This past December, science writer David Dobbs published an essay (2013) in the online magazine Aeon (aeon.co/magazine/) that purports to explain why the ‘selfish gene’ concept is outmoded and should be retired. It elicited a good deal of commentary, and in...
Last month, I completed teaching a graduate course for the tenth time. After several years (in the early 1990’s) of thinking about launching a new alternate-year seminar course and then planning it, I began teaching PATH 480 in the fall of 1994. The original name of...
In lay publications, it is commonplace for writers to refer to the deoxynucleotide sequence of an individual’s nuclear genome as that individual’s “code” and to the determination of that sequence as “deciphering the code.” Molecular biologists mean by the “genetic...
Both Nature and Science are currently celebrating the 100th anniversary of the birth of an icon of logic, computer science, and mathematical biology: Alan Turing. In reading Andrew Hodges’s spectacular biography of Turing (1983) many years ago I came to appreciate...
As biomedical technology advances, the probability increases that evolution guided, constrained, or facilitated by scientists will be relevant to medicine. Of particular interest in this context is the increasing ability of investigators to engineer microbes to...