaster.)

April 9, 2019 Wellesley College. Mayer Lecture. Details to come.

May 25-26, 2019 Copenhagen: Bloom Festival.

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#115

March 7, 2019

Friday's Elk, January 31, 2019

New Year, New Podcast
For the first Friday's Elk of 2019, I have some good news. In some earlier newsletters I wrote about a live series of conversations I hosted in New York about the nature of life itself. Now you can listen to the podcast edition of "What Is Life?"--eight episodes of talk with fascinating thinkers about what it means to be alive. Here's a link to iTunes. Also I've put together a page on my web site with show notes and embedded recordings, plus a set of pages on Medium. It should also be propagating itself to Sticher and other podcast services. Thanks to Ben Lillie and all the good people at Caveat for making this happen!
Decoding Watson
PBS recently ran a thorough and provocative documentary about Jim Watson, who shared the Nobel Prize for discovering the structure of DNA. You can watch it here. I show up from time to time to offer some talking-head narration. For more on the show, you can read this New York Times article by Amy Harmon--and her follow-up piece on the fall-out that ensured after the show aired.
CRISPR on The Daily
Jennifer Senior interviewed me about the ongoing CRISPR baby saga for the Daily podcast from the New York Times. Listen here.
Crickets and Spies
Here's what I've been writing for the New York Times since the last Friday's Elk:

1. Numerous remains of Aboriginal Australians are scattered in museum collections around the world. DNA may help bring them back home to rest.

2. In Cuba, American diplomats have suffered mysterious neurological symptoms. One common report was that they heard strange sounds before falling ill. Was it a sonic weapon--or Cuban crickets?

3. There's evidence suggesting that our microbiome is talking to our brains. And that conversation may have an influence on the development of conditions ranging from Alzheimer's to autism. For this feature, I tried to balance the excitement of the science with the profound mysteries that remain. Don't expect a quick probiotic cure for Parkinson's any time soon.

4. A quarter million years of Denisovan history. The Denisovans are an extinct branch of the human family, known only from a single Siberian cave. Now their fossils have a clear-cut timeline. They lived in the cave for at least 250,000 years and may have gained the powers of self-expression along the way.
New to the Calendar
A couple updates to my upcoming appearances:

If you're heading to the annual AAAS meeting in Washington DC, please consider coming to my lecture on Saturday at noon. I'll be signing books afterwards.

I'm looking forward to a live conversation with David Quammen at Harvard on February 28.

Upcoming Talks

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture: "Heredity: Our Defining Mystery"...followed by a book signing.

February 20, 2019 Connecticut College, New London CT: “The Deep History of Global Affairs”

February 28, 2019 Harvard Museum of Natural History: A Conversation with David Quammen..

March 3, 2019 Adelaide Writer’s Week

March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society. Details to come.

March 15, 2019 Brookline, MA. “Science On Screen” at the Coolidge Theater. (A double-feature: a talk about heredity and a screening of the heredity-based comedy, Flirting With Disaster.)

April 9, 2019 Wellesley College. Mayer Lecture. Details to come.

May 25-26, 2019 Copenhagen: Bloom Festival. Details to come.

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#114

January 30, 2019

Friday's Elk, December 14, 2019

A Year in Friday's Elk!
Thanks to everyone for subscribing to this newsletter through the year. Wrapping up 2018, I have some additional news to share about She Has Her Mother's Laugh

1. The New York Times Book Review named it one of the notable books of the year.

2. The Guardian picked it as the Science Book of 2018.

3. She Has Her Mother's Laugh also got onto a variety of other Best-of-2018 lists, including The Sunday Times (UK), Kirkus Reviews, New Scientist, Smithsonian, Science News, and Science Friday

4. I made the long list for the PEN/EO Wilson Literary Science Writing Award alongside some amazing writers--both veterans and first-timers. Check them all out!

The CRISPR People Have Arrived
At the end of She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I write about the discovery of the gene-editing technology called CRISPR, and the power it offered to alter heredity. As I was wrapping up the manuscript, scientists were starting to unveil experiments in which they altered DNA in human embryos. An international call went out to resist taking the next step--to implant those embryos and allow them to become babies.

But last month, a Chinese scientist named He Jiankui ignored that call and decided to cross the line. He edited a gene in two embryos. And then He announced had developed into twin baby girls born in November.

For the Sunday Review section of the New York Times, I tried to put this news in some historical context, drawing on a section of She Has Her Mother's Laugh about "three-parent babies." This is new territory in some ways, and yet, in another sense, we've been here before. Genetically modified people already walk among us.

You can also listen to my conversation with Joshua Johnson on NPR's 1A about what He's misadventures portend.

Other Intelligences, Other Inheritances
1. The Science Times section of the New York Times recently celebrated their 40th anniversary. As part of a special package of essays observing this event, I wrote about what we've learned so far about how humans evolved, and the most interesting questions left to explore.

2. A big part of the story of human origins is the evolution of our intelligence. But intelligence of different sorts has arisen on other branches of the animal kingdom. I wrote about the paradox of intelligence in the octopus and other cephalopods--animals that seem to defy the pattern seen in other smart creatures.

3. A lot of people are concerned about CRISPR because of how it might alter the future of heredity. I'd argue that a few people who get disease-causing mutations removed from their DNA will have a minuscule impact on the inheritance we leave to future generations. In She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I argue that we must also consider the environmental inheritance humans leave for their descendants. And if we look back at a catastrophic burst of climate change 252 million years ago, it bodes ill for our legacy.

4. For my most recent column, I wrote about what happens when people inherit certain genes from Neanderthals. It turns out that they can slightly reshape our brains. This research may give scientists clues to the evolutionary steps that made our brains so different from that of extinct humans. (In the figure above, the red brain is a Neanderthals, the blue a modern human's.)
Next Year's Travels
I've added a few more talks to my itinerary for the new year. If you're in Adelaide, Boston, or anywhere else on the list, I hope you can join me!
Upcoming Talks

January 15, 2019 New York: House of Speakeasy, “Secrets and Lies”

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture: "Heredity: Our Defining Mystery"

February 20, 2019 Connecticut College, New London CT: “The Deep History of Global Affairs”

February 28, 2019 Harvard Museum of Natural History: A Conversation with David Quammen. Details to come.

March 3, 2019 Adelaide Writer’s Week

March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society. Details to come.

April 9, 2019 Wellesley College. Mayer Lecture. Details to come.

May 25-26, 2019 Copenhagen: Bloom Festival. Details to come.

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#113

December 13, 2018

Friday's Elk, November 19, 2019: The One More Final Vote Edition!

Goodreads Choice Award--The Final Round
Thanks to your support, She Has Her Mother's Laugh is now a finalist for a Goodreads Choice Award! I'm writing to ask for your vote one last time, this time for all the marbles. You can make your pick till November 26. Here's where you can cast your vote. Thanks again!

Amazon's Best-Of Lists
A double hit of nice news: Amazon selected She Has Her Mother's Laugh for their Top 100 Books of the Year, as well as their Best Science Books of 2018.

Back From London
My wife and I spent a few delightful days in London this past week for the Baillie Gifford Prize For Nonfiction. The six finalists got together Tuesday to give a public talk about our books. Listening to the other authors, I could imagine any of them winning, and the following evening we found out that the actual winner was Harvard historian Serhii Plokhy, for his excellent book Chernobyl: The History of a Nuclear Catastrophe. Plokhy combed through Ukraine KGB archives and other sources to put together his new chronicle of this terrifying disaster. The details of this very human failure remain chilling decades later.
Heredity On TV--And Other Interviews
I'm on this week's episode of Open Mind, which airs on many PBS stations. I talked with host Alexander Heffner about genes and inheritance. You can watch the interview on YouTube here.

