Category: Science and Society

  • Ten minutes with…Leslie Vosshall

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    Fernando Bejarano Last year, gender inequality in science hit the headlines of numerous major scientific journals. Several remarks from notable scientists about their thoughts on women working in science brought up again the dearth of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) fields to the public consciousness. According to the US Bureau of Labor…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part XXII: Roderick MacKinnon, 2003 Prize in Chemistry Joseph Luna In the early 1950s, two English physiologists named Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley wrote a five-part magnum opus of papers formally describing the electrochemical basis of action potentials, those short lasting impulses that travel along nerve cells. Starting with electrophysiological measurements of squid giant axons,…

  • How the approval of the “Against Mass Immigration” initiative threatens science in Switzerland

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    Juliette Wipf Over the last decade, nationalist and anti-immigration parties have gained voters throughout Europe (Front National, Golden Dawn, Alternative für Deutschland, Lega Nord, and many more). Brexit is not the first case where citizens have decided in favor of legislation that jeopardizes international academic cooperation. In Switzerland, scientific collaborations are at stake after the…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part XXI: Paul Nurse, 2001 Prize in Physiology or Medicine Joseph Luna All cells, in the end, are copies of copies. But unlike the loss of quality in the Xerox sense of making a copy, a cell needs to be perfect. It must faithfully and exactly duplicate its genetic information, gather extra membranes, energy and…

  • NYU’s “Street Science” Aims to Bridge the Gap Between STEM Fields and the Younger Generation

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    Johannes Buheitel “Cool” and “Awesome” are just two of many joyous exclamations I hear while I am trying to squeeze through the crowd of children, parents and other interested individuals filling up the NYU Kimmel Center to the brim. On Sunday, June 5, citizens from all boroughs came to Washington Square Park to engage in…

  • All Aboard the BioBus

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    Aileen Marshall What were your science laboratory classes like when you were in grade school or high school? Did you ever get a chance to use a fluorescence microscope? Or sequence DNA? I never did. What if you had never been exposed to much laboratory science during your school years, would you have gone into…

  • The price of mistakes in clinical trials

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    By Guadalupe Astorga Last January 11, a human clinical trial in phase I caused brain death in one healthy volunteer, while five others were hospitalized. Unfortunately, this is not the only case where healthy volunteers have died or been severely affected. The molecule (BIA 10-2474) produced by the pharmaceutical company Bial, is an inhibitor of…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes

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    Part XIX: Günter Blobel, 1999 Prize in Physiology or Medicine By Joseph Luna Let’s start with a fantastical scene: picture a band of Neolithic humans in a hot air balloon overlooking modern New York City. What would they see and experience? Lacking a vocabulary and a mental model of twenty-first century life, our ancient friends…

  • The Lowline

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    By Aileen Marshall Have you heard of the Lowline? No? Well maybe because it doesn’t fully exist yet. And no, it’s not under the Highline, although its name was inspired by it. It will be an underground park in an abandoned trolley terminal under Delancey Street. The park will use new solar technology to redirect…

  • Twenty-four visits to Stockholm: a concise history of the Rockefeller Nobel Prizes.

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    Part XVIII: Robert Bruce Merrifield, 1984 Prize in Chemistry By Joseph Luna By the time Bruce Merrifield sat down to write in his lab notebook in May 1959, a scientific puzzle had been twirling in his head for quite some time. What he wrote next summarized a Nobel-worthy problem and offered a bold but totally…