Here, I am collecting samples with teammates; we were volunteers with a marine biology research project. We were called the ‘goats;’ we spent our time on sharp, slippery rocks to get to the tide-pools. The cool kids did the diving and underwater tasks.

The CRISPR Children.

I always wondered what happened to the ‘CRISPR babies,’ born in China and to an uproar in 2018 as the first children with genomes  edited before their birth. How might their edited genomes affect their lives?

My investigative story about them in Nature Biotechnology has been three years in the making. It’s accessible here or here. I did some blog-posts to go along with the story and podcasts. More podcasts on this subject are underway.

Here are some resources. And here are some podcasts.

This one is with physician-scientist Kiran Musunuru of the University of Pennsylvania, who is also co-founder of Verve Therapeutics. He is also author of the book:

The CRISPR Generation: The Story of the World’s First Gene-Edited Babies

And here is episode 2, with Rudolf Jaenisch from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research. In February 2018, He Jiankui, who had done the experiments, came to see Rudolf Jaenisch.

…”He came in February. The announcement was in November, he came in February, the experiment had been done, I think, he wanted to get approval from labs, Here, I think he went to other labs. Of course, it was absolutely not acceptable. I didn’t realize the guy had already done it, I thought he was maybe thinking about this and that I could talk him out of this.”…

Here is episode 3 with anthropologist Eben Kirksey from Deakin  University. He is also author of the book:The Mutant Project

“Dr. He definitely had some very powerful backers within the Chinese Communist Party. And he worked with them. He gave them foreknowledge in the same way that he gave the Associated Press foreknowledge of the birth and planned a release very much with blessings from important political factions in Beijing. As a speaker at the summit, I watched kind of the public takedowns emerge in real time.”

Here is episode 4 with Alison van Eenennaam from the University of California, Davis.

“That’s when we started: what if we fertilize only for six hours. Well our fertility goes down but we get reduced rates of mosaicism. So for us that’s more important. If instead of getting 40 blastocysts we get 10 blastocysts but they’re all non-mosaic, that’s a better bet for us then getting 40 mosaic blastocysts. Those are the types of things in a long-lived species like cattle where you have three years to get to maturity and have their own offspring, you don’t really want a mosaic because you need to breed that out of them. And that’s a decade.”

Machine learning, quantum computing, they’re not magic 

‘Artificial intelligence’ (AI) is hard to beat as an enigmatic term. And quantum computing is right up there, too, in the way it draws attention. Without good training data machine learning algorithms can disappoint.

For my Nature Methods story Machine learning, practically speaking, I asked biomedical researchers about how they use machine learning. For example, machines can learn to assess whether a tissue sample that the system has not previously ‘seen’  indicates breast cancer.

For my story Biology begins to tangle with quantum computing and in a piece called Bits of quantum bits, I asked scientists about how they use quantum computing and what they think it’s promise is. And I looked into the mysterious disappearance of Ettore Majorana.

Illustration by Erin Dewalt SpringerNature

Erin Dewalt did this wonderful illustration for the machine learning story. It’s modern and retro, which corresponds well to ML, which is new and has been around for decades, too.

(Erin Dewalt)

When computational pipelines go ‘clank’

Pipeline plunk

These two stories, available here and here, are about what it takes to build and maintain computational pipelines. Yes, pipelines can go ‘clank’ and they can plunk but interviewees talk a little about how to avoid that or to fix it when it does.

There’s text, animation and a podcast. And some animated puns that harken back to another story I did on benchmarking software tools. Again, some fun, informative interactions with scientists and collaboration with the oh-so-talented managing designer Erin Dewalt.

Here are the podcasts on long-COVID.

This one is based on a conversation with Nadia Rosenthal, the scientific director of The Jackson Laboratory.

“The field is racing. And yet I’m not seeing that much that’s really budging our understanding of what’s going on in these various cases where people are really having very different responses,” says Nadia Rosenthal.

Most of the studies on animal models of COVID look at time points that are acute, like three days, six days, nine days, maybe 21 days maybe, and although mice have a compressed lifespan, the virus is basically running the same show.
And so you really need to take these mice out for months to understand whether we have the right models for long COVID and the study of long COVID.”

You can hear this podcast here:

And you will find a transcript here:

This podcast on long-COVID is based on a conversation with Avi Nath from the US National Institutes of Health National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

“Now, the virus may be gone, but the music lingers on. But what is lingering: is it the immune system that is lingering or is it parts of the virus that are lingering?”

You can hear this podcast here:

And you will find a transcript here.

This podcast on long-COVID is based on a conversation with Terina Martinez, a field application scientist at Taconic Biosciences.