If you prefer audio over video, check out the latest episode of the Sapiens podcast, a great new series about anthropology. They dedicate the full episode to a conversation I had with host Chip Colwell about She Has Her Mother's Laugh.

And if print is your game, here's an interview in Penn Today about the dangers of fake news to science reporting, plus a Q/A with LitHub about the Baillie Gifford Award, including the best writing advice I ever got.

Columns: The Oldest Pictures of Animals, the Peopling of the Americas, and More
Before I hit the road, here's what I reported on this month for New York Times:

1. Deep in the rainforests of Borneo are caves decorated with pictures of animals. It turns out that people started making these images over 40,000 years ago--meaning they are the oldest evidence of figurative art on Earth. For my column, I explore what this new finding tells us about the development of human culture.

2. How did people first spread across the Americas? In the past few years, geneticists have sequenced hundreds of ancient genomes from Alaska to Chile. This DNA is offering some new clues about ghost populations and previously unknown waves of people on the move from continent to continent. For my column, I try to make sense of all the new findings.

3. The search for a better flu vaccine continues. Here's a piece I wrote about a radically different approach to protecting us from a virus that kills hundreds of thousands of people every year.

Upcoming Talks

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture: "Heredity: Our Defining Mystery"

February 20, 2019 Connecticut College, New London CT: “The Deep History of Global Affairs”

NEW-->February 28, 2019 Harvard Museum of Natural History: A Conversation with David Quammen. Details to come.

March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society. Details to come.

NEW-->April 9, 2019 Wellesley College. Mayer Lecture. Details to come.

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#112

November 18, 2018

Friday's Elk, October 31, 2018 [Get Out the Goodreads Vote Edition!]

Goodreads Choice Award--Can I Get Your Vote?
I'm sending this newsletter out a couple days early because of some late-breaking developments. She Has Her Mother's Laugh has been nominated for the Goodreads Choice Award in the Science & Technology category. This is a wonderful honor, because the award is the only book prize out there entirely determined by readers, rather than a judging panel made of critics, media, etc. (Not that those aren't great, too!) You can now vote for your favorite nominees in each category. The opening voting round ends on November 4. Here's the link. Thanks!
In Other She Has Her Mother's Laugh News
1. Dutton has put together an elegantly designed book club guide that you can download from my web site

2. Publisher's Weekly put She Has Her Mother's Laugh on their list of the Best Ten Books of 2018.

3. Three new reviews came out. The London Review of Books calls the book "an unlikely page-turner." In the Longview, Texas, News-Journal, columnist Frank Pool writes, "I just finished the best science book I’ve read in years." And the Guardian writes, "The book offers clear insights into a fast-moving area, and asks big questions. Scientists can eradicate diseases, alter DNA and change human heredity. Should they? What could be at stake if they get it wrong?"
Fake News, Heredity, and Other Talk Updates
1. I'm back from a string of talks, some of which were reported on. Here's a story about my lecture on heredity at Colorado State University. At Mount Holyoke College, I talked about science writing in the age of fake news (featuring the original master of fake science news, P.T. Barnum). And here's a story that covers a talk I gave at CSI Con in Las Vegas on the top misconceptions about heredity.

2. I had a great conversation earlier this month with anthropologist Jennifer Raff and Wall Street Journal science writer Robert Lee Hotz about heredity, ancestry, and how we use both to define ourselves. You can now watch the video.
Elizabeth Warren's DNA, Wildfire Refuges, and More Columns
It was a busy month on the science news front over at the New York Times:

1. I wrote about Elizabeth Warren's DNA, explaining how researchers use genetic material to learn about people's ancestors--and what that does and does not mean for people's own identity. The day that piece came out, a GOP operative and a Wall Street Journal pundit used my reporting on genetic ancestry to make distorted accusations against the senator. So I wrote a fact-checking tweet storm. That got people's attention, so I turned the tweets into a fleshed-out essay, which appeared in the Sunday Review. With tens of millions of people looking at genetic tests for clues to their ancestors, the week's events resonate far beyond one political conflict.

2. It turns out that healthy cells are riddled with mutations in genes strongly linked to cancer. So where is the line between health and disease?

3. This year's ravaging wildfires left some refuges behind, as all fires do. Scientists suspect refuges are vital to the long-term well-being of ecosystems. But climate change could wipe many of them out.

Upcoming Talks

November 2, 2018 West Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Stanmeyer Gallery

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News

November 13, 2018 Waterstone's, London: An Evening With The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlist

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture: "Heredity: Our Defining Mystery"

March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#111

October 30, 2018

Correction to an upcoming talk

Sorry to clog your inbox, but I needed to send out a correction. My upcoming talk at the Stanmeyer Gallery in West Stockbridge, Massachusetts, is not on November 2. It is on Saturday, November 3, at 2 pm. Here's the Facebook event page. Hope to see some Friday's Elk readers from the Berkshires this weekend!

Carl

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#110

October 30, 2018

Friday's Elk, Ocotber 5, 2018

Happy First Friday!
September hurried by in a rush as I zipped around for much of the month. One of my favorite stops along the way was the lovely English city of Bath. I traveled to the university there for a conference to celebrate the opening of the Milner Centre for Evolutionary Biology. The University of Bath has long been a powerhouse for evolution research, and I expect the new center will up their game even more.

For two days, we listened to talks on topics ranging from the evolution of deadly bacteria to the Cambrian explosion to Darwin’s finches to the domestication of dogs. At the end of the conference, I moderated a panel on the future of evolution research, talking with Patrick Goymer from Nature Ecology and Evolution, Aiofe McSlayt from Trinity College Dublin, Michael Purgannan of New York University, Roli Roberts from PLOS Biology, Nina Waddell of the University of Exeter.

They agreed that the science of evolution has been profoundly accelerated by DNA sequencing. It's now possible to put hypotheses to the test that until now were practically untestable. As a result, a lot of arguments are getting resolved, and evolution is becoming more and more of an applied science—helping to explain precisely how HIV becomes resistant to antivirals, for example, or determining the best way to treat cancer.

While the technology we talked about might be new, it struck me that the concepts were not. The researchers talked about things like natural selection, genetic drift, character displacement, adaptive radiation—concepts that have been part of the language of evolutionary biology for decades. When I asked if the future of evolutionary biology was going to see the emergence of new concepts, the panelists shrugged their collective shoulders. They considered the conceptual toolkit of evolution to be in good shape.

More News about She Has Her Mother's Laugh
A big highlight of the month was learning that She Has Her Mother's Laugh is on the shortlist for the Baillie Gifford Prize, Britain's top prize for nonfiction books! The winner will be announced next month. The web site Five Books interviewed one of the judges about their choices. I'm looking forward to reading clear the other books on the shortlist.

In other book news...

I spoke to BBC about heredity.

PBS put together a nice video about the inheritance of height, based on a chapter from the book.

The Beagle Has Landed, a podcast about clinical genetics, interviewed me about She Has Her Mother's Laugh.

And, last but not least, it was a surreal delight to find David Quammen, a writer I deeply admire, posting a picture of my book on Twitter, posed with a tumbler of a whiskey and a python.
Colorado, Massachusetts and more: October's Talks
For reasons unknown, I am rushing around to a bunch of talks this month--a few of which fell into place just recently. Here are the details for October. (Full calendar at the end, as usual.)

On Tuesday, October 9, I'll be at New York University for an event called "Why You’re You: Explaining Heredity to a Confused Public." I'll be talking with Jennifer Raff, an anthropologist at the University of Kansas, and Wall Street Journal science writer Lee Hotz.

