Articles by Stan Fields (26 results)

The recent Brexit vote may initiate a break up of the European Union and a split in the United Kingdom. Violence and war is tearing apart the Middle East. Racial tensions are flaring up in the U.S. But in Florida two weeks ago, 3,000 model organism geneticists proved that separate communities not only can co-exist…

One of Shakespeare’s First Folios was recently on loan from the Folger Library to Seattle, and my wife and I went to view it. You don’t have to be a theatre-lover to feel awestruck peering at the page opened at: “To be or not to be…” in a printing from Shakespeare’s troupe made shortly after…

My apologies for this blog post to Sir William Schwenck Gilbert, who collaborated with Sir Arthur Sullivan on a series of comic operas that included The Pirates of Penzance. Pirates premiered in 1879 and featured a song called “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” and I am far from the first to…

In my thirty plus years as a faculty member I’ve had a lot of people in tears sitting in my office. Too many to tally, really. They were women and men, grad students and postdocs, from the U.S. and abroad, from my lab and other labs. How do we – charged with responsibility for the…

We biologists can be a credit-hungry lot. Getting a paper into press that shows we were first to make a discovery best satisfies our appetite for affirmation. But has the trend to slice each piece of credit ever finer gone too far? (While perhaps easy for a senior member of the field like me to…

As a geneticist, when I get asked by a friend or neighbor to explain what I do for a living more than just being a biologist, I might say something like: “I work on understanding how proteins function using yeast and other model organisms.” Besides that look of incomprehension that suggests I may have absent-mindedly…

American titans of industry are approaching the business of medical philanthropy just as they do their day jobs: in a big way. It’s not unusual to hear of gifts in the hundreds of millions of dollars, if not the occasional one with close to yet another digit to the left. The inevitable institutes and research…

If you’re reading this, you’re likely passionate about genetics. Now if I ask which of your passions cause you to donate money, some of you might say public radio and the Sierra Club. Or Doctors Without Borders and Amnesty International. Or World Vision and Habitat for Humanity. But my guess is your answer won’t include…

When I was 21, I spent a year in the Department of Biochemistry at the University of Cambridge, at the end of which I hoped to stay on in Cambridge for graduate work. The Biochemistry curriculum included a set of lab-based projects, and so I found myself one fine spring morning spreading E. coli onto…

If you’re producing a network news show and want a perspective on how some policy will affect global health, you could do worse than ask Bill Gates, who has almost invented this area of philanthropy. If you need to interview someone on economic prospects for the coming year, you could ask Janet Yellen, who would…

The Allied Genetics Conference – TAGC – is coming up soon (July 13 to 17 in Orlando), with an abstract submission deadline of March 23. This pan-genetics meeting features seven of the GSA communities: C. elegans; Ciliates; Drosophila; Mouse; Population, Evolutionary & Quantitative Genetics; Yeast; and Zebrafish. I think you should be there, because someday…