Featured series 
Tag: A Life in Science
-
Science & Tech
The Postdocs – II
Miriah Meyer isn’t a biologist, but she helps biologists better understand their work. A postdoctoral research fellow in computer science in Harvard’s School of Engineering and Applied Sciences (SEAS), Meyer spends her work hours not at SEAS, but rather in a biology lab at Harvard Medical School, learning how DNA affects the development of thousands…
-
Science & Tech
The Postdocs
Some physicists spend their lives obsessed with questions about the possibility of parallel universes, or of travel at the speed of light. Amy Rowat is obsessed with the mechanical properties of the tiny cell nucleus, and how changes in its shape affect the cell’s physiological function. She also is applying her training as a soft-matter physicist to the question of…
-
Science & Tech
Geology is destiny
As a teenager in Toronto in the 1950s, Paul Hoffman would spend hours in the Royal Ontario Museum studying its collection of rocks and minerals. He became a passionate collector, trading rocks with friends and exploring abandoned mines in search of crystals.
-
Science & Tech
Carol Robinson: Pushing a technology’s boundaries
The distinguished chemist Carol Robinson has used mass spectrometry throughout her career to tackle increasingly complex problems in biology. When she delivered the Radcliffe Institute’s first Lecture in the Sciences of the academic year, last Oct. 6, she chose the title “Reading Between the Spectral Lines,” referring to the jagged lines of data produced by…
-
Science & Tech
Countway marks development of ‘the pill’
The birth control pill, which revolutionized contraception and sparked a cultural reassessment of the purpose of sex and the sanctity of life, was developed by a Harvard fertility doctor who believed people should have children early in life — and as many as they could afford. John Rock, a Harvard College and Harvard Medical School…
-
Science & Tech
Narayanamurti named director of Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Belfer Center
Venkatesh “Venky” Narayanamurti will be the new director of the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Belfer Center director Graham Allison announced April 1. “Dean Venky,” as he is widely known, is the John A. and Elizabeth S. Armstrong Professor of Engineering and Applied…
-
Health
Connie Cepko
In some ways, Connie Cepko’s job has gotten easier. The Harvard Medical School genetics professor is working to uncover the mysteries of the eye, to understand how it develops and what can go wrong. Her work ranges from understanding the genetic roots of diseases like retinitis pigmentosa, which afflicts 100,000 Americans, to basic genetic research…
-
Health
Microbiologist Gary Ruvkun:
Gary Ruvkun has made a career out of imagining the unimaginable, and of surrounding himself with like-minded thinkers who let the wheels of thought spin until they catch on something hard, gain traction, and take off. In the early 1990s, the thoughts of Ruvkun and colleague Victor Ambros caught on the idea of microRNA, tiny…
-
Health
Driven:
When the baby vomited again, Gail Melton knew something was seriously wrong with her second child, a son she and her husband, Doug Melton, had named Sam. She phoned Doug and took Sam to Harvard Health Services in Holyoke Center. Doug hurried to the clinic from his Fairchild Biochemistry Building lab on Divinity Avenue, where,…
-
Science & Tech
Peter Ashton: A legacy written in trunk, limb and leaf
They were in a bind, no doubt about it. Wearing little but cotton shorts, the four men huddled on a streambank deep in the Bornean rainforest. Water dripped from their soggy clothes, making muddy pools around their feet as they assessed the situation. They were surrounded by a forest so vast that it would take…
-
Health
Louise Ivers: ‘I can’t sleep at night because of the things that I see.’
