Soviet geneticist Nikolai Vavilov led an ideologically perilous campaign to rid the world of famine. | Continue reading
Our approach to fighting wildfires is a fantasy—and it’s making them even more catastrophic. | Continue reading
A centuries-old sailor’s hack enters the ecologist’s toolkit. | Continue reading
Biologist John Calhoun’s rodent experiments gripped a society consumed by fears of overpopulation. | Continue reading
How an obsession with crustaceans guided the naturalist toward his most consequential insights. | Continue reading
What drove a blind biochemist to experiment with LSD? | Continue reading
One summer evening in 1808, while on a stroll through London with his wife and sister-in-law, sailor Thomas Urquhart was accosted by a stranger who wanted to know his name. As the outraged Urquhart demanded to know by what right the man questioned him, three or four men seized hi … | Continue reading
Sometimes the people in charge of keeping us safe know just enough to put us in even greater danger. | Continue reading
By all accounts Jesse Gelsinger was a sweet, sharp-witted, if not particularly ambitious kid who loved motorcycles and professional wrestling. In 1999 he was living in Tucson, Arizona, with his parents and siblings, attending high school, and working part-time as a supermarket cl … | Continue reading
In a backwater Soviet laboratory in the early 1960s, Nikolai Fedyakin toiled away at his research. Fedyakin worked at the technological institute in Kostroma, an old city on the Volga River 200 miles northeast of Moscow. Some would say this bygone hub of the linen industry was ch … | Continue reading
In the early 20th century a busy mother trying to prepare a healthy meal for her family might turn to The New Cookery. One of the cookbook’s recipes, protose cutlets, sounds easy enough: Remove the contents of a pound can of protose, cut in halves and each half into eight slices. … | Continue reading
In 1942, as World War II raged, the United States’ newly established spy agency, the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), asked its scientists to turn their attention from their other projects to the urgent mission of creating a truth drug to interrogate prisoners of war. The OSS … | Continue reading
Making Marvels: Science and Splendor at the Courts of Europe Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City Closes March 1, 2020 | Continue reading
In offering his colleague a cup of tea, Ronald Fisher was just being polite. He had no intention of kicking up a dispute—much less remaking modern science. | Continue reading
Why would anyone visit a radioactive ghost town or the remnants of a nuclear reactor? The reasons are surprisingly varied, and the impressions of the people who have journeyed to these far-flung places offer a glimpse of our collective understanding of the nuclear age. | Continue reading