I have an essay in the June issue of The Atlantic, out online now and at your favorite magazine dealer or airport in a week or so. It’s an essay review centered around Siddhartha Mukherjee’s newest book, The Gene. The book is part history of genetics and part discussion of current genetic science and medicine. […]
Bloggers
The Whig interpretation of the gene
I have an essay in the June issue of The Atlantic, out online now and at your favorite magazine dealer or airport in a week or so.
Written by
Nathaniel Comfort
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.
More from this author →