Friday's Elk, December 4, 2015 (The better late than ever edition)

Greetings--

Sorry to be sending out this week's issue of Friday's Elk on a Saturday. I blame writing. I'm starting on the first draft of my next book, and I was having so much fun spending a day of uninterrupted writing that I forgot about everything else.

Better late than never, here are a couple new items for you to read.

Lamarck or Not?

--Can the experiences of parents alter the course of heredity? This week in the New York Times, I look at some recent studies suggesting that they can. They raise the possibility that obesity can alter the function of genes in a father's sperm, leading in turn to changes in his children's metabolism. While this work is provocative and potentially very important, the case is far from closed.

The Power of Simplicity

I've written a new feature for STAT (my third so far). I profile Slava Epstein, a scientist who fled Russia and discovered a marvelously simple way to discover new antibiotics: make bacteria happy. (Photo of Epstein by Josh Reynolds for STAT)

The Talks

January 28, 2016: the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark, NJ: Details to come.

June 23-25 International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Durham North Carolina. Here's the meeting site.

July 31. I'll be giving the keynote lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah

The End

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Best wishes, Carl