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.
There is a basic contradiction in the lay response to genome news. Somehow, the more we learn about how complex and nuanced gene action is, the more we seem drawn to “gene-for” explanations.
Jan 26, 2013
Giving a bump to this essay from 2011 for my students in "Individuality in medicine from antiquity to the genome age.
Jan 16, 2013
I have a piece in the Hartford Courant's special set of editorials on the Sandy Hook tragedy.
Jan 12, 2013
A quick thank you to the 126,000 or so eyeballs that fell upon these pages in 2012, and especially to fred bortz, misha, kw, and others who commented on my posts.
Jan 11, 2013
Criminomics Bears Fruit: 2037 Murder Rate Lowest Since 1964 Dylan looks like any normal six-year-old.
Dec 31, 2012
I just read Alexandra Stern’s fine new history of genetic counseling, Telling Genes (Johns Hopkins, 2012; $40 cloth/$25 paper/ $15 Kindle). Though Alex is my friend, I review her book here because her subject relates so closely to the themes of Genotopia.
Dec 13, 2012
Certain critics of rigid genetic determinism have long believed that the environment plays a major role in shaping intelligence.
Nov 20, 2012
The researchers found the meta-analyses would have led doctors to adopt useless treatments one-third of the time, and to reject helpful therapies another one-third of the time.
Nov 12, 2012
Nov 6, 2012
Call it the Biological October Surprise. Last week, just in time to potentially shape the final days of the presidential campaigns, researchers identified a particular form of a gene that is associated with Republican voting patterns.
Nov 5, 2012
Here's a level-headed article by Virginia Postrel, who finds that cancer comes in more shades than pink.
Oct 31, 2012
Good article in USA today about the way some of the breast cancer awareness promotions grossly sexualize and objectify women.
Oct 30, 2012
Hoo boy! We survived the storm, we're almost at the end of the month, and there's so much more pink crap to post!
Oct 30, 2012
Maybe I have a twisted perspective, but this strikes me as particularly bad taste: I just imagining someone one dying of breast cancer and her family being…
Oct 28, 2012
