To my surprise, I discovered that anesthesiologists are a bit in the dark themselves. How anesthesia works has been a mystery since the discovery of anesthesia itself, writes Michael Alkire, an anesth...
To eliminate feeblemindedness, Goddard rejected the calls of people like McKim to kill the feebleminded. But he did want to make sure they didn’t get to have children. And by they, Goddard mostly mean...
They have come up with a bold idea: Our minds, too, are shaped by conflict between our parents’ genes.
The story of the Kallikaks, Goddard concluded, was a powerful argument for rounding up the feebleminded and putting them in colonies, at least until a better solution could be found.
The idea of a pure race is not even a legitimate abstraction, Dobzhansky wrote. It is a subterfuge to cloak one’s ignorance.
The Galtons were a pious family of Quakers, but by the end of the 1700s, the wealth they made from war and slavery had largely turned the Society of Friends against them. In 1790, a faction of Quakers...
The Danish plant physiologist Wilhelm Johannsen gave Mendel’s factors a new name: genes. As to the nature of the ‘genes,’ Johannsen warned, it is as yet of no value to propose any hypothesis.
Influenza. If you close your eyes and say the word aloud, it sounds lovely. It would make a good name for a pleasant, ancient Italian village.
In 1950, a thirty-year-old scientist named Rosalind Franklin arrived at King’s College London to study the shape of DNA. She and a graduate student named Raymond Gosling created crystals of DNA, which...
In 1939, Hitler expanded his campaign against the feebleminded, launching a program to kill children judged to be idiots, along with those suffering deformities. Their parents were told that they had...
Chromosomes were chemical mixtures, including proteins as well as a mysterious molecule called deoxyribonucleic acid, or DNA for short.
Careful imitation could also explain why hand axes managed to stay so similar to each other for over a million years. If Homo erectus simply looked over old hand axes to guess how to make them, they w...
By one estimate, genealogy has now become the second-most-popular search topic on the Internet. It is outranked only by porn.
And of those responding neurons, 51 fired in response to only a single person or thing. One neuron responded only to Halle Berry, for example. Amazingly, the Halle Berry neuron responded to any pictur...
Among children who grew up in affluent families, the heritability was about 60 percent. But twins from poorer families showed no greater correlation than other siblings. Their heritability was close t...
A child’s humors might be able to weaken that impression. Or a healthy parent’s seed could sometimes counter a diseased one. The defect still lurked in the child, who could then pass it down to its ow...
When he bred them, he would discover variations among their offspring.
We use words like sister and aunt as if they describe rigid laws of biology. But despite our genetic essentialism, these laws are really only rules of thumb. Under the right conditions, they can be re...
They found that the fetal cells from their sons reached their brains, sprouted branches, and pumped out neurotransmitters. Their sons helped shape their thoughts.
Psychiatrists devised intelligence tests for the courts. In one exam, they gave subjects a suitcase, books, bottles, and other objects. They had to pack the suitcase so that the lid could be easily cl...