Featured series 
Tag: A Life in Science
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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.
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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,…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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…
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Nation & World
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.…