May 31, 2017
(Nature) – The prospect of a memoir from Jennifer Doudna, a key player in the CRISPR story, quickens the pulse. And A Crack in Creation does indeed deliver a welcome perspective on the revolutionary genome-editing technique that puts the power … Read More
April 18, 2017
(Science Daily) – Most Americans have some form of digital technology, whether it is a smartphone, tablet or laptop, within their reach 24-7. Our dependence on these gadgets has dramatically changed how we communicate and interact, and is slowly eroding … Read More
April 6, 2017
(The Verge) – The field of synthetic biology, or engineering new forms of life, is less than two decades old, but its pioneers are responsible for some of the most interesting projects coming out of labs today: inscribing lines of … Read More
April 6, 2017
(NPR) – “He tried to reproduce them all,” Harris tells Morning Edition host David Greene. “And of those 53, he found he could only reproduce six. That was “a real eye-opener,” says Harris, whose new book Rigor Mortis: How Sloppy … Read More
March 27, 2017
(The Washington Post) – In this, the fifth and final piece in a series of excerpts from my new book, “Sex and the Constitution,” I will briefly address Margaret Sanger and the birth of the birth control movement. As we … Read More
March 20, 2017
(New York Post) – Imagine a world where parents can give birth to superbabies with bones so strong they’re impervious to a surgical drill and a heart less prone to failure. A world where a child has DNA from three … Read More
March 8, 2017
(Nature) – In 2000, two landmark papers started a revolution in our ability to design entirely new functions inside cells. The authors took two electronic circuits — an oscillator and a switch — and built the equivalent from living matter. … Read More
March 7, 2017
(Undark) – What if technology could set us free from our own mortal bodies? If there were a way to expand our mental and physical beings beyond the limitations we were born with? If we could harness science to morph … Read More
March 2, 2017
(NPR) – “Flesh is a dead format,” writes Mark O’Connell in To Be a Machine, his new nonfiction book about the contemporary transhumanist movement. It’s an alarming statement, but don’t kill the messenger: As he’s eager to explain early in … Read More
February 23, 2017
(NPR) – The human species is about to change dramatically. That’s the argument Yuval Noah Harari makes in his new book, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. Harari is a history professor at Hebrew University in Israel. He tells … Read More
February 8, 2017
(Nature) – A rare probity permeates Meredith Wadman’s The Vaccine Race, the riveting story of a human fetal cell line, the scientists who established it and the front lines of vaccine research where it was deployed. In the epilogue, Wadman … Read More
January 31, 2017
(NPR) – Prolonging life might sound like a good thing, but Warraich notes that medical technologies often force patients, their loved ones and their doctors to make difficult, painful decisions. In his new book, Modern Death, he writes about a … Read More
January 25, 2017
(Nature) – Experiments in Democracy reminds me of this painting, in both its ambitious scope and its sense of unease. Science historian Benjamin Hurlbut offers a wide-angle history of US attempts at democratic deliberation on the ethics of human-embryo research. … Read More
December 20, 2016
(The Wall Street Journal) – The nonfiction book by Dr. Kalanithi, who died within 22 months of his diagnosis with stage IV lung cancer at age 37, arrived to critical raves. Beyond its literary merits, the memoir owes its success … Read More
November 16, 2016
(Nature) – To many Americans, the name Bellevue signifies ‘psychiatric facility’ as much as Bedlam does to Britons. The psychiatric unit of the New York City public hospital gained fame from the stream of cultural icons passing through its portals. … Read More
November 11, 2016
(Scientific American) – In his new book, Suggestible You: The Curious Science of Your Brain’s Ability to Deceive, Transform and Heal (National Geographic Publishing, November 2016; 288 pages), science writer and Scientific American contributor Erik Vance seeks to explain one … Read More
October 11, 2016
(Scientific American) – According to the American Psychiatric Association, about 5 percent of American children suffer from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), yet the diagnosis is given to some 15 percent of American children, many of whom are placed on … Read More
October 7, 2016
(Nature) – In Rebel Genius, science historian Tara Abraham offers a biography of McCulloch (1898–1969) that shines a light on the twentieth-century revolution in the mind sciences and cybernetics — the scientific study of automatic control in animals (including humans) … Read More
September 21, 2016
(Nature) – Two very different books on the epidemic have now emerged. Anthropologist Paul Richards’ Ebola is an original account of how Sierra Leone in general, and 26 villages there in particular, interpreted the epidemic and wider responses to it, … Read More
August 30, 2016
(Nature) – By the time science-fiction writer Daniel Keyes died in 2014 at the age of 86, he had lived through vast upheavals in biomedical science, from the discovery of the DNA double helix to the sequencing of the human … Read More
August 17, 2016
(Nature) – Technological innovation in fields from genetic engineering to cyberwarfare is accelerating at a breakneck pace, but ethical deliberation over its implications has lagged behind. Thus argues Sheila Jasanoff — who works at the nexus of science, law and … Read More
July 25, 2016
(National Geographic) – The gene is “one of the most powerful and dangerous ideas in the history of science,” argues Siddhartha Mukherjee in The Gene: An Intimate History. Since its discovery by Gregor Mendel, an obscure Moravian monk, the gene … Read More
July 8, 2016
(New York Times) – In “Ordinarily Well,” Kramer tills some of the same ground that he did in his previous book, but his approach this time is less philosophical and more argumentative. He is out to make the case, against … Read More
June 14, 2016
(The Guardian) – The book is a lively, speculative examination of the singular threat that Bostrom believes – after years of calculation and argument – to be the one most likely to wipe us out. This threat is not climate … Read More
June 6, 2016
(The Chicago Tribune) – Clearly genetics has changed the way we think about ourselves, our children, and our world in ways large and subtle, and sometimes, as the history of the 20th century shows, with deadly serious consequences. Indeed the … Read More