The next day, Wednesday, October 10, I'll be at Yale Law School to talk about the science of science communication. Why is it that science news or a visit to the doctor can change the way some people think but not others? Why is global warming controversial, but lasers aren't? I'll be discussing these issues with Dan Kahan and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, two of the leading researchers in this field, and Sarah Smaga, a Yale graduate student who dedicating a lot of her efforts to science outreach.

A week later, on Wednesday, October 17, I'll be talking about She Has Her Mother's Laugh at Colorado State University as a Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture.

On October 19, I'll be in Las Vegas to talk about heredity and its misconceptions at CSICon.

And, finally (for October), I'll be speaking at Mount Holyoke College on October 23.

Jellyfish and Borrowed Neanderthal Genes
My batch of New York Times columns in September runs the biological gamut:

Chimps and bonobos are generous--up to a point. And being human means going beyond that point.

We don't know much about most of our genes--and that's a problem.

Jellyfish: It's what's for dinner

Neanderthals may have given us the flu, or viruses like it

Upcoming Talks

October 9, 2018 New York University: "Why You’re You: Explaining Heredity to a Confused Public"

October 10, 2018 Yale Law School: "The Science of Science Communication"

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture

October 19, 2018 Las Vegas, CSICon

October 23, 2018 Mount Holyoke College

November 2, 2018 West Stockbridge, Massachusetts: Stanmeyer Gallery

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia: Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News

November 13, 2018 Waterstone's, London: An Evening With The Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Shortlist

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture (details to come)

March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#109

October 5, 2018

Friday's Elk, September 9, 2018

Living Medicines
For a science writer, it's always exciting to report on the dawn of a new kind of science.

In the 1990s, journalists furiously wrote about gene therapy, a treatment that medical researchers promised would cure hereditary diseases by injecting working genes into people's cells.

At the same time, champions of the Human Genome Project also promised tremendous benefits to mapping all our DNA.

By the end of the 1990s, a new field, known as synthetic biology, was also hatched. Researchers sought to rewire the genes of cells like electronic circuits, promising to fashion organisms that could carry out all sorts of new tasks for us.

But science writers also have a responsibility to follow these fields beyond their grand birth announcements, and see whether they live up to the promises--and, if they do, to see how long the process takes.

Gene therapy did not quickly deliver a panacea for hereditary diseases. Instead, after a death during a clinical trial, the field ground to a halt for years and then regained ground slowly. Five years ago, I wrote about this hard rebound for Wired, profiling the scientist who ran the infamous trial that put the brakes on gene therapy. Just a few weeks ago, my New York Times colleague Gina Kolata reported on how gene therapy is starting to get FDA approval. And yet, she notes, there are still unresolved questions about how effective it will prove in the long run.

The Human Genome Project provided scientists with a tool that's now essential for studying our DNA. It's allowed scientists to tie many genes to many different diseases. In some cases, that knowledge is leading to new medicines and new ways to estimate people's risks. But it certainly hasn't made a big dent in major diseases like Alzheimer's and diabetes. The video series The Code, which I helped create, offers a look at where we stand now.

And then there's synthetic biology. Among its exciting promises was the possibility of cheap, plentiful drugs to cure malaria. The drug, called artemisinin, is naturally produced by certain plants. Synthetic biology offered the possibility of retooling microbes to churn it out in far bigger amounts for far less effort. Here's a 2006 Q/A I did for Discover on the project, talking with its leader, Jay Keasling. The pharmaceutical giant Sanofi ramped up Keasling's technology to an industrial scale.

But they couldn't make a lot of artemisinin from microbes, and what little they made proved expensive. As Mark Peplow recently reported in Chemical and Engineering News, researchers are still searching for a formula that can truly deliver on this particular promise of synthetic biology.

Another idea that's been tossed around is to use synthetic biology to make microbes that can treat diseases inside our bodies. I've heard people talk about this for years. I've seen prototype bacteria in labs that can do simple things like change color when they detect a pathogen. But it's no small task to gather all the data on one of these "living drugs" that could give it a chance of getting FDA approval.

This week in the New York Times, I looked at one such case: a microbe that's programmed to make an enzyme that people with a hereditary disease can't make for themselves.

History has taught me to not hold my breath until these microbes are curing real people of real diseases. But I still think it's an important milestone in the ~20-year history of synthetic biology.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: Two Lists and an Interview

It was a delight to discover that Vanity Fair put She Has Her Mother's Laugh on their list of the summer's best nonfiction, while Goodreads put the book on its own list of the best new nonfiction.

Meanwhile, Canada's Globe and Mail interviewed with me on the future of heredity. A snip:

Q: In addition to CRISPR, you talked about recent research where scientists take skin cells from mice, make them into stem cells and then in turn make those into sperm or eggs. If I understand this correctly, that could mean a homosexual couple could make sperm and eggs to have babies just like heterosexual couples do. How close are we to that happening?

A: I think we’re pretty close, as strange as that sounds. Something we would have thought was profoundly mysterious and defied the laws of nature turns out to be just a matter of finding the right chemicals to dunk your cells into. There are still a lot of obstacles for them to overcome but the fact that they’ve gotten so far already is pretty mind-blowing.

I think that that kind of technology could unsettle our ideas about heredity much more than CRISPR. Imagine one man takes a cheek scraping, turns them into stem cells, turns some of those cells into sperm and eggs, fertilizes the eggs with the sperm, and that turns into an embryo. That’s a one-parent embryo! Theoretically that’s possible!

Now imagine that you pluck a cell from that tiny little embryo, when it’s just a clump of cells, and you then grow eggs or sperm from that. Remember this is an embryo that has never turned into an adult. Then you fertilize another egg created this way, and you do that for a few generations. If an embryo that develops from that is now implanted into a woman and is able to grow into a person, that person has no parents… has no grandparents! That family tree is pretty much impossible to draw. So when I think about that possibility it just seems like we could really be going into a science fiction future.

Read the full interview here.

Talk to You In October!
This summer was a whirlwind of the best sort. I'm incredibly grateful to everyone who came out to hear me talk about She Has Her Mother's Laugh, or listened to me on radio shows or podcasts. As the summer progressed, I also started getting a gratifying supply of emails and tweets from readers who let me know how much they enjoyed the book. (Please share your enthusiasm with everyone you know! And people you don't know on Goodreads or Amazon!)

Now my work is shifting to a different phase. I'm back to teaching my writing course at Yale. I'm continuing writing weekly for the Times. And, as you can see below, I've got a busy travel schedule for public lectures over the next few months.

With my work on She Has Her Mother's Laugh pretty much done, I'm shifting back to the earlier stages of the book life cycle. I'm working on the third edition of my evolution textbook with my co-author, the biologist Doug Emlen. And I'm spending a lot of time grazing for new ideas for a new trade book. Finding them requires me to take a fair-sized jump from the topic of my previous books. It has to provide me with enough excitement to fuel the long haul of writing another book. And gathering that fuel will take some time.

So I'm going to dial this newsletter back to a monthly pace. You'll still get plenty of warning about upcoming stuff, and I'll keep you up to date with the recent things I've been up to. But I'll also have a chance to be a bit more reflective about what I've been reading (or watching).

Think of this now as First Friday's Elk.

Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

October 9, 2018 New York University: "Why You’re You: Explaining Heredity to a Confused Public"

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 Las Vegas, CSICon

October 23, 2018 Mount Holyoke College "Science Reporting in the Age of Fake News"

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania (details to come)

November 13, 2018 New York, House of Speakeasy

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

February 16, 2019 Washington DC AAAS Topical Lecture (details to come)

NEW! --> March 7, 2019 University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Thomas M. Siebel Lecture Series in Science and Society (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#108

September 8, 2018

Friday's Elk, August 24, 2018

Her Mother Was A Neanderthal, And Her Father Was A Denisovan
A remarkable new study on a 90,000-year-old fossil fragment gives us an extraordinary look at what the world was like when a wide range of humans walked the planet. It was a real privilege to get to write up this discovery for the New York Times. You can read my story of this find here. (I'm also experimenting with responding to comments on the article.)

