When I gave a talk on fossils last year at the Boerhaave Museum in Leiden, my Dutch friends told me to be sure to include a mention of the Maastricht mosasaur, the most famous fossil Maastricht mosasaurus. Wikimedia in the Netherlands, even though I was actually talking about much more recent fossils such as mammoths. …
A few weeks ago I looked at some manuscripts of the French intellectual and antiquarian Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc (1580-1637) at the Bibliothèque Méjanes in Aix-en-Provence, France. I describe Peiresc as an “intellectual”; he was one of those universal scholars we find in early modern Europe who were interested in everything. Peiresc’s fame, such as …
I’m always looking for skeleton stories. But it’s not often that I come across an article in the scientific literature that includes references to the ancient Greek physician and herbalist Dioscorides (ca. 40-90 CE) or the medieval abbess and scholar St. Hildegard of Bingen (1098-1179). So this open-access article in Science Advances, “Medieval women’s early …
12 September 2015 A week ago I drove up to Portland with my grad student Elizabeth to interview the biologist John Tyler Bonner. We were both amused, or bemused, by the declaration of the Institutional Review Board at Oregon State that the interview did not qualify as research (and therefore did not need IRB approval, …
Continue reading The biologist in the ashram (with a walk-on by Harpo Marx)
25 May 2015 An update: the Benton County anti-GMO ballot measure 2-89 went down to a resounding defeat in last week's election: you can read an account in the Corvallis newspaper here. It was not clear to voters that the measure would not ban genetically-related research at Oregon State University (its language indicated a blanket …
To appear from the University of Chicago Press on May 20. See the Chicago website or Amazon. Book launch party at OSU on May 21. More soon!
Anita Guerrini 