Long before the first reports of a new flu-like illness in China’s Hubei province, a bat—or perhaps a whole colony of them—was flying around the region carrying a new type of…

“The funny thing about life is that it’s temporary; that is to say, temporary in the ‘temporal’ sense of the word, meaning that all living things and all that we do are subject…

Fame is something that sticks to someone or something, a quality earned or gained for no reason at all. It is also a force of connection. A famous person or thing forms a hub in a…

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the 18th-century poet and philosopher, believed life was hardwired with archetypes, or models, which instructed its development. Yet he was fascinated with…

Conservationists and bioethicists often regard the packages of engineered DNA called “gene drives” with a mixture of wonder, excitement, and dread. Gene drives violate the normal…

We’ve all seen the stark headlines: “Being Rich and Successful Is in Your DNA” (Guardian, July 12); “A New Genetic Test Could Help Determine Children’s Success” (Newsweek,…

Of the important global crops, the banana is the most genetically uniform. A single cluster of nearly identical genotypes, the Cavendish subgroup, nearly monopolizes the world’s…

In 2012, I ran a trip sampling the nautilus populations along Australia’s Great Barrier Reef explicitly to see if nautiluses living on marine protected areas of the reef are as rare…

In humans, the profound biological differences that exist between the sexes mean that a single male is physically capable of having far more children than is a single female. Women…

It is a bit of a stretch, but by no means impossible or even unlikely that a hybrid or a chimera combining a human being and a chimpanzee could be produced in a laboratory. After all,…