She Has Her Mother's Laugh #478

June 15, 2018

What does heredity really mean? Carl Zimmer would argue it's more than your genes along. In "She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity", Zimmer covers the history of genetics and what kinship and heredity really mean when we're discovering how to alter our own DNA, and, potentially, the DNA of our children.

Guests:

  • Carl Zimmer

Guest Bios

Carl Zimmer

Carl Zimmer is the author of thirteen books about science. His newest book is "She Has Her Mother’s Laugh: The Power, Perversions, and Potential of Heredity". His column, "Matter", appears each week in the New York Times. His writing has earned a number of awards, including the 2016 Stephen Jay Gould Prize, awarded by the Society for the Study of Evolution to recognize individuals whose sustained efforts have advanced public understanding of evolutionary science. In 2017, he won an Online Journalism Award for his series of articles in which he explored his genome. A professor adjunct at Yale University, he is a familiar voice on programs such as Radiolab. He lives in Connecticut with his wife Grace and their children, Charlotte and Veronica. He is, to his knowledge, the only writer after whom a species of tapeworm has been named.