I'm writing to you from the lovely town of La Jolla, California, where I'm participating in Future of Genomic Medicine, a meeting where scientists are talking about how sequencing our DNA is going to affect our lives. I gave a talk yesterday about the experience of getting my genome sequenced. If you're on Twitter, you can read about the presentations under the hashtag #FOGM17.
From here, I'm heading to Palo Alto. If you live anywhere near Stanford University, please consider joining me for a talk at 1 pm on Monday, March 6, in McCaw Hall. I'm giving the keynote address at the annual meeting of the Stanford Center for Computational, Evolutionary and Human Genomics. Details here.
In my column this week for the New York Times, I wrote about what may be the world's oldest known fossils. Or not. They may be 3.77 billion years old. Or 4.2 billion. What's half a billion years between friends? This sort of uncertainty comes with the job when you're a scientist trying to reconstruct the first chapters of Earth's history. These fossils come from what may be the world's oldest known rocks, from a formation in Canada. I wrote about the debate over their age in 2014 in Scientific American.
This week I also spoke to the BBC about de-extinction. I joined a group of scientists and writers on BBC Newshour Extra. You can listen to it here. And here's a feature on de-extinction I wrote for National Geographic.
You can also follow me on Twitter, Facebook , LinkedIn, and Google+. And there's always carlzimmer.com.
Best wishes, Carl
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