All Writings

In the twenty-first century, genetics stands at the threshold of the post-natural era. Beyond conventional cut-and-break CRISPR, precision base editing and prime...

In 2010 and 2016, J. Craig Venter and his institute crossed the boundary from genetic modification to de novo synthetic creation. Synthesizing...

From an obscure bacterial immune system defending against viral bacteriophages, Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier engineered CRISPR-Cas9 into a programmable molecular scalpel....

From microscopic shavings of 40,000-year-old Neanderthal bones, Swedish geneticist Svante Pääbo conquered post-mortem chemical decay to resurrect the genomes of our extinct...

Genetics does not happen solely inside solitary test tubes or isolated cells; it unfolds across macroscopic populations evolving through deep evolutionary time....

For decades, molecular biologists dismissed the 98.5% of our genome that does not code for proteins as 'junk DNA'. The discovery of...

Beneath the fixed text of the primary DNA sequence lies an exquisite, dynamic software layer: Epigenetics. From Conrad Waddington's conceptual landscape to...

From 1990 to 2003, humanity embarked on its biological Apollo project: sequencing all three billion letters of the human genome. Through a...

In a late-night delicatessen in Honolulu in 1972, Herbert Boyer and Stanley Cohen united restriction endonucleases and bacterial plasmids to create the...

On a moonlit drive along California's Pacific Coast Highway in 1983, eccentric biochemist Kary Mullis conceived the Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR). By...