Neil Shubin
Linkage 7/22: Smarter Dosing and Fossil Diaries
A large portion of medical research is dedicated to designing and testing new and better drugs for treating disease. But what if we could improve treatments with the drugs we already have – and potentially cut costs at the same time? That’s the proposal made in an editorial this week in the Journal of the […]
A Time Machine for Limb Evolution
It’s one of the most significant events in Earth’s history: the moment when a sea creature first stepped – or more likely wriggled – onto land. The momentous occasion 400 million years ago opened up a whole new habitat where life on Earth could evolve and spread out, and made that first bold pioneer and […]
Linkage 6/3: Quantrell Award and Gloopy Transplants
Teaching with Treadmills Inside the Biological Sciences Learning Center on the Medical Center campus is a laboratory that looks more like a gymnasium. Six state-of-the-art treadmills and six futuristic exercise bikes sit around the room, each connected to a computer alongside modified oxygen masks and suction cup sensors. Instead of dissecting frogs or mixing chemicals, […]
Linkage 5/6: Shubin Honors, The Life Cycle of Drugs, & Bin Laden’s DNA
More Honors for Shubin In 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln signed an order creating the National Academy of Sciences, an organization bringing together the country’s most esteemed scientists to “investigate, examine, experiment, and report upon any subject of science or art.” From the original 50 members, the group has blossomed […]
“Graduate Students Can Change Everything”
The unsung heroes of scientific research are the graduate students*. Graduate students provide the enthusiasm to run experiments 7 days a week and all hours of the day and night to generate data for publications and their own thesis projects. The fresh perspective a graduate student brings to an area of research can also provide […]
The Lost, Species-Scrambling Extinction
In the Devonian Period of roughly 400 million years ago, fish were the masters of Earth, filling the seas and rivers with enormous diversity from the 30-foot-long Dunkleosteus to lobe-finned fishes like the modern lungfish. Then, 359 million years ago, something happened. The fossil record tells a clear before-and-after story: Dunkleosteus and its family members, […]
Relive Darwin/Chicago in Video Form
Six months ago, some of the world’s brightest evolutionary biologists and scholars gathered on the University of Chicago campus for a three-day birthday party celebrating Charlie Darwin’s 200th. At the time, the blog featured live-ish coverage of the event wherein I tried my best to capture the fascinating lectures and discussion on display at Rockefeller […]
Linkage 1/8: Tetrapod Tracks & Cell-Phone Therapy
Do Polish Tracks Trump Tiktaalik? A bit of a firestorm with local significance was stirred up this week when a paper published in Nature purported to reset the clock on when marine animals took their first step out of water. Grzegorz Niedzwiedzki and colleagues from Warsaw and Sweden presented a fossil “trackway” made up of […]
Darwin/Chicago 2009: Saturday
4:15 p.m. – Of Mice and Mammoths The last talk of the day (for me, as I had to leave before the final, final talk) made for a great reminder of how far the field of evolutionary biology, wrapped in a relatively simple story told engagingly by Hopi Hoekstra of Harvard. Hoekstra described her research […]
An Award for Your Inner Fish
Whenever I see a drawing of Tiktaalik like the one above, I always think “Man, that walking fish sure looks snooty.” But Tiktaalik roseae, discovered in 2004 by University of Chicago evolutionary biologist Neil Shubin and his team in the Canadian Arctic, is worthy of its haughty air. For one thing, the “fishapod” had a […]
