Contributor
Nathaniel Comfort is a professor in the Department of the History of Medicine at The Johns Hopkins University. From 1997 to 2002, he was on the history faculty at The George Washington University, where he also served as Deputy Director of the Center for History of Recent Science. The Center’s director and founder was Horace Freeland Judson (The Eighth Day of Creation), who, along with John McPhee and Monty Python, Comfort considers among his biggest writing influences. Comfort’s books include The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001), and the edited volume, The Panda’s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Debate (Johns Hopkins, 2007). In addition to scholarly articles, he has written for Natural History, the New York Times Book Review, National Public Radio, Nature, Science, New Scientist, The Believer, and other publications. Should he expire tomorrow, he would be survived, in decreasing size order, by a son, a wife, a daughter, a dog, a cat, another cat, and still another cat.
10) Links between genetic determinism and white supremacy remain strong. 9) The staunchest Dawkins followers got nothin'. 8) Wasps are brainless but extremely aggressive.
Sep 15, 2015
Dull, dull, dull, my God it's dull! It's so desperately dull and tedious and stuffy and boring and des-per-ate-ly DULL!
Sep 9, 2015
From our friends over at NursingClio we learn of a terrific piece of new health gadgetry, just for women.
Jul 22, 2015
[caption id="" align="alignnone" width="749"] (from The Nation)[/caption] In a new piece out today in The Nation, I argue that both the hand-waving and the…
Jul 16, 2015
Jun 25, 2015
“Nobel scientist Tim Hunt: female scientists cause trouble for men in labs. English biochemist tells conference women in laboratories ‘fall in love with you…
Jun 12, 2015
"Precision medicine" has become a biomedical buzzword, largely replacing "personalized" or "individualized" medicine.
May 13, 2015
Check out my new review in Nature's Spring Books issue. Three books on the genome and junk DNA.
Apr 30, 2015
[Edit: I'm going to brazenly steal from my friend Keith and rename this post. Once I slept on it and my rage cooled, it became apparent that "Are you !@#$%…
Apr 10, 2015
Today, the Library of Congress and NASA announced my new gig for next year, as the Baruch Blumberg Chair of Astrobiology at the LC.
Apr 7, 2015
Imagine going “on safari” across Europe in 1939. Out of a nearby bunker steps none other than Adolf Hitler.
Apr 1, 2015
Academic colleagues of mine who are only slightly or not at all involved with social media often ask me why I do it, while those of us who are involved often…
Feb 16, 2015
This is one of the most serious pieces ever posted on Genotopia. As the shooting at the French humor magazine Charlie Hebdo shows, satire can be dangerous business.
Jan 7, 2015
I received two nice holiday gifties: My recent essay on race, genetics, and the Nicholas Wade affair heads up Nature’s top 10 list of Books & Arts…
Dec 19, 2014
