Louise M. Slaughter National DNA Day Lecture

About the Talk: Biologists know what DNA is, although they’ll be the first to tell you there’s a lot about DNA they don’t know. But what does DNA mean to someone who is not a biologist?  Even a scientifically literate person might have trouble explaining what DNA does, how it works, or what the discovery of its structure was so important to modern biology. How much does someone need to know about DNA to make informed decisions about genetic engineering, genetic privacy, or when life begins? We will examine these questions in this talk, but as you will see these questions are not always so easy to answer. That’s what makes this work so interesting! 

Speaker Biography: Joe Palca has been a science communicator for nearly four decades. From 1992-2022 he was a science correspondent for NPR, National Public Radio. Prior to that he worked for the news sections of Science and Nature. He also worked as a television producer. He came to journalism from a science background, having received a Ph.D. in psychology from the University of California at Santa Cruz where he worked on human sleep physiology. Palca has covered a range of science topics — everything from biomedical research to astronomy. He is founder of the NPR Scicommers program, a collective of science communicators.  Palca has won numerous awards, several of which came with attractive certificates. In 2019, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. With Flora Lichtman, Palca is the co-author of Annoying: The Science of What Bugs Us (Wiley, 2011).