Greetings--
Here are a couple items for your long-holiday reading list.
Last month in Stat, I wrote about science fairs and how they've become an exercise in privilege. Yesterday, my attention was drawn back to science fairs with the announcement that the Intel Science Talent Search--the biggest high school science fair in the United States--is now the Regeneron Science Talent Search. Intel was an iconic company in the age of personal computing. Likewise, Regeneron is one of the darlings of the new generation of biotech companies making (expensive) wonder drugs. The announcement inspired me to write a new piece about science fairs as bellwethers of American science over the past 70 years.
History, scientists are increasingly appreciating, is inscribed in our DNA. For my column today in the New York Times, I look at a new study on African Americans, and how their journeys in Southern slavery and then across the rest of the country has influenced their genetic variation throughout the United States.
June 17: Austin, Texas. Public Lecture for the Stephen Jay Gould Award. The title of the talk will be "The Surviving Branch: How Genomes Are Revealing The Twisted Course of Human Evolution." Details here
June 23-25: Durham North Carolina: International Society for Evolution, Medicine, and Public Health, Plenary Lecture. Here's the meeting site.
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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