Elephants Fighting Cancer: Another Weapon
Along with ancient DNA, evolutionary medicine is another obsession of mine. It's fascinating to see how scientists gain new insights about diseases and health by observing how different branches of the tree of life have adapted. Some species have evolved some remarkable defenses against cancer, for example. I've written previously about naked mole rats, which have strange proteins that may keep them from ever getting cancer. Elephants ought to get more cancer than they do. In 2015 I wrote about one intriguing mutation that may protect them. Now scientists have found another unique feature of the species that may allow them to kill off mutant cells more effectively than we can.

Interviews: Psychology, Heredity, and (Non-)Science Degrees
1. I had a great chat with the psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman about what heredity can tell us about psychology (and can't).

2. Sapiens, the online anthropology magazine, has launched a podcast. I'm delighted to be a guest on their first episode, "Is Your DNA You?"

3. The Open Notebook, a great web site on science journalism, asks whether you need a science degree to do the job. My answer: I sure hope not!

Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018, University of Bath (UK): Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018, 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

NEW!--> October 9, 2018, New York University: "Why You’re You: Explaining Heredity to a Confused Public"

October 17, 2018, Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018, Las Vegas: CSICon

October 23, 2018: Mount Holyoke College

November 7, 2018: University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 13, 2018, New York: House of Speakeasy

November 14, 2018: Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#107

August 23, 2018

Friday's Elk, August 12, 2018

Hello, UK!
This week, She Has Her Mother's Laugh came out in the UK. Many thanks to Ravi Mirchandani and the rest of the team at Picador for this lovely edition. (Amazon UK link)

Three Conversations
The writer Philip Ball interviewed me for the Sunday Observer. You can read our Q/A here.

I had a great chat with Michael Ian Black, host of the podcast "How to Be Amazing." You can listen to our conversation about science writing here.

The cosmologist Sean Carroll and I have known each other for eons, ever since we discovered each other through our blogs. (Remember blogs?) Now Sean is diving into the next big thing--podcasts--and invited me to chat with him for his latest episode of "Mindscape." It's my favorite kind of conversation--more like a talk at a bar than a job interview. We talk about quantum epigenetic yoga, whether designer babies are inevitable, and much more.

Two Decades of Following Life into the Water
It's been twenty years since I published my first book, At the Water's Edge. It grew out of my earliest feature writing at Discover, where I had the privilege to report on some of the most exciting fossils discoveries in the history of paleontology--like whales with legs. In 1998, when I published my book, scientists had only barely started to look at the DNA of whales for clues to their evolution. But it was clear that genes could have a lot to say. For one thing, they suggested that hippos were the closest living relatives of whales--something that paleontologists had not guessed at looking at fossils alone.

In the two decades since, paleontologists have found many more transitional fossils. And geneticists are pinpointing some of the molecular changes that occurred when mammals took to the sea. This week a particularly intriguing study came out, showing that whales, seals, and manatees repeatedly lost the use of the same gene. While this loss may have been significant for taking up a marine life, it may now put these animals at risk, as they are exposed to modern pesticides. I take a closer look at the study in my column for the New York Times.
Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 23, 2018 Mount Holyoke College

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 13, 2018 House of Speakeasy, New York

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#106

August 12, 2018

Friday's Elk, August 3, 2018

A Troika of Stories
This turned out out be a busy news week. Here are three stories I wrote for the Times.

1. On Monday I wrote about "global greening." That's the increase in photosynthesis spurred by all the carbon dioxide we're pumping into the atmosphere. It may sound like a lovely thing, but an expert on global greening I interviewed says it's no reason to celebrate--or to stop looking for a way to fight climate change.

2. On Wednesday, I covered the nomination of a new White House science advisor. This was a particularly newsworthy event, given that the post has been vacant for so long--and given how often the administration has brushed off scientists and scientific evidence. The nominee is Kelvin Droegemeier, a University of Oklahoma meteorologist. I talked with his colleagues to find out about his career, and what they expect from him when he goes to Washington.

3. And yesterday, I wrote about a fun tale of failure and discovery and tiny elephants. The Indonesian island of Flores seems to have a powerful shrinking effect on mammals that have washed onto its shores. Elephants became dwarf elephants there--twice. And humans and human relatives appear to have evolved a pygmy-sized body at least twice as well.

Radio and Reviews

1. I talked with Doug Fabrizio, host of Radio West on KUER in Salt Lake City, about She Has Her Mother's Laugh. You can listen to our hourlong conversation here.

2. Sometimes there's just no substitute for the print version of a review. Here's a piece in the London Evening Standard by behavioral geneticist Robert Plomin. Thanks to Camilla Elworthy for posting this photo of the full-page treatment!

Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 23, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (PLEASE NOTE CHANGED DATE)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 13, 2018 House of Speakeasy, New York

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#105

August 2, 2018

Friday's Elk, July 29, 2018

The Past and Future of Genetic Modification
A number of scientists hope that GM foods can be part of the solution to feeding the world, as the population grows and climate change puts crops under stress. But GM crops also inspire fierce opposition, because many people worry that they may be harmful to the environment or human health.

In the past few years, scientists have begun using CRISPR and other gene-editing technologies to alter the DNA of crops. This week, the top court in the European Union ruled that these crops should be considered GMOs, and thus be subject to the same tight regulations that cover crops produced by older methods. Except for methods that are really old...

Confused? Well, I did my best to make sense of the situation in an article for the New York Times. You can read it here.
Heredity and School
I tackled another controversial topic this week: the influence of genes on behavior. Genes have an influence on just about every kind of behavior that researchers have studied, although it's often weak and indirect. The biggest study of human behavior so far came out this week--a survey of the DNA of 1.1 million people, revealing over 1200 genes linked to how long people stay in school. Here's my story.
She Has Her Mother's Laugh: Radio, TV, and Reviews
1. Over the weekend BookTV aired a conversation I had with the anthropologist Chip Colwell before a live audience and the Denver Museum of Nature and Science about She Has Her Mother's Laugh. You can watch it here.

2. The UK edition is coming out next week, and some reviews are coming out there. New Scientist says the book "balances eloquent story-telling with well-researched science...Anyone interested in their path through history, and what they may hand on, will find much to excite them.” The book also got the reviewer for Current Biology regaling his dinner party guests with all sorts of strange tales of heredity.

3. On the audio front--you can listen to my Science Friday interview here. I also talked with the Big Picture Science about how heredity can run backwards or sideways, turning people into chimeras.
Science, Science Fiction, and Other Parts of A Healthy Book Diet
The Boston Globe runs a column called Bibliophile, where they interview writers about what they read. I went through a bunch of books to write my own. And now I'm diving into other books to recuperate and think about what I might want to write next. You can read my interview with them here.
Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 13, 2018 House of Speakeasy, New York

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#104

July 28, 2018

Friday's Elk, July 20, 2018

Tune In!
1. This afternoon, I'll be on Science Friday starting about 3 pm ET. Ira Flatow and I will talk about She Has Her Mother's Laugh. Catch us on the radio, or listen live online.

2. If you want to catch me in pixel form, I'll be on BookTV on C-SPAN on Sunday at 5 pm ET. They'll be broadcasting a recent conversation I had at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science with anthropologist Chip Colwell in front of a live audience.

3. The Aspen Ideas Festival posted the audio of the book talk I gave for them last month. Listen here.
The Illusions of Genealogy
The Globe and Mail, one of Canada's leading newspaper, has published an adaptation of part of my book about genealogy. I consider why we are so drawn to our family trees, and how we see more in them than actually exists. Check it out.

Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 13, 2018 House of Speakeasy, New York (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#103

July 19, 2018

Friday's Elk, July 13, 2018

(Image: Zhaoyu Zhu)
When Did People Leave Africa?
We know that our ancestors diverged from other apes in Africa. And for millions of years that's where they remained. But at some point hominins expanded to other continents, in a series of waves that included our own species roughly 70,000 years ago.

When was the first trip out? The clearest answer to that question would come from skeletons. The oldest skeletons of hominins yet found outside of Africa are about 1.7 million years old, found in the republic of Georgia. But this week, a team of researchers who have worked for years digging into a giant gulley in China, say they have found tools as old as 2.1 million years.

This is much more than just a matter of re-pinning an event to a new page of the calendar. The age of these tools--if they are tools--says a lot about what sort of folks walked out of Africa. Were they tall, big-brained people like us, or were they basically upright apes?

I dig into this fascinating study this week in the New York Times.

She Has Her Mother's Laugh: Conversations in Print and in Person
1. National Geographic's Simon Worrall interviewed me about my new book.

When I told my wife the title of your book, and that it was about heredity, she said: “I got my mother’s laugh and voice from being around her.” So, Carl, is it genes or the environment—nature or nurture—that make us who we are?

No one has done a rigorous genetic study of the genetic inheritance of laughter. [laughs] But researchers have studied behavior in general, and genetics, which show that there are different kinds of behavior and aspects of people’s personalities that are “heritable.” This means that if you look at the variation in a trait in a big group of people, some of that variation is due to the genes that they inherit. Identical twins, for instance, will tend to be more similar to each other in that trait than their siblings.

But I would be surprised if laughter had even 10 percent heritability. Genes you inherit may play a role in your laugh being somewhat similar to your parents’, but you’re also growing up with them and listening to them laughing, and we’re a very imitative species. There’s no way you could drill down and say we have identified that 10 percent of your laugh came from your DNA. We’d like it to happen. That’s why consumer genetic tests are incredibly popular. Somehow we want to look inside our DNA and get a precise measurement of why we are the way we are.

Certainly our genes are enormously important, but they’re not the only things that are passed down from our parents. I would argue that you should think beyond genes when trying to understand the full scope of heredity. For example, we humans are cultural animals and culture works like its own form of heredity. You’re probably already discovering, for example, that your children or grandchildren are a lot better than you are at using a smart phone. They may go on to think about a new way of designing phones, which will then get passed down to future generations.

You can read the rest here.

2. Thanks to Thrillist for naming She Has Her Mother's Laugh one of the best books of 2018 so far!

3. The new issue of O Magazine is out, calling the book "a story filled with palace intrigue and breathtaking innovation.”

4. Here's a podcast recording of my conversation at the Silicon Valley Commonwealth Club from last month.

Upcoming Talks

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York: "What Makes Us Human? Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung.

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 13, 2018 House of Speakeasy, New York (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#102

July 12, 2018

Friday's Elk, June 29, 2019

Wall Street Journal review and more
I'm back from the long journey west. Since I last wrote, there's been more news about She Has Her Mother's Laugh.

1. In the Wall Street Journal, William Saletan gets it--

"Nature’s laws are violated all the time, and the cardinal violator is nature itself. This is the paradox that Carl Zimmer explores in She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Powers, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity. Mr. Zimmer, a New York Times science columnist and author, is careful and well-informed. So when he says that research is overturning things you were taught in biology classes, he’s worth heeding. Acquired traits can be inherited. Biological time can turn backward. And monsters are real."

2. Nature Genetics, the top genetics journal in the world, gives a shout-out to the book in the current issue's editorial, urging care in drawing conclusions from new studies on the link between genes and intelligence and personality--

"In his superb book on heredity, She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Carl Zimmer discusses how the proper understanding of heritable influences on intelligence and the related trait of educational attainment could be used to guide the design and evaluation of improved educational strategies. Intelligence, like height, is highly heritable, polygenically inherited and depends environmentally upon nutrition and opportunity. For this new knowledge to be used effectively, he argues, the very real genetic influences should be considered constitutional potential, rather than the more frequently grasped concept of genetic essence."

3. The Times of Israel interviewed me about the book.

4.Here's an episode of the Good Life Podcast in which I have a lively conversation with host Jonathan Field.

5. The New York Times Book Review included the book in its list of recommendations this week.
How old can we get?
Two years ago I wrote about a provocative study in which scientists claimed we have a fixed maximum lifespan of 115 years or so. Now comes a new study of 105+year-old Italians that suggests that if there is a limit, we're nowhere close to it. And maybe some interesting biology happens inside of people after they cross the century mark. Here's my column on the ongoing debate in the New York Times

More talks
I've added some new talks to my list below. More to come!

NEW July 9, 2018 Breakwater Books, Guilford CT

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

NEW October 4, 2018 92nd Street Y, New York (Panel with Maria Konnikova, Nathan Lents, and Sebastian Seung. More details to come)

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

NEW November 13, 2018 House of Speakeasy, New York (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

If you've enjoyed reading She Has Her Mother's Laugh, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. Thanks!

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#101

June 28, 2018

Friday's Elk, June 19, 2018

News from the Road
Greetings from the road--or, to be more precise, Palo Alto, where I'm talking tonight at the Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley. Tomorrow I'm zipping over to Denver, to talk with anthropologist Chip Colwell at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science. It looks like we'll be filmed by the good people at Book TV. When and if CSPAN decides to air our talk, I'll share the information.
Word of Mouth--and of Keyboards
I have a favor to ask. I am doing my best to let people know about She Has Her Mother's Laugh, but I'm only one person. If you've already read my book and would like to help spread the word, please rate/review it on your favorite book site, such as Goodreads or Amazon. There's strength in numbers. Thanks!
Two Podcasts and a Video
This Sunday, Jennifer Raff's wonderful review of She Has Her Mother's Laugh appeared in the print edition of The New York Times Book Review. The editor of the review, Pamela Paul, invited me on her podcast to talk about heredity. You can listen here.

I also talked with the good folks at the "Stuff to Blow Your Mind" podcast. And, if you'd rather watch a video, here's a conversation I had with microbiologist Ben Libberton for Nature Research Microbiology.
Want a Bookplate?
I am happy to sign books at public events until they drag me from the venue. But if your path and mine don't intersect, I'd be just as happy to send you an autographed bookplate. I simply need to see that you've bought the book and get your address. You can email me a receipt or a picture of yourself holding the book at carl@carlzimmer.com. Or, if you'd like to help spread the word on social media, you can post a photo of you and the book on Twitter, tagging @carlzimmer and @duttonbooks so that we see you and can get in touch. Or you can put it in a comment on this post on my Facebook page. Upcoming Talks

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (to be recorded for Book TV).

June 24, 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival SOLD OUT!

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#100

June 18, 2018

Friday's Elk, June 12, 2018

What Seals Can Tell Us About Our Dreams
Sleep is one of my enduring fascinations. I've revisited the research on sleep from time to time in my work at the New York Times. In my first piece, back in 2005, I looked at research on how different animals sleep, and how it can help shed light on the mystery of why we need to sleep at all. Two years later, I looked more closely at the strange sleeping habits of birds--especially ones that can fly for thousands of miles.

When did sleep evolve? Well, the chemistry that makes it possible may have started hundreds of millions of years ago, as our single-celled ancestors rose and fell through the ocean over the course of each day. More recently, we humans may have evolved better sleep when we came down from the trees and began sleeping on the ground. The molecular study of sleep has revealed important clues too; here's a piece I wrote about research that suggests we sleep in order to clear out the brain's metabolic garbage that piles up each day.

