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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…

Last night, a milieu of scientists, Congressional staffers, members of Congress, and representatives from the National Science Foundation (NSF) filled the banquet room of the Rayburn House Office Building to show how investments in STEM research and education are fueling American innovation. Among those scientists was GSA member Ahna Skop, an Associate Professor of Genetics and…

The 4th annual USA Science & Engineering Festival in Washington, D.C. attracted more than 365,000 attendees who engaged in over 3,000 hands-on activities. GSA piqued the interest of 5,000 participants by asking them to help choose “America’s Next Top Model Organism” or to build their own Drosophila mutant.  This year, the Top Model Organism was C.elegans, taking the title from…

Last year, GSA launched a new initiative to support our student and postdoc members who have ideas for local workshops on topics related to genetics research. The Advocating Translational Genetics/Genomics Conference in St. Louis (ATGC-STL) held at Harris Stowe State University (HSSU) was one of the first Trainee Organized Symposia to be funded through this…

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…

At the time of her death in 1912, Nettie Maria Stevens was a biologist of enough repute to be eulogized in the journal Science by future Nobelist Thomas Hunt Morgan and for her passing to be noted in The New York Times. In 1910 she had been listed among 1,000 leading American “men of science.”…

In preparation for The Allied Genetics Conference (TAGC), set to take place in Orlando this July, Genes to Genomes is getting the inside scoop from many of the outstanding keynote speakers in our “Behind the Podium” series. Here, GSA member Sarah Neuman interviews National Institutes of Health Director, Francis Collins.     As the former…

You may have seen that recently several publishers signed an open letter committing to requiring ORCID iDs for at least the corresponding authors of accepted papers. Perhaps you’ve submitted a grant application to one of the funders now requiring ORCID iDs for grantees. Or maybe you’ve been asked—or required—to use your ORCID iD in one…

In the early 1940s, many biologists doubted bacteria had genes. After all, they seemed to play by their own genetic rules: they appeared to lack chromosomes, meiosis, mitosis, sex, and all the other trappings of Mendelian inheritance. They even seemed to show a kind of Lamarckian inheritance, in which an individual could pass on traits acquired…

In 2014, Bruce Alberts, Marc Kirschner, Shirley Tilghman, and Harold Varmus published an article in PNAS detailing the pitfalls and challenges of the structure of the biomedical workforce. Though many have written about and discussed these problems before, people seemed to pay attention to the conversation this time. Scientists at all stages of their careers…

GSA has begun to receive feedback from our members about the Maximizing Investigators’ Research Award (MIRA) program from NIH’s National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS). And we are interested to hear your perspective, especially if you were eligible to apply for MIRA.   Please let us know what you consider the strengths and weaknesses of…