2018 in Quotes

From the effects of political upheaval on research to claims of gene-edited babies, the year has been a tumultuous one for the scientific community.

Written byCatherine Offord

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ABOVE: US Army Sgt. Rodrigo Estrada of the California Army National Guard’s 649th Engineer Company, 579th Engineer Battalion, 49th Military Police Brigade, from Chico, California, leads a team conducting search and debris clearing operations following devastating wildfires in Paradise.
CALIFORNIA NATIONAL GUARD

—Heather Sher, a radiologist in Broward County, Florida, writing in The Atlantic about treating victims from Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School who were shot with an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle (February 22)

—Ivanka Savic, a neuroscientist at the Karolinska Institute in Sweden, speaking to The Scientist about the quest to find the biological mechanisms underpinning gender dysphoria (March 1)

—Science comedian Brian Malow speaking to a crowd in Raleigh at the 2018 March for Science, a smaller affair than last year’s landmark event
(April 14)

—Robert Green, a medical geneticist and professor at Harvard Medical School, speaking to Buzzfeed after data from online genetic database GEDmatch was used to help identify ...

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Meet the Author

Catherine Offord
After undergraduate research with spiders at the University of Oxford and graduate research with ants at Princeton University, Catherine left arthropods and academia to become a science journalist. She has worked in various guises at The Scientist since 2016. As Senior Editor, she wrote articles for the online and print publications, and edited the magazine’s Notebook, Careers, and Bio Business sections. She reports on subjects ranging from cellular and molecular biology to research misconduct and science policy. Find more of her work at her website.
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