

If you were to ride the D.C. metro the morning after the election, you would have been overwhelmed with a tense, eerie silence that pervaded the mood of the town.

This type of distress and strong emotion permeated throughout the country.

“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1826.

What you consume not only affects the health and appearance of your body, but also the integrity of the mind.


As a member of the Science Policy Group, people frequently ask me what science policy entails.

For thousands of years, explorers, adventurers, and conquerors have searched for the “fountain of youth,” a magical spring that grants longevity to those who drink from it. Today, the search continues, now led by explorers of a different kind — research scientists.
In human cells, three billion base pairs arrange themselves into sequences of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs to form genes. However, despite its large size, only 1% to 2% of the human genome is actually organized into genes. So, what does the remaining, mysterious, 98% of the human genome do?
With the successful creation of DNA vaccines that elicited immune protection from Zika infection, hope is on the rise in the fight against this awful virus.
Information is instant. I remember the moment when this fact of the digital age was made unequivocally clear to me. It was the summer of 2014 in Montreal and I felt my room shake. A truck? Thunder? An earthquake? An earthquake. The news was up on Twitter faster than it seemed possible to type. Yet, as the internet breathes immediacy into almost all forms of communication, the dissemination of biological findings has remained embarrassingly slow. Research routinely takes years to be shared, hindering the speed at which science progresses.
“Would you rather live forever or die in the next five seconds?” This question was posed to me recently and I was flummoxed. Most people, according to the asker, say they would die in the next five seconds. It took me much longer than five seconds to answer, so I guess I was already doomed to an eternal life and to the painful demands of being a thinking, sentient lifeform forever.