At the close of 2017, I just wanted to thank all of you for reading "Friday's Elk" through the year. One of the joys of this job is learning more about the world. Another one is sharing that joy.
To round out the year, here's a feature I published this past week in the New York Times about the mysteries of proteins.
The genesis of the story goes back seven years ago, to a podcast I recorded with a biologist named David Baker. He explained to me just how hard it was for scientists to figure out the rules by which proteins fold into their final shapes. Protein scientists simply call this challenge "the folding problem."
A couple months ago, I had the chance to meet Baker in person and hear him deliver a lecture about what he and his colleagues have been up to in the past few years. To my surprise, they had figured out so much about the folding problem that they were making designer proteins from scratch to do things ranging from fighting the flu to detecting trace amount of illegal drugs. If my story leaves you intrigued, you can join the effort by letting Baker take over your computer or your Android phone.
This year has been full of remarkable science that I've had the privilege to report on--from giant penguins to telescope-like scallop eyes, ancient African genomes, healing seagrass beds, the oldest known fossil of our species, dinosaur-age gliding mammals, deer-killing proteins, embryo-like organisms, risky gene drives, and our endangered primate cousins. And then there were really strange assignments, like writing about rumors of sonic rifles in Cuba. (One highlight of the year for me was a prize for some work I did in 2016: an Online Journalism Award for my Game of Genomes series at Stat.)
The talks I gave in 2017 spanned the range from science to politics (a range that's a lot narrower than some people may have realized till recently). On "The Daily," the excellent news podcast from the New York Times, I talked about advances in gene editing. In March I gave a lecture about what lurks inside our genomes. In June I chatted at the Aspen Ideas Festival with fellow science writer Ed Yong about our shared obsessions about subjects such as Neanderthals and neuroscience. In 2017, I also talked about the state of science in the Trump era. In September, I offered a warning from the past about the threats science can face. And in October I talked about reporting on science in an age of fake news.
As for 2018, I can offer a few promises.
1. For starters, I will be giving more talks that I hope you can come to. I'll add them to this newsletter's running list as they get locked in.
2. In 2017, I ran a series of talks at Caveat in New York about the nature of life. It was a blast to interview a philosopher, a chemist, a synthetic biologist, and others in front of a live audience about the Big Question. If all goes according to plan, the recordings of those talks will get released as a podcast series in early 2018.
3. There will be a book! At the start of 2017, I wasn't 100% sure there would be one--or at the very least I knew I had a scary amount of work left to do on it. But at the end of the year, I have proof that it's a thing. She Has Her Mother's Laugh will be out in the spring, but you can pre-order a copy now.
January 3, 2018 San Francisco: Society for Integrative and Comparative Biology Annual Meeting, Plenary Lecture: "Science and Scandal: Reporting on Biology In An Age of Controversy."
NEW! January 18, 2018 Guilford CT: Can We Edit Life? Should We? Details here.
February 15, 2018, Rochester, NY: Neilly Series Lecture. Details to come.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook, Goodreads. LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
If you'd like to learn more about my books, you can visit my web site
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