For last week's column, I came back to the question of sleep once more. In particular, the strange bouts of activity known as REM sleep. A new study on seals reveals that they experience REM sleep like no other animal ever studied before. And those patterns point to an intriguing function that REM sleep may carry out: brain shivers.

CRISPR, Cancer, and the Stock Market
In She Has Her Mother's Laugh, I explore the discovery of the gene-editing technology CRISPR and consider its possible use to fix hereditary diseases. Yesterday, several companies seeking to make medicine out of CRISPR. They all fell at 11 am. The reason? Two studies were published in Nature Medicine pointing to how cells respond to having their DNA altered. Basically, they don't like it. Does that mean CRISPR raises the risk of cancer? Or does it mean that Wall Street has a hard time waiting for science to do its thing? I take a look at the situation for my column today in the New York Times.

More Book News
1. Ed Yong and I had a great time at a packed house at Kramerbooks in Washington DC on Wednesday, talking about She Has Her Mother's Laugh. Thanks to @MezidaSaeed for the photographic evidence!

2. I talked to Terry Gross on Fresh Air

3. Historian Nathaniel Comfort reviewed She Has Her Mother's Laugh in the new issue of the Atlantic: "Magisterial...In Zimmer’s pages, we discover a world minutely threaded with myriad streams of heredity flowing in all directions, in variegated patterns and different registers.”

4. Writer Hamilton Cain reviews the book for the Minneapolis Star Tribune: "A leading contender as the most outstanding nonfiction work of the year"

5. Jerry Coyne reviewed my book for the Washington Post, praising "its combination of accuracy, journalistic clarity and scientific authority....If the science doesn’t matter to you now, it will soon." Coyne also recommended the book for summer reading on his blog, Why Evolution Is True.

6. I stopped by WNPR's new studio in New Haven to talk for an hour about heredity.

7. Next week I'm heading off for the western leg of my book tour. First stop, Palo Alto. Hope to see you there! (Details below.)
Upcoming Talks

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science

June 21-24, 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#99

June 11, 2018

Friday's Elk, June 3, 2018

Thirteen Things
Whew. The first week since the publication of She Has Her Mother's Laugh publication day has been busy. Here's a linky list of thirteen things that happened:

1. An incredibly gratifying review ran in the Sunday Times Book Review, calling She Has Her Mother's Laugh "extraordinary."

2. I talked about the possible science-fiction futures of heredity on WBUR's Radio Boston.

3. Amazon put She Has Her Mother's Laugh on its "Best of the Month" list.

4. The Daily Beast published the prologue of She Has Her Mother's Laugh

5. I talked to Jonathan Capehart about heredity on WNYC New York's Midday .

6. My publisher, Dutton, put a few minutes of the audiobook version on Soundcloud. Take a listen.

7. I answered some questions on Reddit.

8. Stat published another excerpt from the book, in which I write about how microbes can be inherited much like genes, and how our life depends on this microbial inheritance.

9. My mom, local historian extraordinaire, took a closer look at my chapter on eugenics, which is set not far from where I grew up in New Jersey.

10. The New York Post ran a quick piece on the book's exploration of chimeras.

11. Here's an episode of the podcast "Talk Nerdy To Me" hosted by Cara Santa Maria all about She Has Her Mother's Laugh.

12. I talked to Joanne Manaster and Jeff Shaumeyer about heredity for their YouTube show, Read Science!

13. I squeezed in a new column on a particularly cool study of heredity. It's about the peopling of the Americas. Ancient DNA suggests that humans came into North America from Asia, split about 13,000 years ago, stayed genetically separate for thousands of years, and then merged back together some time before 5,000 years ago.

There's more to come, which I'll be able to share next week. And to all you folks around DC: please join me and Ed Yong at Kramerbooks on Wednesday. See below!

Upcoming Talks

THIS WEDNESDAY! June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC, with Ed Yong

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science

June 21-24, 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#98

June 3, 2018

Friday's Elk, PUBLICATION DAY EDITION [INSERT FIREWORKS HERE!] May 29, 2018

Tweet by Kelly Ann Taylor Today, She Has Her Mother's Laugh officially goes on sale. If you pre-ordered it (thanks!) it should be thumping on your welcome mat very soon. If you like it, please consider reviewing and rating it on Amazon, Goodreads, or your favorite book site.

I've been very busy the past few days spreading the word about the book. Here's a quick run-down of things that may be of interest to you. (Forgive the abundance of exclamation marks. It's an exciting day!)

1. Reviews!

Nature calls the book "a beguiling narrative...In She Has Her Mother’s Laugh, Zimmer has built a subtle, multifaceted and deep understanding of heredity, grounded in revelatory insights from genome sequencing. And he shows that we will need it to face our uncertain future.”

2. Wired Q/A!

I talked with Megan Molteni about why heredity ≠ genetics.

3. Podcast!

Wendy Zukerman of the wonderful "Science Vs" podcast interviewed me about one chapter of the book, about how the science of heredity went off the rails in the early 1900s, becoming a justification for institutionalization, sterilization, and much, much worse. I tell the story through the life of one long-forgotten New Jersey woman, Emma Wolverton, who became the face of eugenics. You can listen to their podcast here. I'll be doing more podcasts and radio shows in the next few weeks and will post links in future issues of Friday's Elk.

4. Ask Me Anything, Reddit!

I'll be coming back to Reddit for another AMA (ask me anything) on Thursday, May 31, at 4 pm. Join me then. Proof.

5. A new excerpt!

Dutton, my publisher, has posted the prologue of She Has Her Mother's Laugh on the book's web page.

6. Hitting the road!

This week I'm giving three talks in three days. If you're in Boston, Connecticut, or New York, please join me.

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 1, 2018 World Science Festival, New York (In conversation with Maria Konnikova)

7. My Mother Is Outraged!

Not about the book, but about the results I got when I looked at my own genes linked to intelligence. Over at the Atlantic, I write about how we shouldn't take these tests personally, because they're based on populations, not persons.

Future Talks

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

June 21-24, 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#97

May 28, 2018

Friday's Elk, May 22, 2018

First Excerpt from "She Has Her Mother's Laugh"
At long last, I can start sharing some of the stuff in my new book, which arrives in book stores one week from today. (You can pre-order it now.)

She Has Her Mother's Laugh is all about heredity, including forms of heredity that don't get as much attention as they deserve. This morning's New York Times has an excerpt about one of those unexpected forms: our inner heredity. Our development into human beings begins with one fertilized egg dividing in two--into a pair of "daughter cells," as scientists call them--which divide in turn. You can draw our entire body as a genealogy of mother and daughter cells. And in some of the body's lineages, genes mutate, turning us into mosaics. We're only starting to grapple with what this genetic diversity in our bodies means for our lives.

The artwork for this excerpt is both lovely and spot-on, giving nods to DNA, family trees, and real trees (which are exceptionally mosaic, giving rise to the notion that witches ride on brooms--I explain how in the excerpt and book). Thanks to Jason Holley for the image.
Joining Forces in DC with Ed Yong
I'll be in Washington on June 6 to talk about She Has Her Mother's Laugh at Kramerbooks. I'm delighted to announce that the intrepid writer Ed Yong (author of I Contain Multitudes) will join me there for a conversation about heredity. As long as he doesn't get us onto the topic of hippo feces (which, yes, are very, very important), it will be an excellent evening.

