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Before Jane and Dian, Biruté and Jeanne, there was Anne. In 1957 Anne Innis (b. 1933) became the first woman to attempt a solo animal...

Science is a creature of lurches and inchings, presided over by two (mostly) mutually exclusive castes.  We know the lurchers well,...

Telomerase is one of those enzymes which just won’t let you come to a settled opinion. When it runs wild, it promotes cancer. But it...

One of the exciting and daunting things about doing science in the Twenty-First century is the sheer number of competencies it demands. ...

The human body is a truly wonderful place to live, if you can fit in it. It's warm and protected and, because humans are such clever at...

How is it that, starting from a single fertilized egg, employing only mechanical processes, you can form a kangaroo, a housefly, or a...

As Isabella Bird, in her seventieth year and in the middle of her last great adventure, sat across from the Sultan at Marrakesh, telling...

In the late eighteenth century, it would have been not at all unusual to run into a woman on the streets of New York wearing upon her...

We are all mutants, our genes loaded with the steadily acquired variations of three billion years that gradually changed a collection of...

One of the most consistently frustrating things about humanity is our blithe willingness to allow all manner of industrially organized...

Who (besides, obviously, bacteria) doesn't love penicillin? It's on everybody's shortlist of the most important things we've discovered...

In 1964, two publications announced the beginning of two roads out of the centuries-long quagmire represented by the Nature Versus...

In the mid 19th century, American biological science was tentatively feeling its way forward along a half dozen different and...

One of the first things that we teach high school students about statistics is the relative worthlessness of convenience-type surveying -...

"I don't know what to write to you, so I shall tell you a story about four little rabbits whose names were Flopsy, Mopsy, Cottontail and...

When Rosalind Franklin (1920-1958) succumbed to cancer at the age of thirty-seven, she left behind monumental contributions to three...

The brain can be its own worst enemy. In a host of those diseases, the merest whisper of which is enough to send a streak of black dread...

There is a lot of life left to live after one's children are out of the house. It might seem an obvious statement, but it was a fact that...

If you were to ask an ancient Greek how it is determined that a baby is born a boy or a girl, they would have had some interesting and...

After a life spent studying our closest relatives, and arguing passionately for their protection and that of the wider planet of which...