disarticulation

The unlikely path that Thumbi Ndung’u followed to become a world-class AIDS researcher began in a rural highland village in Kenya. Ndung’u grew up with five brothers and five sisters in a house with no running water or electricity. He picked coffee beans and milked the family cows when he wasn’t at school. By Kenyan standards, he was middle class, and his father was a hardworking teacher at a neighborhood school. It would take a series of lucky breaks for this gifted scientist to wend his way to the Ph.D. program at Harvard University, becoming the first scientist to clone HIV subtype C—the most prevalent strain of HIV in Africa and one long ignored by Western scientists.

Paulo Mazzafera punched a pea-sized disc out of a waxy green coffee leaf, then placed the disc in a small vial with a mixture of chloroform and methanol to dissolve it. Later, he loaded the extract, along with 95 other samples, into a high-performance liquid chromatography machine, which separates out each chemical component. When the plant physiologist returned to his lab at the University of Campinas in Brazil the next morning, he sat down at his laptop to examine the results. Scrolling from one chromatogram to the next, he scrutinized the peak representing caffeine. In one plant, it was missing.

Mazzafera ran the sample twice more and then, just before noon, called his collaborator Bernadete Silvarolla, based at the agricultural station nearby, to share the news. “Are you sure?” she asked. He was. In fact, he was thrilled. After screening thousands of plants over the course of two decades, his project to find a naturally caffeine-free coffee finally seemed to be bearing fruit. That was in late 2003.

The US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has missed a self-imposed deadline to release recommendations for the regulation of dioxins. The 31 January cut-off was part of a reassessment process that has stretched out for 20 years, but the agency has promised to finalize its guidelines “as expeditiously as possible”, although it gave no new deadline.

One fine afternoon last may, Jayne Belnap drove north out of Moab, Utah, in her beige Lexus SUV when the highway vanished. In an instant, a 100-foot-tall cloud of dust had swallowed up her vehicle. She wanted to brake, but she worried about another car slamming into her from behind. She tried to pull over, but she couldn’t see the shoulder. So Belnap split the difference: “I figured if I just crept slowly enough that I’d eventually get out of there or fall off the road.”

In June 2010, Michael Finkel needed a new idea. The Bozeman-based author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpaand writer for GQ, National Geographic, and Men’s Journal wasn’t satisfied with the stack of print-outs in the two-inch deep brownie pan on his desk. And none of the hundreds of ideas in a Word document on his computer struck his fancy. So, he opened up his web browser and typed a query into Google: “Amazing human feats.” That nebulous search brought him to a YouTube video of a blind man careening down a trail on a mountain bike, and by the end of the day he had a killer one-paragraph pitch for Men’s Journal: The Incredible (Yet True) Way That (A Few) Blind People Can “See”: Echolocation.

There are whole books on interviewing, and whole books on structure, but finding ideas remains one of the most mysterious and frustrating parts of journalism. “Nobody teaches you how to come up with ideas,” Finkel says. “It’s alchemy.” As a freelancer, I find that there are few things worse than running out of ideas and becoming paralyzed in front of the computer, wondering what I am supposed to write about next. It’s not writer’s block, exactly. If I had the idea, I could start the research, and if I could start the research, then I could start the writing. It’s that old catch-22: I don’t want to invest time researching a topic that may not turn into a sellable story, but if I’m not researching that topic, I’ll never find that story.

The bidding starts early at the seafood auction in Gloucester, Mass. Each day about 30 tons of fish—mostly cod, haddock, and flounder—come in by boat on Cape Ann, a fist jutting into the Atlantic Ocean. Fishermen motor up to the concrete docks behind the beige-and-white warehouse, then wait while workers in rubber boots hoist their catches and weigh them out on a stainless-steel digital scale. At 4 a.m. grocery store buyers, restaurant owners, and distributors file in to inspect and bid on the haul.

The traders and graders were wrapping up their business just after 9 a.m. on Dec. 7, 2006, when 16 federal agents in Crown Victorias and Ford Expeditions pulled into the parking lot. They entered the building in pairs. Although most of them worked for National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, they wore bulletproof vests and carried Glock pistols.

When Shirley Ann Jackson was in elementary school in the 1950s, she would prowl her family’s backyard, collecting bumblebees, yellow jackets and wasps. She would bottle them in mayonnaise jars and test which flowers they liked best and which species were the most aggressive. She dutifully recorded her observations in a notebook, discovering, for instance, that she could alter their daily rhythms by putting them under the dark porch in the middle of the day. The most important lesson she took away from these experiments was not about science but compassion. “Don’t imprison any living thing for very long,” she says in a mellow drawl that belies her reputation as a lightning-fast thinker and influential physicist. “I have never been a fan of dead insect collections.”

Helen ‘Happy’ Reichert died in September. She was a lifelong New Yorker, a former television talk show host and Cornell University’s oldest alumna. She was 109. Despite her death, however, Reichert’s memory may live on through her genome sequence.

On 26 October, the nonprofit X-Prize Foundation—best known for its attempt to spur the development of private spaceships—launched a $10 million competition to accurately sequence 100 genomes from 100 centenarians over the course of one month, starting 3 January 2013.

The patient had endured 20 years of pain: her calves had turned into two bricks,  and she now had trouble walking. A slew of doctors had failed to treat, let alone diagnose, her unusual condition. So when her x-rays finally landed on William A. Gahl’s desk at the National Institutes of Health, he knew immediately that he had to take her case.

Gahl is the scientist and physician who leads the Undiagnosed Diseases Program, which tries to unravel the underlying causes of, and find therapies for, mysterious maladies and known but rare conditions. Louise Benge’s x-rays had revealed that blood vessels in her legs and feet bore a thick coat of calcium that restricted blood flow. Benge’s sister, Paula Allen, along with several other members of the family, also shared the disorder. Over the course of several months Gahl identified the genetic root of the disorder—a mutation in a gene that regulates calcium—and he went on to propose a treatment with drugs already on the market. He continues to assess the treatment’s value.