“We are all on the brink, hopefully, of reaching some better population immunity because of the vaccine program. But the research doesn’t stop because of the vaccines. I think that because we have this whole group of people who have long COVID we need models that will help us understand what’s going on there, because, you know, giving someone another vaccine, is it going to stop their long COVID.”

You can hear this podcast here:

And you will find a transcript here.

For Metropolis of Science, a project developed by Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism’s Marguerite Holloway, I did a piece about the  Yellow Fever Fence in New York City.

Yellow Fever came to visit New York many times. Here an account by James Hardie.

“Coffins, coffins of all sizes!” is what boys shouted through the city streets, touting the pine coffins for the many dead. The four-dollar price tag was too steep for many people. Nightly, a dead cart carried corpses to the pits of Potter’s Field, now the site of Washington Square Park.

Yellow Fever repeatedly ravaged New York City. It’s a sad reminder that infectious diseases do not just come and go.

“When yellow fever ravaged New York in 1822, the city’s Board of Health put up a picket fence to quarantine a section of lower Manhattan. Residents were ordered to leave. If they were unwilling, the authorities forcibly removed them. Those who were too poor to leave were taken to a temporary asylum.” 

The project is part of Columbia University’s Center for Science and Society.

And here’s a mini-documentary about the Vertebrate Genomes Project

Here is a story in Nature “The Big Challenges of Big Data”

“Biologists are joining the big-data club. With the advent of high-throughput genomics, life scientists are starting to grapple with massive data sets, encountering challenges with handling, processing and moving information that were once the domain of astronomers and high-energy physicists.”

An Iron Man and cancer researcher

composita/Pixabay

This is a piece about a scientist at Baylor College of Medicine. Ken Scott is an Iron Man, a dad, a husband, a scientist, a religious man and a cancer patient. I started writing about him after I had interviewed him for a story and he shared his cancer diagnosis with me. I wrote for him and his family. Then I asked him if it would be ok to write about him in a more public way. He and his wife said yes and I am grateful for that.

The story starts like this:

As a kid, Ken Scott once rode his bike off the roof of his family home. In a later experiment, he attached a model rocket to the bike that melted his seat and his rear caught on fire. Ken grew up to marry his high school sweetheart, raise two kids, become a scientist. He trains hard; he has jogged up to 10 miles at a time wearing a backpack loaded with 100 pounds of logs. He competes in the Iron Man in which participants swim 2.4 miles, bike 112 miles and run 26.2 miles.

You can read the piece on Medium here. 

For The Daily Beast, I wrote

New Mayan Discovery: The World Isn’t Ending!

…“That is correct, the world will not end,” says William Saturno, the Boston University archaeologist behind a new paper that could help put to rest the long-held myth that the ancient Mayans predicted a 2012 apocalypse—a belief still held by 10 percent of the world’s population, according to Reuters. “A cycle is ending, but a new one begins, according to the Mayans, who regard their calendar as a series of infinite cycles,” he says.

Read the full story here, which also includes a bit about an excavated room that was likely space where a Mayan nerd—a calendar-keeper, astronomer, and scribe—puzzled away.

*

James Cameron and Investors Seek to Lasso and Mine an Asteroid

Also for The Daily Beast I did a story about asteroid mining. James Cameron is advising a company called Planetary Resources. Asteroids have bounty to offer,  says John Lewis, professor emeritus at the University of Arizona’s Lunar and Planetary Laboratory, also an adviser to Planetary Resources,  and author of  a book, Mining the Sky, Untold Riches From the Asteroids.

Read the full story here.

For The New York  Times, I did this story about libraries.

Technology: In DSpace, Ideas Are Forever
“The libraries at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are earnestly bookish (2.6 million volumes and 17,000 journals) but increasingly digital (275 databases and 3,800 electronic journals). And just as e-mail dealt a blow to snail mail, digital archives are retooling scholarly exchange. A number of universities, from the California Institute of Technology to M.I.T., are creating ”institutional repositories” designed to harness their own intellectual output. M.I.T.’s archive, perhaps the most ambitious, is called DSpace (www.dspace.org).

Scholarly Storage: Traditionally, journals make research public after peer review, which can take months, sometimes years. Archives like DSpace, however, collect unpublished work — documents of any length, lecture notes, photos, videos, computer simulations, blueprints, software — in all disciplines and make most of it available to anyone as soon as it’s received.”

ARTE theme evenings –

Themenabende/Soirées thématiques

For the public television network ARTE, which is run jointly by French and German public television, I curated and produced theme evenings.

These are multi-hour evenings on one theme. They are made up of different genres: feature films, short films, documentaries, animation and experimental genres, too.