I'm continuing to add new book-related events to my talks page and the list of talks at the end of the newsletter.
Science Magazine Is Entertained
Yesterday, Science reviewed She Has Her Mother's Laugh: "Zimmer is one of the best science journalists of our times, with a long history of setting the bar for beautiful, clear, and scholarly writing. He is true to form in this book…She Has Her Mother’s Laugh is more than a historical account of the field of genetics. It’s a treasure trove of curious facts, contextual tidbits, and up-to-date reports on the trials and tribulations of heredity told in a most entertaining way.”
Talks

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 1, 2018 World Science Festival, New York (In conversation with Maria Konnikova)

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC (In conversation with Ed Yong)

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science

New->June 21-24, 2018 Aspen Ideas Festival (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

New->November 7, 2018 University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia (details to come)

November 14, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#96

May 21, 2018

Friday's Elk, May 12, 2018

Coming to a City Near (Some of) You!
I'm excited that at long last I get to hit the road to talk about my new book, She Has Her Mother's Laugh. The book will officially be published on May 29, and my first batch of talks has offically taken shape. While I always post a running list of talks at the end of my newsletters and on my web site, I just want to bring these book-launch events to your attention, in case you live in the area(s):

If you're in Boston, you can catch me at the Harvard Book Store on May 30.

If you're in Connecticut, I hope you can join me at the wonderful RJ Julia Bookstore in Madison CT on May 31 (pictured above).

On Friday, June 1, I'll be in New York to talk about my book at the World Science Festival

A few days later, I'll head down to Washington DC to talk at Kramerbooks on June 6.

On June 19, I'll be on the other side of the country, in Palo Alto, CA to talk at the Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley

The next day, June 20, I'll be in Colorado to speak at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science.

Five Years of Matter
Five years ago, my editors at the New York Times suggested I write a weekly column about science. In May 2013, cicadas were emerging out of the ground in my town, so I suggested reporting on why these strange insects spend years hiding in the Earth before emerging in vast swarms.

Just about every week since, I've had the good fortune to write about other remarkable corners of science. For my fifth-anniversary column this week, I chose a topic that brings together two of my long-running obesssions: ancient DNA and viruses. Researchers have discovered the DNA of the hepatitis B virus lurking in the teeth of skeletons dating back as far as 7000 years. Before now, the oldest DNA of any human infectious virus every found was just 450 years old. This new work opens up an entirely new frontier in the study of the evolution of diseases--a topic I hope to report on in my column in years to come. Check it out.
Talks

May 17, 2018 "Exploring the Complexity and Controversy of Heredity" Keynote Lecture, Bio-IT World, Boston

May 21, 2018 "Biotechnology and Its Future Impact on Greater Boston" (panel discussion) Boston Athenaeum (sold out)

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 1, 2018 World Science Festival, New York

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

Changed date-> October 17, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

New->November 14 25, 2018 Stevens Institute of Technology, Hoboken, NJ (details to come)

You can learn more about my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#95

May 11, 2018

Friday's Elk, May 4, 2018

Book Giveaway: Two Is Better Than One!
Earlier this week, I walked into the office of my editor, Stephen Morrow, to discover a stack of books. Real books--not pdf files, not galleys, but hardback copies of She Has Her Mother's Laugh suitable for curling up in bed with or propping open your front door or cracking open walnuts (warning: past performance is no guarantee of future results).

In celebration of this glorious event, my publisher is going to pick ten Friday's Elk readers to win a two-book pack: a finished copy of She Has Her Mother's Laugh, plus The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition.

The Descent of Man is one of Darwin's underappreciated classics--partly because it's a massive, catalog-like tome. For my concise edition, I selected some of the key passages that have framed our thinking about human evolution ever since, and wrote a set of essays to accompany them. You can get more information about The Descent of Man: The Concise Edition on my web site.

All current readers of Friday's Elk--plus anyone who signs up by May 14--will be eligible. If you know of anyone who'd like to receive these books, forward them this email and let them know they can subscribe to it here.

And to new subscribers who learned about this book giveaway on social media (Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, Linkedin) welcome! I try to get this newsletter out each week, letting readers know about stuff I've been up to--stories, books, podcasts, talks, etc.--and sometimes share stuff from other people that's been intriguing me. You can read past issues of Friday's Elk here.

In Search of the First Animal
For my column this week in the New York Times, I take a look at the dawn of the animal kingdom. Over 650 million years ago, our single-celled ancestors evolved bodies, and the world was never the same. We don't know exactly what that ur-animal looked like, but now a pair of scientists have taken a different look at it: they've reconstructed some of its genome.
Talks

May 17, 2018 "Exploring the Complexity and Controversy of Heredity" Keynote Lecture, Bio-IT World, Boston

May 21, 2018 "Biotechnology and Its Future Impact on Greater Boston" (panel discussion) Boston Athenaeum

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

NEW-->November 7, 2018 Colorado State University: Murray Honors Visiting Scholar Lecture (details to come)

You can find out about my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads, and LinkedIn. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#94

May 3, 2018

Friday's Elk, April 28, 2018

One Month To Go!
The official publication date for She Has Her Mother's Laugh is May 29. My fingernails are already nubs. As any author will tell you, these days pre-orders make a huge difference to the launch of a book. I'm deeply proud of this book and hope you'll find the subject as fascinating as I did writing about it. Please consider pre-ordering a copy. And tell all your friends who have ever wondered about heredity to consider doing so, too. Ordering early will help me bring the book to the attention of even more potential readers. Many thanks!

Big Stories in Little Things
I've written another Facebook post about science books. Today, it's Jonathan Weiner's The Beak of the Finch, one of the books that showed me as a young science writer how it's done. Nearly a quarter of a century later, the science has moved on, but the book remains a classic.

Photo: Melissa Ilardo The Evolution of Human Divers?
In southeast Asia, a group of extraordinary divers have plunged deep underwater to fish for centuries. A new study suggests they've adapted to their way of life, evolving larger spleens to deliver more oxygen. I wrote about the research last week for my column in the New York Times. (While the researchers I contacted for the story were impressed with the research, some scientists took to Twitter for a little critical post-publication peer review--see population geneticist Matthew Hahn and physiologist Michael Joyner.)
Photo: Frans Lanting
Hot Chimps
Oe a trip to Africa in 1995, I spent a few days in a cloud forest in Rwanda. There were chimpanzees around me, but I never got to see them. Only the seasoned experts at the field station could navigate the dense vegetation and catch glimpses of the apes. They became my personal icons of chimpanzees--creatures of the cool, wet canopy. But chimpanzees are more flexible than that. Some in Senegal live on a savanna that can hit 110 degrees. For my column this week, I wrote about a long-term study of these very different chimpanzees--and the hints they offer us about how our own ancestors abandoned forests for the open plains.

"The Code"--all of it All three episodes of Retro Report's series on the past and future of genetics are now online. You can watch them here.
Talks

May 2, 2018 "From Ebola to Dinosaurs to 23andMe: Writing about the Science of Life" Columbia School of Journalism

May 3, 2018 MIT, Knight Science Journalism seminar

May 17, 2018 "Exploring the Complexity and Controversy of Heredity" Keynote Lecture, Bio-IT World, Boston

May 21, 2018 "Biotechnology and Its Future Impact on Greater Boston" (panel discussion) Boston Athenaeum

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

You can find information about my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#93

April 27, 2018

Friday's Elk April 20, 2018

Wikipedia The Voyage of the Sweet Potato
I had no idea that the origins of sweet potatoes were so mysterioius until I dug into a new study on their DNA. Turns out, it helped inspire Thor Heyerdahl's famous voyage on the Kon-Tiki. He wanted to test the idea that sweet potatoes got from the Americas to remote Polynesian islands through pre-Columbia contact. The new study claims instead that the sweet potatoes spread across thousands of miles of ocean on their own. Here's my New York Times story on the ongoing debate.
National Library of Medicine Resurrection by Biography
I've written a third post about books on my Facebook author page. This time I take a look at a fine biography of Rosalind Franklin, who did pioneering work on DNA only to sink into obscurity. (Here's a previous post on Stalin and the Scientists, and here's one on Being Mortal.)

