Adela Torres studied Biology, specializing in Biochemistry. After finishing her degree, she was a participant in the Arabidopsis thaliana Genome Sequencing Project, and after getting a fellowship from Fundación La Caixa spent five years researching DNA mismatch repair in plants at Oregon State University. Even though she doesn't work in research anymore, science is still her main passion.
When the general media report news about genetics, there is a deplorable tendency towards gene determinism. Headlines in the vein of “Gene for X discovered”—where X is anything from a physical trait to a complex behavior—are regrettably common, and almost always incorrect. That’s why I face this article with some trepidation. Because, you see, there […]
Smell has often been the neglected sense, despite—or, hopefully, until—the increasing number of interesting discoveries being made about and around it. Trivially, smells are interpreted as a series of neurochemical reactions mediated by receptors; this is no novelty, and at the single-molecule and single-neuron level the mechanism (how a molecule triggers a specific receptor which […]