I enjoyed producing these, taking them from idea about an evening-long narrative arc, through development to broadcast.

Some films we bought, others we produced or co-produced. Plus we produced graphical vignettes in between the pieces which could have any length. We told smaller stories within the arc of a larger story.

Im Testfieber

For Süddeutsche Zeitung, I wrote a story about studying for the GRE.

For Die Zeit, I did a story about zebrafish research, friendship and rivalry in science.

Von Fischen und Frauen

Steam Power takes to the Road again. 

For New Scientist, I wrote about Swiss engineer Roger Waller, a modern steam pioneer. He and his team update and redesign steam engines on railway routes. And they have built a steam car.

To cut or not to cut

For New Scientist, with Graham Lawton I wrote about male circumcision. It’s a decision parents of baby boys face and it’s not an easy one.

When microbiologists plunge into the ocean

Microbiologists want to be heard on the subject of climate change. In a consensus statement, a community of scientists writes: “underappreciating the importance of microbial processes both on land and in the oceans, “we fundamentally limit our understanding of Earth’s biosphere and response to climate change and thus jeopardize efforts to create an environmentally sustainable future.”

The consensus statement ‘Microbiologists’ Warning to Humanity’ is here and so is a petition. Rick Cavicchioli, from Australia’s University of New South Wales, has been spearheading this effort.

Microbiology of the oceans is fascinating and there’s so much left to find out about what determines the distribution of microbial species, for example, and roles the microbes play.

There’s also increasing collaboration between biological oceanographers and physical oceanographers. Oops, let’s not forget chemical oceanographers. Read more in my Nature Methods story here: When microbiologists plunge into the ocean.

Here’s a striking Landsat 8 satellite image showing phytoplankton swirls in the sea north of Canada’s Yukon Territory. Whoo, these are some swirls. And here’s a blog post with more pics.

(Credit: NASA Goddard Space Flight Center OceanColor Web)

For Science, I did a story called Beautiful Bioimages for the Eyes of Many Beholders.

Method of the Year: spatially resolved transcriptomics

The Method of the Year, chosen by Nature Methods, is about how labs find out and capture which genes are expressed where in a tissue or cell. It’s called spatially resolved transcriptomics.  Here is my story, here’s an excerpt:

If a researcher is making a smoothie, it might be snack time. Or it could be the moment to prepare a sample for bulk RNA sequencing, in which tissue is homogenized and analyzed to yield averaged gene expression from the mRNAs in a tissue’s cells — its transcriptome. …Working with single cells is more like digging into a fruit salad than a smoothie, says Hongkui Zeng, who directs the Allen Institute for Brain Science. …“Fruit tart is spatial transcriptomics,” says Bosiljka Tasic, an Allen Institute researcher who was interviewed jointly with Zeng. “You know exactly where each piece of fruit is and what is the relationship of each piece of fruit to the other,” she says….

Counting proteins

Here is a story in Nature Methods about an emerging technology called single-cell proteomics. Researchers can now routinely sequence genomes, and they can sequence RNA. Some labs are working on ways to tally how many proteins there are in a cell.

Having this tally is another big step toward understanding cells. And understanding the differences between healthy cells and those afflicted with disease.

For this story Erin Dewalt again did a fabulous illustration.

It’s not a faraway dream to tally proteins in single cells. Credit: Stéphane Larochelle, Erin Dewalt Springer Nature

This illustration came about as I interviewed people and heard what a powerful dream this concept of single-cell proteomics was to them.

Some science behind the rogue science of editing the genes of human embryos and bringing them to term.

Here is a story about embryo-editing in Nature Methods. Yes, it sounds creepy. There are scientists who are editing the genomes of human embryos. And in one case –perhaps more?– the babies were brought to term. This story is about one such rogue scientist….and it’s a look beyond rogue scientists.

It looks at DNA-repair mechanisms and discusses if they might work differently early on in development. It’s about the opportunities that might rest with gene-editing, what it will take to deliver gene-editing constructs efficiently. It’s about lowering the risk of mosaics. It’s hard to edit all the cells in a developing embryo. And then there’s the CRISPR-Cas system itself.. how might one stop it from editing after the first edit.

Sugars–cells use them in all sorts of ways

Here is another podcast. It’s on this blog page and called Sugar Rush. You can also listen to the podcast on SoundCloud or right here.

And yes, I wish it were about candy, which I love. It is about sweetness, but not about the type we eat but the type that coats our cells. Sugars coat all cells in the human body.

I spoke with a number of scientists working to understand the role these sugars play. Pam Marino at NIH, Gordan Lauc of the University of Zagreb, Chris Taron at New England Biolabs.