Louise Ivers gently lifted the 7-month-old by his forearms, hoping he would pull himself up as a healthy child a third his age might. But his head hung limply back, eyes wide, upper body slack. At 7 months, when a healthy child would be sitting up on his own and thinking about crawling, this baby…
-
Health
M. Judah Folkman, biomedical pioneer, dies at 74
One of Harvard Medical School’s (HMS) most forward-looking and innovative physician-scientists, M. Judah Folkman, died suddenly Monday (Jan. 14) after suffering a heart attack at the Denver International Airport in Denver. He was 74. Folkman is widely known as a pioneer in the study of angiogenesis, the growth of new blood vessels. His findings in…
-
Science & Tech
Gonzalo Giribet
They had sifted through the forest floor’s leaves and dirt for days, looking for a tiny type of daddy longlegs native to New Zealand, but had little more than dirty hands to show for it. Gonzalo Giribet, a professor of organismic and evolutionary biology, managed to remain upbeat, but with each passing day the sick…
-
Science & Tech
From overviews of landscapes to inner views of cells
The photographs are stunning abstracts that look as though they should be hung above a mantle or in a fine art gallery. But these aren’t primarily works of art; they are images of scientific phenomena. The images were made by Felice Frankel, a senior research fellow at Harvard University’s Initiative in Innovative Computing. Frankel brings…
-
Campus & Community
Wakeley examines ancestral lines
John Wakeley is devising new ways to trace the evolutionary road taken by humans and the creatures with whom we share planet Earth by creating new models that examine how DNA has changed over time. A theoretical population geneticist, Wakeley’s research focuses on how our DNA changes as it is passed from generation to generation.…
-
Science & Tech
Blogging from the Ugandan forest
A Web log, or blog, co-written by Harvard researcher Ian Gilby, working in Uganda’s Kibale Forest, makes vivid the family lives of chimpanzees. The blog, on the Anthropology Department Web site, also provides an unusual glimpse into the daily life of a field scientist. The blog was the brainchild of Alex Georgiev, a graduate student…
-
Campus & Community
Spar takes on boom in baby biz
The field of reproductive technologies has become a fast- growing and profitable economic sector. “Parents choose for different traits, clinics woo clients, and specialized providers earn millions of dollars,” points out Harvard Business School Professor Debora Spar in her book, “The Baby Business: How Money, Science and Politics Drive the Commerce of Conception.” Some parents…
-
Campus & Community
Three weeks in tiny tunnel pay off
After three weeks in a tiny tunnel 50 feet below an ancient Maya pyramid in the Guatemalan jungle, Peabody Museum researcher Bill Saturno finally got to view his prize. Fine lines and dramatic colors emerged from the tunnel’s gloom, depicting a story of the gods who created the Maya world. “It’s really like a Mayan…
-
Campus & Community
Using physics to understand biology
Anita Goel is using the tools of physics to examine one of the most basic processes of biology, the way genetic information is extracted from DNA molecules and how this process is influenced by the environment. Goel, an associate of the Physics Department, is hoping her unique approach will lead to both a new understanding…
-
Science & Tech
Einstein’s rings in space
In a 1936 paper, Albert Einstein described how the gravitational field from a massive object can warp space and thereby deflect light. In special cases, the light from a distant object can be so distorted that it creates a complete ring known as an “Einstein ring.” The distortion maps the distribution of matter creating the…
-
Health
Zoologist says in animal kingdom, less is more
Harvard researcher Piotr Naskrecki hopes his new book, “The Smaller Majority” (Harvard University Press, 2005), will win over some new advocates for the tiny creatures he has spent his life studying. It is a gorgeous book, featuring hundreds of photographs from Naskrecki’s expeditions in Latin America, Africa, Australia, and the South Pacific. Naskrecki has trained…
-
Health
Special delivery brings fats to immune system
It was both unexpected and unsurprising when, in the mid -1990s, Michael Brenner, the Theodore Bevier Bayles professor of medicine, and his colleagues showed that some antigen- presenting cells display fats rather than proteins. Arrayed on CD1, a new type of serving tray distinct from MHC molecules, fat-containing antigens derived from the tuberculosis bacterium ably…
-
Health
Solving the mystery of a centuries-old plague
Edward O. Wilson identified two different ant species in investigating the mystery of centuries-old plagues, a tropical fire ant in the early 1500s and an introduced African ant in the late 1700s. Both ant plagues came with widespread crop destruction that Wilson blames on the arrival of sap-sucking insects that are tended by the ants…
-
Health
DNA splicing enzyme observed in action
Researchers in the lab of Tom Ellenberger, the Hsien Wu and Daisy Yen Wu professor of biological chemistry and molecular pharmacology at Harvard Medical School, reported the doughnut shape of human ligase I in the Nov. 25, 2004 issue of Nature. The details revealed by the ringlike structure suggest new ideas about the functions of…
-
Science & Tech
Studying Boston’s race trends
Guy Stuart, an associate professor of public policy at the Kennedy School of Government, is the author of a new study, “Boston at the Crossroads: Racial Trends in the Metropolitan Region in the 1990s and Beyond.” “The rest of America looks very different from Boston,” Stuart said. “Whites here are very isolated. When kids go…
-
Campus & Community
Race, class still matter
Even as she was marching proudly through academia, earning a Ph.D. in sociology from Yale and a fellowship and ultimately assistant professorship at Harvard, Vivian Shuh Ming Louie saw family members and friends from her former Chinatown neighborhood struggling to stay in, or get into, college. Turning a scholarly lens on this experience, Louie produced…
-
Campus & Community
The brains behind writer’s block
“It’s likely that writing and other creative work involve a push-pull interaction between the frontal and temporal lobes,” Harvard Medical School neurology instructor Alice Flaherty speculates. If the temporal lobe activity holds sway, an aspiring scribe may turn out 600 logorrheic pages. If the temporal lobes are restrained by frontal lobe changes, the result might…
-
Science & Tech
Researcher Mia Ong finds physics ‘glass ceiling’ intact
If you’re anything other than a middle-aged white guy, your appearance matters profoundly in physics, where appearances aren’t supposed to matter, found Graduate School of Education researcher Maria “Mia” Ong. Ong’s research emerged from a much larger study of physics undergraduates and graduates at a large research university. While conducting interviews with these students, she…