Reading Frames

A poet finds artistic inspiration in her work as a scientist and new perceptions in the lines and linkages of her art.

The promise of viruses as biotech tools will help molecular biology fulfill its true potential.

In an essay entitled "Molecular Cut and Paste: The New Generation of Biological Tools," virologist William McEwan envisions a future where viruses are reprogrammed to become the workhorses of science and medicine.

In an essay entitled "Nurture, Nature, and the Stress That is Life," neurobiologists Darlene Francis and Daniela Kaufer envision a future where science moves past the nature vs. nurture debate in considering differences in human behavioral responses to stress.

Researchers studying differences in how individuals respond to stress are finding that genes are malleable and environments can be deterministic.

Exposing the life and work of a visionary and troubled scientist opens a window onto the evolution of altruism.

In Chapter 13, "Altruism," author Oren Harman discusses how George Price's and John Maynard Smith's 1973 formulation of evolutionarily stable strategy (ESS) meshes with examples of altruism in nature.

Administrators have taken over US universities, and they’re steering institutions of higher learning away from the goal of serving as beacons of knowledge.

In Chapter 6, "Research and Teaching at the All-Administrative University," author Benjamin Ginsberg describes the perils of pursuing scholarship and teaching in the industrial environment of today's American institutions of higher learning.

The story of the US government’s efforts to stamp out smallpox in the early 20th century offers insights into the science and practice of mass vaccination.

In Chapter 5, "The Stable and the Laboratory," author Michael Willrich explores the burgeoning vaccine manufacture industry that ramped up to combat smallpox epidemics in turn-of-the-twentieth-century American cities.

In Chapter 9, "We Were Hunted, Which is Why All of Us are Afraid Some of the Time and Some of Us are Afraid All of the Time," author Rob Dunn explains how predators shaped our evolution as we cowered and ran from their ravenous maws.

Whose well-being is threatened by our changing relationship with the myriad organisms that shaped the evolution of our species?

In Chapter 8, “A Divine Programmer,” author Laura J. Snyder explains how Darwin’s own ideas on evolution may have been influenced at lavish parties hosted by one of the club’s members, Charles Babbage.

In the 19th century, four friends changed the way scientists viewed themselves. It’s time for another shake-up.

In Chapter 9, “Darwin in Denial,” author Tim Birkhead explains how Darwin’s failure to recognize avian female promiscuity resulted in a century of misconceptions about sexual selection

A recent book exposes what Darwin got wrong about sexual behavior in birds, and what his error tells us about the evolution of scientific knowledge.

In Chapter 3, “Credibility: Validating Discovery Claims,” author Frederick Grinnell details the difficulty in making discoveries that buck current scientific paradigms.

The winding path that an interesting result takes to become a bona fide discovery is just one of the topics covered in this new book on the practice of science.

A book is born from pondering why sexual selection was, for so long, a minor component of evolutionary biology.