More on: science

Ecologies of Knowing: What Natalie Settles Learned in the Lab   IN 2011, NATALIE SETTLES sat down for coffee and a conversation with Stephen Tonsor, head of an evolutionary plant genetics lab at the University of Pittsburgh. Settles had recently moved to Pittsburgh after a decade in Madison, Wisconsin, where she had been fascinated with and…

When Adam saw her, muscle of a new day, when he squatted to smell the musk between her legs, when he leaned down To grasp the wrist of the most familiar creature he’d encountered yet, to pull himself, the mirror image of himself, to her feet; When he took a few steps back to appraise…

In Anselm Kiefer’s Am Anfang A ladder rises like a DNA helix Out of the seething flux, an ocean Of broken glass, shattered light, The bonds just barely linking there, Chiral, as yet un-living, into proto- Membrane, proto-cell, accreting In the sugary stew of their forming, The nucleotides surging tidal As they begin to spiral…

Dismayed by the murder of Pakistani healthcare workers for vaccinating children against polio, I recall the dread that darkened my childhood before Salk proved the power of killed virus to halt infantile paralysis, the summer scourge. I also recall a girl, held upright by braces the rest of her life, one of six to fall…

There is no way we can thank him, other than not to forget him. But we do not trust our resolve, having to look up his name. Even the name of the virus fades from our minds as strange microbes evolve and spread in Guangdong, driving out old fears with new. SARS, a benign sounding…

After Psalm 139 If humans are ninety percent bacteria, then “I”—a consortium—pray for help in keeping me all together. My microbiome is such a swarm of bits and pieces that statistical analyses can’t prove I am. Replete with coding errors and mutations, I am fearfully and wonderfully provisional. Mitochondria, packing their own genome, reside in…

When Charles Darwin sat down, finally to write his big book he wondered, not                                how it would end, but where                                on the shelf    …

Paul Shaw breeds insomniac flies. He tilts test tubes at unstable angles, then watches wide-eyed as the flies inside go haywire. Thousands of flies fly inside Paul’s hypotheses; thousands of flies defy them. As fast as he identifies a pattern, the field of sleep expands. Paul celebrated tenure in October, and all the Shaws flew…

Awake in the middle of the night, the river cracked with language, the ice of it a heave of squares and oblongs. Only the waterfall, its cold spray frosting nearby juts of stone with lace, continued to tumble as if it would never cease to move and be. Once it was, we lay down together,…

Stars and the sun are not eternal. They flare. They wither. The earth and its high mountains, its tors and spires, aspen groves, scarred and broken bristlecone pines, torrential blizzards, are not eternal.                                            Rivers and seas change courses, alter shores, appear, dwindle, vanish. The rampant floras, birds, reptiles, and mammals of tropical forests…