Ricki Lewis
Nether region science—What’s the allure for cats of fellow feline rear ends?
Anyone who lives with more than one member of Felis catus knows that our beloved felines love to smell each other’s ...
Here’s the straight poop about fecal transplants
Fecal transplants carry a certain ick factor for many people. But there is a legitimate medical use for them -- ...
On the anniversary of Kristallnacht, as the Israel-Hamas War rages, a DNA data leak of Jewish 23andMe customers raises fears of modern-day Jewish yellow badges
Tonight is the 85th anniversary of Kristallnacht, “The Night of Broken Glass.” On November 9 and 10, 1938, Storm Troopers, ...
Will AI make biology textbook authors redundant? Here’s one author’s view of ChatGPT
I just used ChatGPT for the first time. Initially, I was concerned about my future as the chatbot near-instantaneously answered ...
How octopi can edit their own RNA to rapidly respond to environmental changes
How organisms rapidly respond to a challenge: For an octopus, that might be a sudden plunge in water temperature, which ...
Perpetuating the ‘nerd’ stereotype: Why I won’t watch Apple TV+’s ‘Lessons in Chemistry’
Lessons in Chemistry, set to debut on Apple TV+ October 13, is based on the best-selling 2022 novel by Bonnie ...
What do ‘non-identical’ identical twins have to do with COVID-19? Mutations!
Identical twins Stella and Desiree Vignes were born in 1938 in a Louisiana town so small that it wasn’t on ...
Sequencing the watermelon family tree reveals ‘lost’ disease-resistance genes that were bred out generations ago
As autumn looms, we’re enjoying the last bites of sweet, juicy watermelon ...
7,000+ rare diseases remain untreatable. The genetic revolution and federal research funding offers hope for cures, but vaccine hesitancy and a lack of newborn screening pose hurdles
There are an estimated 7,000 known rare diseases affecting 30 million people; for 95% of them, there are no treatment ...
Revelations from the embryo: Glimpses into the prenatal period
Two weeks after sperm fertilizes egg is a critical time in human prenatal development. Intricate waves of signals stamp cells ...
How COVID can lodge itself in our brains
As the fourth year of the pandemic dawns, a study published in Nature from Daniel Chertow, MD, MPH, head of ...
Why did Ellie in the Last of Us not succumb to Cordy, the zombie virus? Stem cells might explain it, and that could yield real-life vaccines
It’s unsettling to watch The Last of Us, in which parasitic fungi turn humanity into flesh-eating zombies, just as the ...
Faith genes? Can DNA predispose us to religion and spirituality?
Do our genes predispose us to follow a religion? I searched Google Scholar for reports on the inheritance of religiosity ...
Viewpoint: Why health care based on race is so problematic
Choosing a medical treatment based on patient traits historically used to define races is fundamentally flawed, because race in the ...
Genomic scars: How centuries of surviving antisemitism has shaped Jewish genetics
Between election news and the ever-earlier encroachment of Christmas, an important November anniversary of a horrific event goes mostly unnoticed: ...
How might we adapt to fast-changing global temperatures? 2-million year old ‘environmental DNA’ offers clues
The reconstruction of a once-living landscape in northern Greenland from 2 million years ago, deduced from bits of DNA bound ...
Can we know for sure COVID’s origins? Why is Omicron so persistent? Knowing how evolution works provides guidance
The latest phrase borrowed from biology in COVID conversations is convergent evolution. It refers to pairs of unrelated species that ...
How cats got their stripes: The mystery of color patterns in mammals
In 1902’s Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling famously explained how the leopard got his spots in what would today be deemed an ...
Evoking Jeff Goldblum’s ‘The Fly’: Does growing human ‘brains-in-a-dish’ and creating chimeras cross a bioethical line?
Bits of human brain growing in a lab dish can reveal a great deal about how a disease begins and ...
3-years and counting: GLP contributing writer and geneticist Ricki Lewis highlights 100 articles on the COVID pandemic
Three years ago, health officials in China announced the first cases of infection with a “novel coronavirus.” Dr. Zhang Jixian reported ...
Live to 150? That’s what some AI algorithms claim is possible. What does the science say?
We’re obsessed with aging. In the quest to prolong life while remaining healthy, people have tried everything from turtle soup ...
How Freddie Mercury got his voice: It wasn’t his teeth
Was Freddie Mercury's magnificent voice aided by a genetic defect? ...
Naturally saffron-flavored rice? Here’s how scientists are using genetically modified tobacco and lemon to recreate the world’s most expensive spice
Biotechnology mass-produces valuable molecules from nature, from drugs to textiles to a jellyfish protein that lights up most anything a ...
‘Lessons in Chemistry’: New Apple TV series based on best-selling book has opportunity to skewer sexism while challenging the ‘nerd stereotype’
I loved Lessons in Chemistry, the hit novel by Bonnie Garmus, and I’m thrilled that Apple TV+ picked it up ...
Diversity, inclusion and the Human Pangenome Project: Why capturing human genome diversity in our 4-letter language is such a big deal
“Pan” has several meanings. As a noun, it refers to “a round metal container that often has a long handle ...
Gene therapy approvals now at four with treatments for inherited anemia and degenerative brain condition — but costs are stratospheric. Why?
The FDA recently approved two gene therapies with hefty price tags, the first for an inherited anemia and the second ...
Here is the story behind Svante Pääbo’s Nobel Prize for sequencing the genome of Neandertals and discovering another ancestor, the Denisovans
I was thrilled to learn of the awarding of the 2022 Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine to Svante Pääbo, ...
Viewpoint: In the post Roe v Wade world, what changes should a biology textbook writer make to address the medical repercussions of Dobbs?
I’ve published 38 editions of several college life science textbooks since 1982. All have covered human prenatal development and assisted ...
