If I remember rightly, it was back about 1963 that I first got interested in the biochemistry of memory. My curiosity was sparked by some remarkable experiments with flatworms — tiny, extremely primitive animals with rudimentary brains and nervous systems.
Biology
Photo by Laura Fuhrman on Unsplash
Is this really necessary? • Photo by Romi Yusardi on Unsplash
Life is simple without sex
Some years ago, the humorists James Thurber and E. B. White wrote a book called Is Sex Necessary? It was not an altogether frivolous question and any biologist can tell you the answer: No.
Photo by [2Ni] on Unsplash
Roots of clay for family tree?
At the time Genesis was written, clay was the premier material of artisans. Of it were made containers, tablets for writing, and effigies of animals and men. So what was more natural than for the Creator to do his work in the same medium. According to the author of Genesis, the Lord took up clay into his hands and molded it into the beasts of the field and the birds of the air. And the first man.
A human oocyte undergoing IVF • ZEISS Microscopy (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Curiosity and boundaries
“Scientific curiosity is not an unbounded good.” One does not often hear those words, especially uttered by a scientist. They come from an essay by the octogenarian biochemist Erwin Chargaff in the May 21 [1987] issue of Nature.
The HIV virus • Image by Bette Korber (Public Domain)
AIDS and history
In October 1347, a fleet of Genoese merchant ships from the Orient arrived at the harbor of Messina in northeast Sicily. All aboard the ships were dead or dying of a ghastly disease.
Image by Josef Reischig (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Eons of sex
How could I resist a book with a chapter called “Three Billion Years of Sex?”
A model of human DNA (Public Domain)
Answering the oldest question
“Who am I?” It is the oldest question in philosophy. Socrates asked it. Descartes asked it. Philosophers today are still asking it. And science may be on the verge of breakthroughs that will change forever the way we understand the question.
Photo by Cristian Palmer on Unsplash
It’s all there but the thrill
Not long ago the British journal Nature published a report titled “A new class of Echinodermata from New Zealand.” In it the authors describe an animal previously unknown to science, nine of which were discovered on waterlogged wood dredged up from the ocean off the New Zealand coast.
Model of a DNA molecule • Photo by CGP Grey (CC BY 2.0)
Designer genes — a joke no more
Ever since bioengineers learned how to tinker with DNA and turn out tailor-made living organisms we have been hearing jokes about “designer genes.”
Photo by Rama (CC BY-SA 2.0)
Rights of animals
When I was a boy growing up in Tennessee I once snitched my uncle’s .22 rifle and went hunting with my friends. My first shot brought a gray squirrel tumbling down through the branches of a tree. The squirrel lay on the ground at my feet, its belly pierced by a neat red hole, convulsed with pain. I watched, paralyzed by horror at what I had done, until one of my friends dispatched the squirrel with the butt of his rifle.