General
loom | November 3, 2004 It's obvious from yesterday's vote that embryonic stem cells will continue to split the country (California versus Washington DC, for one thing). But in an ironic bit of timing researchers at the Reproductive Genetics Institute have just published some results at Reproductive BioMedicine Online that could--possibly--short-circuit some of the arguments against using embryonic stem cells.
The RGI researchers have figured out how to derive stem cells from a four-day old embryo--a stage known as a morula. Until now, scientists have been using older blastocysts, and have been destroying them in…
loom | October 29, 2004The good folks at Corante are rejiggering the design of their blogs, The Loom included. Some stuff has yet to make the transition as of this writing, but before too long it will all be back in place.
loom | October 25, 2004I've written a piece for Newsweek about how to program a cell. (The Newsweek International edition comes out this week; the US edition comes out next week.) I find the ongoing research exciting, but sometimes I wonder how much of its promise will become real. Programmable cells, for example, are an illustration of the exciting frontiers that can be explored with stem cells. It may be possible to wire the genetic circuits of a stem cell to make it grow into a particular sort of organ, produce a certain sort of hormone, etc. But it's hard to see how any of that will come to pass if stem cell…
loom | August 22, 2004After a couple months of merciless story deadlines, hard disk crashes, and strange viruses that you only find out about once you have kids, the Loom is creaking back to life. Expect several postings this week. For now, let me direct you to a review I wrote a couple weeks ago for The New York Times Book Review about Devil in the Mountain, a book about the Andes. The author, an Oxford geologist, dissects these mountains like a surgeon cutting open a living person. It reminded me of the times I've driven around with geologists; all of the landscape that blurs past most of us is a vast palimpsest…
loom | July 8, 2004Chris Mooney has just blogged on a depressing new report that came out today that documents how the Bush administration puts politics before science.
loom | June 3, 2004A press release turned up in the comments for a couple of my posts. While that's not as bad as Viagra-ad spam, it's not in the spirit of blogosphere. If you post a press release, it will be deleted. Post a comment in your own words, and it will stay.
loom | May 18, 2004Please accept my apologies for the vile spam comments that keep showing up here. I hope that the folks at Corante and I can find a way to permanently shut down the flow of craven obscenity.
I've been traveling again, and now I'm racing against a slew of deadlines, which leaves precious little time to blog. I hope to get back in the swing next week. More blogging, less spam is my goal for the Loom.
loom | April 21, 2004No, I didnt get hit by a car. Instead, I got hit by your typical crush of deadlines, traveling, and a bout of laryngitis. But tranquility is returning, and Im firing up the blogotron again.
loom | March 29, 2004I'm in Cambridge at the MIT/Harvard Brain Boot Camp this week, so blogging will be light for a few days.
loom | March 4, 2004The Austin Chronicle has an interesting piece today on blogs, which marks the first time anyone's ever interviewed me about the Loom. Conclusion: no money, uncertain future, but much fun.
loom | February 5, 2004Check out Chris Mooney's post on the latest move in Washington to gut government science, which cloaks itself in bogus terms like "sound science." This dreadful campaign probably won't get much attention in the national media, but its effects--on conservation, climate change policy, and so on--could be profoundly bad.
loom | January 14, 2004Based on some feedback from subscribers and my own nosing around, I've decided to switch the subscription system to Bloglet. While this requires you to create a user name over at bloglet.com, the result of this minor chore seems better to me. The main attraction is that links and such don't turn into ugly, unreadable HTML. I will continue to send out the pre-bloglet notifications to those who have it, but you may want to switch over to the new system. Please drop me a note to let me know if you want to be taken off the old notification list.
Any further comments you may have will be most…
loom | January 11, 2004It's been a month since I've joined Corante, and my deep thanks go out to the many new readers who have visited the Loom. Daily visits reached a new high this Friday, January 9, with 900 pairs of eyeballs pointed this way. Please be sure to enter your email address in the subscription box in the lefthand column so that I can notify you of new posts.
loom | January 7, 2004I'm en route to Washington DC to talk tonight about Soul Made Flesh. If you're in the District, please come to Reiter's Bookstore at 2021 K Street NW at 6:30. On my web site I'm posting all my talks and radio interviews as they get confirmed.
In lieu of a blog of my own, let me point to a couple interesting items.
--At Quark Soup, David Appell gets righteously indignant about a new paper that predicts a major wave of extinction due to global warming. Actually, the paper could turn out to be a conservative underestimate (not to be confused with certain politically conservative underestimates…
loom | January 4, 2004Today's issue of Newsday has my review of Sea of Glory, Nathaniel Philbrick's history of the first great scientific U.S. expedition. The review gets pretty harsh towards the end, despite the fact that the book is an exquisitely researched narrative of a fascinating subject. (What makes it particularly fascinating is that the expedition's leader, Charles Wilkes, was practically insane.) It's this very potential that got me so frustrated. Here's a grand story about a journey to the ends of the Earth, about megalomaniacs, about the dawn of a great nation, about the birth of modern science, about…
loom | December 2, 2003Craig Venter has followed up on his announcement that he and his coworkers have assembled a virus from its genome sequence. Now there's a paper available at the Proceeding of the National Academy of Science web site. A bleary-eyed late-night inspection suggests that this is not a flawless Xerox machine for viruses; the researchers had to cast away lots of misassembled versions. (Still, they were able to isolate a perfect sequence in just two weeks.) More interestingly, the authors talk a bit about how they can use this same method to cobble together chunks of much bigger genomes to make…
loom | November 13, 2003In February I wrote an article in Science about what Craig Venter's up to these days. In the late 1990s Venter made his mark by challenging the government human genome project to a race, promising to beat them to the full sequence for a fraction of their budget. Ultimately the race was a tie, and before too long Venter had been shown the door from his company. (I highly recommend James Shreeve's upcoming The Genome War for all the grisly details.) But he had also been working with the genomes of other organisms--particularly microbes--for years, and he went back to his first love. Not…
loom | November 11, 2003A lot of work has gone into reconstructing an entire human being in a computer. Computer scientists put in the precise dimensions of a person's body, factor in biomechanics, mimic facial expressions and so on. This work gets huge amounts of hype in the press, but for all the effort and all the attention, the results so far have left me pretty unimpressed. Does watching Kevin Bacon running around without his skin in Hollow Man really make all that work worthwhile?
Frankly, I'm much more impressed with work going on in places such as the Genetic Circuits Research Group at the University of…
loom | October 30, 2003Books have been bubbling up from the comments cauldron. Jim Harrison has asked what I think of Simon Conway Morris's Life's Solution. Web Webster says Cosmos was his first favorite science book and asks for suggestions. Humboldt and Feyerband make an appearance too. It's ironic that two forms of reading that are competing furiously these days for my free time--books and blogs--meet at this crossroads.
Let me just say that I have four books on my desk, that I am trying to dig into. They're either just out or about to come out. For the most part, I can't tell you that they're great or lousy,…