A Conversation with Jonathan Scheiman

A Conversation with Jonathan Scheiman

T he weeks before and after the 2015 Boston Marathon were busy times for Jonathan Scheiman. “I was riding around Boston five hours a day picking up s--in a Zipcar and putting it on dry ice on the back seat,” he says. The fecal cargo came from 20 marathon runners. Scheiman and his colleagues at Harvard University brought the samples back to their lab and sequenced the DNA in the feces to identif...

Philosophy, Art and Critique: A (short) conversation with the “other”

The article sketches a nexus between philosophy, art (poetry) and critique with a particular emphasis on the contribution of classical Muslim philosophers. At the same time, it demonstrates how luminaries such as Omar Khayyam and Ibn Sina, contributed to the renewal of philosophy as a freedom seeking exercise and as a means to pursue happiness through knowledge. In the second&nbs...

Jonathan Martin Whitfield, MB ChB, FRCP(C): a conversation with the editor. Interview by William Clifford Roberts.

A Conversation with Graham Hutchings

G raham Hutchings of Cardiff University made a discovery in 1982 that came to define his career. He predicted that golddespite its reputation for being inertshould be an excellent catalyst for an industrial reaction that makes vinyl chloride monomer (VCM, or chloroethene), used to produce one of the world’s most ubiquitous plastics, polyvinyl chloride (PVC). More than three decades later, Hut...

A Conversation with Manu Prakash

S tanford bioengineer Manu Prakash specializes in frugal science: engineering cheap, easy-to-use diagnostic tools for the developing world, especially remote areas where bulky, electric-powered lab equipment is impractical. In 2014, Prakash debuted the Foldscopea foldable paper microscope designed to detect blood-borne pathogensas well as a chemistry kit-on-a-chip to carry out diagnostic assa...