Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker:

I don’t know how to write. Which is unfortunate, as I do it for a living. Mind you, I don’t know how to live either. Writers are asked, particularly when we’ve got a book coming out, to write about writing. To give interviews and explain how we did this thing that we appear to have done. We even teach, as I have recently, students who want to know how to approach the peculiar occupation of fiction writing. I tell them at the beginning—I’ve got nothing for you. I don’t know. Don’t look at me.

I’ve written six books now, but instead of making it easier, it has complicated matters to the point of absurdity. I have no idea what I’m doing. All the decisions I appear to have made—about plots and characters and where to start and when to stop—are not decisions at all. They are compromises. A book is whittled down from hope, and when I start to cut my fingers I push it away from me to see what others make of it. And I wait in terror for the judgements of those others—judgements that seem, whether positive or negative, unjust, because they are about something that I didn’t really do. They are about something that happened to me. It’s a little like crawling from a car crash to be greeted by a panel of strangers holding up score cards.

More here.

James Gleick in the New York Times:

I mention a certain writer in an e-mail, and the reply comes back: “Comcast McCarthy??? Phoner novelist???” Did I really type “Comcast”? No. The great god Autocorrect has struck again.

It is an impish god. I try retyping the name on a different device. This time the letters reshuffle themselves into “Format McCarthy.” Welcome to the club, Format. Meet the Danish astronomer Touchpad Brahe and the Franco-American actress Natalie Portmanteau.

In the past, we were responsible for our own typographical errors. Now Autocorrect has taken charge. This is no small matter. It is a step in our evolution — the grafting of silicon into our formerly carbon-based species, in the name of collective intelligence. Or unintelligence as the case may be.

Earlier this year, the police in Hall County, Ga., locked down the West Hall schools for two hours after someone received a text message saying, “gunman be at west hall today.” The texter had typed “gunna,” but Autocorrect had a better idea.

More here.

Jeffrey A. Barrett in Berfrois:

In the Spring of 2007, the journalist Peter Byrne interviewed Mark Everett (E of the band Eels) about Mark’s father Hugh Everett III. Mark did not know much about what his father had done for a living, and he knew even less about what he had done as a graduate student in physics at Princeton University. But when Mark’s father died in 1982, the family cleared his desk and files and put the documents they found, which included notes, papers, sketches and photographs, in a small handful of cardboard boxes. As the last surviving member of the family, Mark had the boxes in the basement of his Los Feliz home. After a quick examination of the contents, Byrne knew that he had stumbled across something of remarkable value.

As a graduate student, Hugh Everett III had formulated one of the most important and contentious physical theories of the last century. His theory was important because it might ultimately lead to a solution of the infamous quantum measurement problem. It was contentious both because of what it predicts in order to get a solution to the measurement problem, and because scholars have never been able to agree on the details of how Everett intended for his theory to be interpreted. After getting his PhD and a government job, Everett himself had remained silent in public as scholars debated the merits and best interpretation of his theory. But the documents in the cardboard boxes stacked among the empty guitar cases and personal belongings in Mark Everett’s basement showed that his father had continued to think about quantum mechanics until his death in 1982.

After graduating from Princeton, Everett went to work as an operations researcher at the Pentagon. He kept track of what people were saying about his theory and he collected letters, papers and his own notes on quantum mechanics. These documents and the work directly related to his original thesis ended up in boxes in Mark Everett’s basement.

Annalee Newitz in io9:

Female Laysan albatrosses have a habit of building nests together and sharing child care responsibilities. Does this make them lesbians? Scientists say no. Still, there have been dozens of news headlines trumpeting the discovery of gay marriage among albatrosses. Now, to fight back, two scientists have done a study on how often the media misrepresents animal sexuality. Their findings are hilarious.

Writing today in Nature, biologists Andrew B. Barron and Mark J. F. Brown explain the scope of the problem:

The vast majority of studies reporting sexual contact between pairs of males or females were presented in media articles as documenting gay, lesbian or transgender behaviour. This is not innocuous – these are terms that refer to human sexuality, which encompasses lifestyle choices, partner preferences and culture, among other factors.

More worryingly, studies that invoked atypical sexual behaviour through genetic or hormonal manipulation were reported as inducing gay or lesbian behaviour or changing the animals' sexual orientation, even in the case of the nematode Caenorhabditis elegans, which has males and hermaphrodites, rather than males and females.

Humans have spent thousands of years heaping cultural ideas on top of our behavior. So when a human says she's a lesbian, it can mean a lot of things that are fairly complicated. When an animal has sex with another animal of the same sex, it doesn't really mean any more than when they have sex with an animal of the opposite sex. It's simply a variant on sexual behavior.

Barron and Brown call out one headline from New Scientist as a perfect example of this issue of translating dry scientific headlines into more exciting (but incorrect) ones:

For example, ‘Female-limited polymorphism in the copulatory organ of a traumatically inseminating insect' became ‘Bat bugs turn transsexual to avoid stabbing penises.'

