It was an exquisitely warm, sunny February day and New York’s groundhog had just bit the mayor, grabbing the headlines too. I made my way to the East Side, cutting through Barneys to the Madison Avenue offices of Koch Industries, Inc., the Kansas-based …
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You’ve got to love the chutzpah of a scientist like Swarthmore biologist Scott F. Gilbert, who (along with his students) once wrote a feminist critique of fertilization narrative, as well as his joie de vie “moonlighting” as a piano player in a Jewish …
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Why have the two major evolution conferences of the year (this and last) been hosted outside the United States? In July 2008, we had Altenberg, Austria and the “Extended Synthesis” , and on March 3-7, 2009 in Rome, “Biological Facts and Theories: A Critical …
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“The kinds of things you’re reporting on, you’re reaching a wider audience. It is important in writing to highlight where there may be controversies or disagreements because that is what’s most exciting, that’s what moves science. . . .
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I t’s not surprising that Stuart Newman was one of “the Altenberg 16” scientists who kicked off a reformulation of the theory of evolution, the “extended evolutionary synthesis,” this July at Konrad Lorenz Insitute. While I’ve been writing about …
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Move over Charles Darwin, this year’s the 125th anniversary of Ernest Everett Just’s birth. And that’s what brings Altenberg 16’s dynamic duo — New York Medical College cell biologist Stuart Newman and Konrad Lorenz Institute chair Gerd Muller — to …
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One night during the untamed post-Woodstock years living in Greenwich Village, my sister and her husband introduced me to a gorgeous Israeli-American scholar and athlete named Jay, the son of Zus — Alexander “Zus” Bielski, a WWII resistance fighter and …
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Now that Nature magazine — pants down — has admitted its theft and has partially and begrudgingly corrected the record regarding my first coverage of the Altenberg story, let’s put blame where blame is due. In a breach of public trust, the coordinator(s) …
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I’ve been having bits and pieces of communication with former NASA Astrobiology Institute chief Bruce Runnegar in recent weeks in between his field trips to Australia — sometimes via his wife Maria, a biochemist at the University of Southern California. Runnegar …
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Over the phone I detect a touch of William Shatner’s Kirk in the voice of NASA astrobiologist Christopher P. McKay . McKay admits he was inspired by the television series Star Trek 30 years ago and the “great voyages of discovery”. But while most of his professional …
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