"A wide-ranging and eye-opening inquiry into the way heredity shapes our species."
Booklist gives a starred review to She Has Her Mother's Laugh. It's the third star for the book, coming after one from Publisher's Weekly and one from Kirkus Reviews.

Episode Two of "The Code"--Can We Cure Diseases By Altering Our DNA? Watch it here!
Talks

April 27, 2018 "The Library of Babel: On Trying to Read My Genome" Yale University, Applied Data Seminar

May 2, 2018 "From Ebola to Dinosaurs to 23andMe: Writing about the Science of Life" Columbia School of Journalism

May 3, 2018 MIT, Knight Science Journalism seminar

May 17, 2018 "Exploring the Complexity and Controversy of Heredity" Keynote Lecture, Bio-IT World, Boston

May 21, 2018 "Biotechnology and Its Future Impact on Greater Boston" (panel discussion) Boston Athenaeum

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

NEW--> June 19, 2018 Commonwealth Club Silicon Valley, Palo Alto CA

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas (details to come)

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

She Has Her Mother's Laugh will be published on May 29, but you can pre-order it now. You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#92

April 12, 2018

Friday's Elk, April 7, 2018

Books to Consider
A few months ago, I participated in Facebook's #Readtolead Program, sharing some of my favorite books of 2017. The response was so enthusiastic, I decided to write some new posts about books I've been reading. For the foreseeable future, I'll be posting them each Friday.

So far, I've written two. The first is about Stalin and the Scientists by Simong Ings. I had grown interested in Soviet science as a result of the research I did on the Stalnist biologist Trofim Lysenko and his crackpot notions about heredity for She Has Her Mother's Laugh. I read more about Lysenko for a lecture I gave in September on journalism, science, and democracy. Only last month did I come across Ing's 2016 book. Primed as I was, I blasted through it.

Yesterday I posted my second piece, on Being Mortal, by Atul Gawande. I reverse engineer the book to see why it succeeds. I also explain why a cat is a useful reading companion for the book.

Storify Is Dead. Long Live Storify
Sometimes the ongoing conversation on Twitter produces an exchange I'd like to save. I used to use a site called Storify to preserve them, but Storify is now shutting down. I'm trying out a new service called Wakelet, which seems to work pretty well. Earlier this week, I asked Twitter whether math is discovered or invented. Mathematicians, scientists, and philosophers shared some interesting tweet-length thoughts, which I've preserved here.
More Ata Updates
It's been a couple weeks now since scientists published a study on a mysterious, tiny mummy from Chile, debunking suggestions that "Ata" (a k a "the girl from La Noria") was a humanoid belonging to another species. It kicked up quite a controversy, and things have not settled down yet.

--In response to the uproar from the Chilean scientific community about the ethics of the study, the scientists published a statement. So did the journal Genome Research, where the study appeared.

--Those statements did not quell critics. Three Chilean anthropologists published an essay this week on the right and wrong ways to study human remains. They are not impressed by the justification from the Genome Research scientists about their work: they didn't know at first whether the remains were human or not. As the anthropologists note, a Chilean newspaper has confirmed that the owner of Ata's remains asked a forensic scientist to look at them five years before the DNA study began. The forensic scientist concluded the remains were of a human fetus. (The story, in Spanish, is online here.)

--Meanwhile, I'm getting emails and tweets from UFO fans telling me my reporting is a giant fraud and part of a massive coverup. If you are both curious and masochistic, you can watch this 112-minute interview with the producer of a documentary about UFOs, who supplied the scientists with a sample of Ata's bone marrow to study. I'm left wondering why my huge check from the CIA has not yet arrived.
Introducing A New Series on The Future (and Past) of Genetics
I've long been a fan of Retro Report, which produces fascinating videos that set today's news in the long arc of history. I was delighted to team up with them to create a three-part series on genetics called "The Code." We take a look at today's headlines about precision medicine, genetic tests, and genetic editing, and discover how, in some ways, we've been here before. You can watch the first episode now over at Stat.
Talks!
After a lull, I'm putting together a bunch of events over the next few months, mostly to talk about She Has Her Mother's Laugh. Here's the list so far--updates to come.

April 27, 2018 "The Library of Babel: On Trying to Read My Genome" Yale University, Applied Data Seminar

May 2, 2018 "From Ebola to Dinosaurs to 23andMe: Writing about the Science of Life" Columbia School of Journalism

May 3, 2018 MIT, Knight Science Journalism seminar

May 17, 2018 "Exploring the Complexity and Controversy of Heredity" Keynote Lecture, Bio-IT World, Boston

May 21, 2018 "Biotechnology and Its Future Impact on Greater Boston" (panel discussion) Boston Athenaeum

May 30, 2018 Harvard Book Store

May 31, 2018 RJ Julia Bookstore, Madison CT

June 6, 2018 Kramerbooks, Washington DC

June 20, 2018 Denver Museum of Nature and Science (details to come)

September 20, 2018 University of Bath (UK), Evolution in the 21st Century (details to come)

October 19, 2018 CSICon, Las Vegas (details to come)

October 25, 2018 Mount Holyoke College (details to come)

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#91

April 6, 2018

Friday's Elk, March 29, 2018

Chilean Scientists Protest the "Ata" Study
Last week, I reported on a study by American scientists on a mysterious, tiny mummy from Chile that some claimed was an alien. The study demonstrated it belonged to a stillborn Chilean girl. In response, the Chilean scientific community has spoken out against the research, contending that the mummy was illegally removed from its grave and then exported illegally out of the country. Some of them are even calling for the study to be retracted. And the Chilean government is stepping in to investigate.

Here's my update, which appeared in Thursday's New York Times. I also highly recommend a commentary published on Sunday by Chilean biologist Cristina Doridor, which provides important historical context about where the mummy was found. (The photo above, of the ghost town where the mummy was found, comes from that piece.)

This blowback reminds me of other incidents, some of which I've reported on. Geneticists these days are eager to use their newly developed tools to sequence as much DNA as they can, in order to better understand human history. But their work comes at the end of a long--and often ugly--history of troublesome relationships between Western scientists and communities of minorities and indigenous people. Here's a piece I wrote about the controversy that arose when scientists sequenced Henrietta Lacks's genome without even contacting her family first. And here's a story about the long-running conflict over "Kennewick Man," an 8500-year-old fossil found in Washington State.

The Frogs Are Vanishing (But A Few Are Coming Back)
For some two decades, a deadly fungus has been spreading around the world and wiping out frogs. Many species may already be extinct, with more that may be doomed. But scientists have also found that in recent years a few species seem to be coming back. Here's my column on recent research on the mystery of their rebound.

Viruses Infect TV Tonight
I got interviewed for a three-part series about viruses, "Invisible Killers." It's premiering tonight on the Discovery Channel and the Science Channel. Here's a preview where I talk about the kinky sex life of influenza (and why their viral orgy kills so many of us).

Two Months Till Publication! (And a Goodreads Giveaway)
Two months left before She Has Her Mother's Laugh comes out! (The photo is from a party I had to spread the word recently.) As part of the run-up, Goodreads is giving away 20 copies. If you get the book and like it, please tell your friends. Tell strangers! And if you don't get it, pre-order it. You'll be doing me a big favor, because pre-orders play an important part in bringing attention to a book when it finally comes out.

If you'd like to hear me talk about the book, you can check out my talks page. I'm only starting to add events there, and more will be falling into place in the weeks to come. I'll post an updated schedule in a future email newsletter.

You can find information and ordering links for my other books here. You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. If someone forwarded this email to you, you can subscribe to it here.

Best wishes, Carl

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#90

March 28, 2018