The problem? Transsexuality is a human category.

Emily Colette Wilkinson and Garth Risk Hallberg in Publisher's Weekly:

Clarissa, Or the History of a Young Lady by Samuel Richardson – Richardson’s Clarissa is a heavyweight in more ways than one. The novel’s physical heft is part of its difficulty (she weighs in at just under three pounds in Penguin’s oversized edition), especially as her 1500 pages are light on plot (Samuel Johnson said you’d hang yourself if you read Clarissa for the plot). But what the novel lacks in plot it makes up for in psychological depth. Richardson was the first master of the psychological novel and he hasn’t been bested since. These depths are also dark and psychically wrenching: Clarissa's rejection and dehumanization by her monstrous family and the sadistic torments she undergoes at the hands of her rescuer turned torturer, the “charming sociopath” Robert Lovelace, offer some of the most emotionally harrowing reading experiences available in English.

Finnegans Wake by James Joyce –Finnegans Wake is long, dense, and linguistically knotty, yet hugely rewarding, if you're willing to learn how to read it. By this, I don't mean wallowing in the froth of scholarly exegesis the Wake churned up in its wake. Not the first time out, at least. (I take Joyce's talk about setting traps for his readers as an expression of hostility born out of years of frustration.) Rather, I mean surrendering to Joyce's music. Meaning here is more a question of effect than of decoding; in this way, this Difficult Book is paradigmatic of great literature more generally. Try reading 25 pages a day, out loud, in your best bad Irish accent. (Seriously – some of what seems like idiolectic obscurity is just a question of how you pronounce your vowels.) You'll be maddened, you'll be moved, and you'll be done in about four weeks.

More here.

Yekaterina Samutsevich, translated and reprinted over at Chotdelat News [h/t: Hong-An Tran]:

During the closing statement, the defendant is expected to repent or express regret for her deeds, or to enumerate attenuating circumstances. In my case, as in the case of my colleagues in the group, this is completely unnecessary. Instead, I want to express my views about the causes of what has happened with us.

The fact that Christ the Savior Cathedral had become a significant symbol in the political strategy of our powers that be was already clear to many thinking people when Vladimir Putin’s former [KGB] colleague Kirill Gundyaev took over as head of the Russian Orthodox Church. After this happened, Christ the Savior Cathedral began to be used openly as a flashy setting for the politics of the security services, which are the main source of power [in Russia].

Why did Putin feel the need to exploit the Orthodox religion and its aesthetics? After all, he could have employed his own, far more secular tools of power—for example, national corporations, or his menacing police system, or his own obedient judiciary system. It may be that the tough, failed policies of Putin’s government, the incident with the submarine Kursk, the bombings of civilians in broad daylight, and other unpleasant moments in his political career forced him to ponder the fact that it was high time to resign; otherwise, the citizens of Russia would help him do this. Apparently, it was then that he felt the need for more convincing, transcendental guarantees of his long tenure at the helm. It was here that the need arose to make use of the aesthetics of the Orthodox religion, historically associated with the heyday of Imperial Russia, where power came not from earthly manifestations such as democratic elections and civil society, but from God Himself.

From The Guardian:

The Olympic Isle on opening night was “full of noises, / Sounds, and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not”. The lion of the industrial revolution could lie down with the lamb. But beneath the fantasy a sewer ran, diverted but untamed: the spectre of doping. And not just doping, because this is the age of genomics: gene doping. The man who came to warn of this prospect is himself a Spector: Tim Spector, professor of genetic epidemiology at King's College London and the author of this book. The means by which gene doping might be achieved (no one is sure whether it has yet been, or in practice can be, done) is Spector's field of expertise: epigenetics. So he has become a media pundit during the Olympics, but his real subject is twins and what they tell us about genes. Identical twins are a unique test of genes in action because, having come from a single fertilised egg, they have identical genomes, all 3bn letters of them. They are clones. The point about twins and identical genes is that genes in action do some strange things that we are only just beginning to understand – identical genes can diverge in their expression during the course of a lifetime. This is epigenetics. It is now generally accepted that personal experience can change our genes. If you practise music for six hours a day and become a great musician, your brain will show recognisable changes both in large-scale anatomy and genetically. London cabbies have “knowledge” – enhanced regions of the brain that start to recede when they retire. The chemical processes that alter the genes in epigenesis – methylation and deacetylation of the packaging proteins of the genes, the histones – are fairly well understood. But the puzzle is that some of these changes can be passed on to offspring, and the effect – although it eventually disappears after three to four generations – can have profound consequences. One hundred and fifty years of biological orthodoxy claimed that these phenomena were impossible. What is supposed to happen at reproduction – and mostly does – is that all the epigenetic marks acquired during life are erased and every birth is a fresh start. But the case of Dolly the sheep and other animals cloned since then show that where adult cells have been reprogrammed to wipe out the epigenetic marks, the process is inefficient. So Dolly, whose parent cell was six years old, was not really a fresh start. She died prematurely as a result. But even in normal reproduction, it seems that some epigenetic marks can persist for a few generations.

