Articles by Guest Author (207 results)

Guest post by Michele Markstein and Gregory Davis. A summary of the May 26, 2020 TAGC 2020 Online workshop, “Raising a Woke Generation of Geneticists: How and Why to Include Eugenics History in Genetics Classes.” In the wake of George Floyd’s murder by Minnesota police officers, the nation has been wrestling with how to identify and combat…

Guest post by Jennifer Tsang. Years ago, Sarah Edie and Norann Zaghloul pored over 50,000 zebrafish embryos, examining them for developmental phenotypes. They had previously injected each of these embryos with a plasmid expressing a gene from chromosome 21. Their goal was to understand how overexpression of specific genes on chromosome 21 affected early development1.…

Guest post by Erin Vinson, University of Maine and Michelle Smith, Cornell University Are you teaching genetics and looking for some new ideas? Check out CourseSource, a peer-reviewed, open-access journal that publishes field-tested articles describing undergraduate biology activities. All the activities are aligned with learning goals written by life science professional societies, including GSA. Many…

Guest author Rori Rohlfs describes a unique classroom project for exploring the eugenic history of our field. I was a fourth-year graduate student when I found myself asking a librarian for the archives of the journal The Annals of Eugenics. I got to that point by climbing back through a chain of references on fundamental…

As COVID-19 spreads across the world, members of the GSA community have had to face unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries.  If you…

We are sad to report that Dr. Karl Gordon Lark died on April 10th, 2020 from an aggressive form of prostate cancer. Karl Gordon Lark was born on December 13th, 1930 in Lafayette, Indiana to Karl and Betty Lark-Horovitz. His father was a physicist with an interest in biology. Gordon entered the University of Chicago…

As COVID-19 spreads across the world, members of the GSA community have had to face unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries.  If you…

Guest post by C. Brandon Ogbunugafor, Assistant Professor at Brown University. John Maynard Smith, born in London on January 6, 1920, was one of the great iconoclasts of the post neo-Darwinian synthesis era, a cult figure whose life was defined by notable contributions across a wide breadth of subfields [1]. He not only authored numerous…

As COVID-19 spreads across the world, members of the GSA community have had to face unprecedented challenges in their professional and personal lives. To stay connected during this socially distant time, GSA invites the scientists in our community to share how they are meeting these challenges, as well as their questions and worries.  If you…

Guest post by CourseSource Editor-in-Chief Michelle Smith and Managing Editor Erin Vinson. In partnership with Society for the Advancement of Biology Education Research (SABER) meeting, CourseSource is hosting an ONLINE Writing Studio Short Course. We have switched to an online setting because the SABER meeting will no longer be taking place in Minneapolis, MN this summer. We will offer this online…

Guest post by Alyssa Scott, Amanda Engstrom, and Teresa Lee.   As scientists, we know that social distancing is the best way to combat COVID-19. But as human beings, we’ve found that social distancing is an efficient way to quickly drain our mental health. We have a friend who, Castaway-style, puts a sticky note on the…