Greetings! As you may have observed, there was no newsletter last Friday. I didn't have anything to point you to, and I was also swamped with stuff that wasn't yet ready for prime time.
But now I'm out of that knot. And so, without further ado...
But now I'm out of that knot. And so, without further ado...
I'm really enjoying writing for Stat, in part because they're hungry for different sorts of writing about medicine and the life sciences. Exhibit A: They let me delve into history. My latest piece for them is on antibiotic resistance. It may seem like a new crisis that we're just coming to terms with. In fact, scientists started warning us about the coming failure of these wonder drugs 70 years ago. But nobody did anything about it. Why not? The answer can give us lessons for dealing with the crisis now that it's upon us. (Image from The Antibiotic Era.)
As I mentioned earlier this year, I gave a talk in June when I received the Stephen Jay Gould Prize. I spoke about the latest findings on human evolution, and how they require us to revise our picture of our family tree. The video is now online, and you can watch it here.
Just wanted to draw your attention to two upcoming talks. On Sunday, I head to Brooklyn for the Brooklyn Book Festival, where Sonia Sha, Ed Yong, and I will talk about viruses, microbiomes, and other features of the invisible world on which our fate depends. Here are the details. It also looks like C-SPAN will be broadcasting it here.
And then on Monday, 9/26, I'll be at Massachusetts General Hospital for Boston's HUBWeek. At “The Art of Talking Science,” I'll be giving some opening remarks, after which I'll serve as one of the judges for a kind of scientific "American Idol," in which eight Boston biomedical researchers give presentations about their work. Here are the details.
This week I was on the radio program "Innovation Hub" to talk about what you can and can't learn from your genome. I likened genomics today to eighteenth century astronomy: a growing science, but a blurry one.
Death to the Embargo System!
This item may feel to some of you like inside baseball, but it's important to us science writers. We are hemmed in by a system of embargoes imposed by prominent science journals. Personally, I think they're a bad idea. Now a hack of the dominant embargoed-news web site, has partially paralyzed the system. I think it may be a good exercise for us step out of the cave and blink in the sunlight. Over at Retraction Watch, some of us journalists exchange views on the issue.
September 18: Brooklyn Book Festival. I'll be joining Ed Yong and Sonia Shah. Details here.
September 26: Massachusetts General Hospital. "The Art of Talking Science." Details here.
October 6: University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa. Details to come.
January 28-29, 2017 Rancho Mirage Writers Festival
March 2-3, 2017 San Diego. The Future of Genome Medicine. Details to come.
If you'd like to learn more about my books, you can visit my web site
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