max s. gerber(the latest shot)

when you go to a conference on evolution, it’s hard to miss the one guy in the room who actually looks like darwin. a philosopher amongst an auditorium full of scientists, he joked that his uncanny resemblance to ol’ charles might have been the reason he was invited in the first place. dan dennett, co-director [...]

i probably watch more TV than is good for me. certainly my DVR has more of a backlog at any given point than i can comfortably manage. if i were a different kind of person i’d blame my parents – a showbiz family who, as i was growing up, not only had a television set [...]

steven pinker is a psychologist at harvard who specializes in the evolution of language. in an appearance on the colbert report he was asked to explain how the mind works in five words or less. his answer: brain cells fire in patterns.
he is a charter member of the luxuriant and flowing hair club for scientists. [...]

last week i was contacted by a woman named hilary gooding. hilary is a textile artist working on a project involving quilts of prominent scientists with the aim of displaying them in museums in the UK next year. hilary wanted to use one of my 2006 photographs of james d. watson (nobel laureate (with francis [...]

i was raised in an atheist jewish household in two of the biggest (and most liberal) cities in the country. my brother and i never even went to hebrew school. i like to say that we’re more jew-ish than jewish. we love matzo ball soup. we’re expert complainers. but no bar mitzvahs. i have no [...]

this week brings russell doolittle, of UC san diego. russell specializes in the evolution of proteins, and blood-clotting mechanisms in particular. admitedly, all these things are over my head, but having been on coumadin for the past ten-plus years i often find myself getting into blood-clotting conversations with doctors and biologists. mostly we have a [...]

searching through my various geeky news feeds today i was delighted to see that the 2009 nobel prize in chemistry went to venkatraman “venki” ramakrishnan, for his work in mapping the structure of the ribosome.
in late may i went to a symposium on evolutionary biology at cold spring harbor laboratory where i was lucky enough [...]