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Category Archives: Natural History
Good Bone
Laurie Goodrich is an orthopedic surgeon whose typical patient weighs between 900 and 1,200 pounds. Her OR contains a gantry crane that lifts the anesthetized patient from the hallway floor and swings them gently to rest on an operating table … Continue reading
Posted in Drug Development, Natural History, R&D, Science
Tagged bone growth, EP4 Agonist, equine bone fractures, KMN-159, Laminitis, Osteoblast, OsteoKey
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Vitamin F
Sabine is a mouse midwife. She’s looking after about 20 expectant mouse moms, and the prognosis for the babies is not good. 3/4 of them will be born looking relatively normal, and no one is too concerned about these. … Continue reading
Posted in Drug Development, Genetics, Medicine, R&D, Science
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Lineage-Enders
Teddy Wayne recently wrote a piece for the Sunday New York Times called “The Childless Life” (the digital version is titled “No Kids for Me, Thanks”) which at face value was a discussion of the individual choice to go vocally, self-righteously extinct. In … Continue reading
Posted in Environment, Genetics, Natural History, Science, Sperm donation
Tagged climate change, DNA, evolution, genetics, hominids
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Of Mice and Men, and Cats and Women
Wookie Bear I am infested with parasites. My entire house is lousy with them—the word lousy is derived from the singular form for lice, a particular small mammalian ectoparasite. We categorize our parasites by where they live—the endoparasites like ascarid worms … Continue reading
Posted in Genetics, Natural History, Science
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Yeitse
This post was inspired by Michael Eisen (@mbeisen), who innocently asked about the DNA content of various foods on Twitter a few days ago. As expected, the responses were mostly the rantings of idiots, all sound and fury, signifying nothing. Michael … Continue reading
Patients in Waiting
When people learn that I have been sequenced as part of George Church’s Personal Genome Project (PGP) they often say, “Wow- I’d like to be sequenced too!” My first response to them is, “Why – are you sick?” If the … Continue reading
Posted in Genetics
Tagged Cancer, DNA sequencing, George Church, John Halamka, Personal Genome Project, PGP, Pretty Good Privacy, sequencing, Wall Street Journal
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Science is Not Your Enemy
A labored defense of the practice of science – which we will define as scientism – was recently published under the title Science is Not Your Enemy by Stephen Pinker in New Republic magazine. A much more lighthearted approach by Tim Minchin … Continue reading
Break a Sweat
Salt is one of the most ancient things of value to man, as a moment’s reflection on the origins of words – like salary (something worth working for) quickly brings to mind. Roman soldiers were paid in salt, not silver. … Continue reading
700,000 year-old Thistle Creek horse eclipses Denisovan record
Until last month, the most ancient whole genome ever sequenced from the DNA residues extracted from fossilized bone was from a polar bear. Continuously frozen in ice for about 120,000 years on Svalbard Island, Norway, this polar bear jaw helped … Continue reading
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