In a destitute hospital in the crowded African city of Kikwit, townspeople, nurse, and doctors are dying of a gruesome disease at the rate of more than a dozen a day. Zaire is on the brink of an explo
It was home to Einstein in decline, the place where Kurt Goedel starved himself in paranoid delusion, and where J. Robert Oppenheimer rode out his political persecution in the Director’s mansion. It i
Ordinary white rice is nutrient poor; it consists of carbohydrates and little else. About one million people who subsist on rice become blind or die each year from vitamin A deficiency. Golden Rice, w
Oh, the humanity!” Radio reporter Herbert Morrison’s words on witnessing the destruction of theHindenburg are etched in our collective memory. Yet, while the Hindenburglike theTitanicis a symbol of th
It's the ultimate technology: nanotechnology—the attempt to build ordinary objects from the atoms up, molecule by molecule. So named because its building blocks are the smallest pieces of matter, nano
Imagine a future in which human beings have become immune to all viruses, in which bacteria can custom-produce everyday items, like a drinking cup, or generate enough electricity to end oil dependency
A genetics professor at Harvard Medical School explains why he supports engineering genomes to make existing organisms more useful and describes how synthetic biology can create new life forms and re
