Greetings from Durham!
Durham isn't quite the brutal oven that Austin was, but it's pretty sultry. I'm here for the annual International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health meeting. I gave a plenary talk about reporting on evolutionary medicine. Some stories virtually write themselves, while others, on tricky concepts like imprinting, require a lot of wrestling. With my talk over, I get to enjoy a couple days of presentations about research about everything from sex chromosomes to mountain sickness.
Sometimes I like to write about rare, weird corners of biology. One of my long-time favorites corners is contagious cancer: cases in which a cancer cell breaks free of its host and invades other bodies, evolving into an immortal parasite. Until last year, scientists only had good evidence for contagious in Tasmanian devils and dogs. Here are a few pieces I've written over the years in the Times and the Loom...
Scientists Discover Origin of a Cancer in Tasmanian Devils
Raising Devils in Seclusion
How A Dog Has Lived For Eleven Thousand Years–In Other Dogs
Now it turns out that contagious cancer may not be rare at all. For the full (and freaky) story, see my column this week in the New York Times.
I wrote a feature for Stat about a long-running debate about how memory works. It'a also a story about how scientific findings can get shot down, and what it takes for scientists to try to bring them back into favor.
June 29: Boston: Festival of Genomics, Plenary Lecture, "Tales from the genome beat: how journalists explore (& sometimes get lost in) our DNA." Details here.
July 31: Plenary lecture at the annual meeting of the Botanical Society of America in Savannah. The talk is entitled, "Plants Are Weird: Epigenetics, Journalism, and the Alien Beauty of Botany"
September 8: University of Nebraska. Lecture: A Journey to the Center of the Brain. Details to come
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
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