Friday's Elk, December 23, 2016

It's hard to believe this will be the last Friday's Elk of 2016. I just wanted to thank everyone for being curious enough about my work to clutter your inboxes with emails from me.

One of the advantages of sending out a semi-regular newsletter is that it's easy to scan back over them and consider which experiences of this past year stood out.

This fall marked my one-year anniversary as a contributing national correspondent for Stat. Among the most satisfying features I wrote for them were a story about the struggle to find the molecular basis of memory, a piece about an experimental procedure to save a man's life with viruses, and a three-part series about getting my genome sequenced.

At the New York Times, I continued in 2016 to focus on our species and what scientists are learning about its history, including the identity of the first farmers and how our species started in Africa and then spread around the world. I also wrote a profile of one of the leading explorers of ancient human DNA. A piece on our extensive interbreeding with Neanderthals and Denisovans even inspired a love song from comedian Harry Shearer. In addition, I looked further back into our deep history, considering how our fins became hands and where we fit on the tree of life.

On the book front, A Planet of Viruses got translated into French, and Parasite Rex got translated into Spanish. And, of course, I worked like mad on my next book, on heredity. It's such a rich subject that I will probably be spending the next few months deciding what to leave out. Killing my darlings, in other words. I'll keep you updated in the coming year about its progress.

I spent a fair amount of the year on the road and the phone, talking about science. Among my favorites is a conversation I had in the spring with the historian Daniel Kevles about the prospect of reengineering humanity. Inquiring Minds had me on their show to talk about viruses. In Texas, I gave the Stephen Jay Gould Prize Lecture about human evolution. On Innovation Hub, I talked about what our genomes can and can't tell us. And at the end of the year, I talked about writing about science with the good people at Longform.

Finally, here's my latest Matter column, just out on Wednesday in the Times. I consider the question of maturity--when we are old enough to vote, to drive, to be tried as an adult. Judges would like some easy answers from neuroscience, but the picture that the researchers are uncovering is not simple. But it is fascinating in its complexity.

Best wishes for 2017. We will be living through some interesting times, to put it mildly. I'll be doing my part to chronicle them.
  The Talks
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival. I will be speaking about the year in viruses, both on Saturday at 3:40 pm and on Sunday at 12:40 pm. Full schedule here.

March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details here.
  The End
  As always, if you have friends who would enjoy getting this newsletter, please let them know they can sign up at http://tinyletter.com/carlzimmer.

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

Best wishes, Carl