Everybody gets older, although not everyone ages in the same way. For many people, late life includes a deterioration of health brought on by age-related disease. Yet there are also people who retain a more youthful vigor, and around the world, women typically live longer than men. Why is that? In this episode, Steven Strogatz speaks with Judith Campisi and Dena Dubal... Source ..read more

A humbling lesson of science is that, even when it comes to many of humanity’s most brilliant inventions, nature got there first. The 2020 selection for the Nobel Prize in Chemistry goes to two scientists who share credit for identifying and developing a revolutionary method of genome editing — one that has allowed researchers to modify and investigate the genomes of microbial, plant and animal cells with an ease, precision and effectiveness that seemed unfathomable even a decade ago. Yet the technology based on their work, transformative as it has been, springs from an innovation that fi ..read more

In the closing paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin urged readers to “contemplate a tangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” Those plants, birds, insects and worms, he continued, all evolved as they did because of the complex web of ecological factors in which they’d been embedded. Had the temperature been hotter, the water more acidic or a certain species of grass absent, a very different “tangled bank” might have evolved instead. Researchers ha ..read more

No one needs to remind Jennifer Doudna about the power of CRISPR, the precision genome-editing technology she codeveloped. CRISPR “gives us a way to ultimately control the evolution of any organism — including ourselves. It is a profound thing. Human beings have now learned enough about our own genetic code that we can change it at will,” she said. “It’s kind of crazy to think about.” That’s why when reports emerged last November that the scientist He Jiankui of the Southern University of Science and Technology in Shenzhen, China, had used CRISPR to alter the DNA of twin baby girls — crossing ..read more

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 rules of inheritance by making sure they get passed down to all of their host organism’s offspring, not just to half of them; they therefore have the unnerving potential to rapidly and irrevocably alter a population. Much of the controversy about gene drives has centered on the practicality (and hubris) of using them to control dangerous insect pests, since insects were about the only animals in which gene drives had b ..read more

The nucleus of a cell has something in common with a cardboard box full of kittens: People get so fascinated by the contents that they overlook the container. The nucleus itself is often treated as no more than a featureless membranous bag for holding the vitally dynamic genetic material. Yet in fact it has specialized parts and an internal architecture of its own, and scientists have long speculated that precisely how the DNA positions itself with respect to those parts might matter a great deal. Now a team of researchers is finding credible evidence that this is true and possibly an importan ..read more

Despite being introduced only a half dozen years ago, the simple and powerful DNA editing tool called CRISPR-Cas is now routinely hailed as one of the greatest biotechnology advances of the past century. This morning, three pioneers in the development of this nanotechnology — Emmanuelle Charpentier of the Max Planck Institute for Infection Biology in Berlin, Jennifer Doudna of the University of California, Berkeley, and Virginijus Šikšnys of Vilnius University in Lithuania — were awarded a Kavli Prize, among the most prestigious accolades recognizing outstanding accomplishments in nanoscience ..read more

As the revolutionary CRISPR technology for modifying genomes has taken off in recent years, one daring potential application has caught the attention of conservation scientists, policymakers, public health workers and others: It could be used to create so-called gene drives to eliminate or control unwanted species. Experts debating the wisdom or perils of that approach have often reached very different answers. A new paper being published today makes a case that caution is warranted. Using computer modeling, it suggests that in at least some forms, the drives may be more invasive than previous ..read more