Spector explains these facts clearly and does not overdo the deep biology. Most of the book consists of case histories and studies of the crucial traits that matter to all of us: intelligence, athletic and artistic skill, disease, obesity, sexual orientation. What the genomic revolution has done is to reopen the old nature/nurture debate. How wildly this has lurched, protagonists on both sides blithely ignoring what little evidence there was. Spector recalls that in the 1960s and 70s it was almost possible to obtain funding for research on twins because of the prevailing blank slate, nurture-is-all ideology. This was preceded by the appalling eugenics period when, despite the evidence that hereditary genius dissipated over the generations, far too many serious biologists endorsed the idea of breeding the best and brightest and preventing this in the unfit. Today there are fewer excuses because the solid evidence is piling up. But the evidence is often puzzling. To the embarrassment of the Human Genome Project, researchers have come to the conclusion that the genetic component of some multi-factorial diseases is exceptionally low. Many genes have been found to be implicated in such conditions but their overall contribution might be as low as 2%.

More here.

At Midnight in the Bakery at the Corner

At midnight in the bakery at the corner
While bread and butter-biscuits are being baked
I remember the Rahman of my childhood
And Asmat’s sparkling eyes
Playing carom with me

At midnight in the bakery at the corner
While bread and butter-biscuits are being baked
I am boozing alone in my room
In front of me fried liver pieces gone cold in a plate
All my friends migrated to the Gulf

At midnight in the bakery at the corner
While bread and butter-biscuits are being baked
The wife of the Pathan next door enters my room
Closes the door and turns her back to me
I tell her, sister, go find someone else

When the bread develops its sponge, the smell
Of the entire building fills my nostrils.
.

by Dilip Chitre
from Ekoon Kavita -1
publisher: Popular Prakashan, Mumbai, 1992

translation Dilip Chitre, 2008
from Shesha: Selected Marathi Poems (1954–2008)

From The New York Times:

Americans have a curiously limited vision of France. We may be wild about Chanel sunglasses, Vuitton handbags, Champagne or Paris in the spring, but when it comes to the kinds of contemporary French culture that can’t be bought in a duty-free shop, most of us draw a blank. Luckily, this veil of benign ignorance is being lifted as publishers in the United States introduce American readers to a new generation of hugely gifted French writers who are reworking the boundaries of fiction, memoir and history (Emmanuel Carrère, Laurent Binet, the American-born Jonathan Littell) or of high art and snuff lit (Michel Houelle­becq). Among the recent crop of writers just reaching the top of their game, Marie NDiaye, born in 1967 and now living in Berlin, is pre-eminent.

NDiaye’s career has been stellar. When she was 18, the legendary editor Jérôme Lindon (best known as Samuel Beckett’s champion) published her first novel to high critical acclaim. Her subsequent fiction and plays have won numerous prizes and distinctions. (NDiaye’s “Papa Doit Manger,” or “Daddy’s Got to Eat,” produced in 2003, is the only play by a living woman to have entered the repertory of the ­Comédie-Française.) “Three Strong Women” — NDiaye’s most recent novel — won the Prix Goncourt when it appeared in 2009 and made her, according to a survey by L’Express-RTL, the most widely read French author of the year. That same year, NDiaye was the inadvertent cause of a national furor when a member of the French Parliament, responding to an interview in which she’d called the Sarkozy government “monstrous,” suggested in an open letter to the culture minister that Goncourt laureates should be required to “respect national cohesion and the image of our country” or else remain silent. What most disturbed people about this outburst — coupled as it was with the Sarkozy government’s increasingly ham-­fisted policies on inner-city policing and the expulsion of immigrants — was what they saw as its unspoken assumption that as a black woman of African parentage, NDiaye should have to prove herself deserving in a way that would never be demanded of white male laureates.

More here.

E.O. Wilson in Discover Magazine:

Also see John Horgan's response to this piece, “No, War Is Not Inevitable.”

“History is a bath of blood,” wrote William James, whose 1906 antiwar essay is arguably the best ever written on the subject. “Modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.”

Our bloody nature, it can now be argued in the context of modern biology, is ingrained because group-versus-group competition was a principal driving force that made us what we are. In prehistory, group selection (that is, the competition between tribes instead of between individuals) lifted the hominids that became territorial carnivores to heights of solidarity, to genius, to enterprise—and to fear. Each tribe knew with justification that if it was not armed and ready, its very existence was imperiled. Throughout history, the escalation of a large part of technology has had combat as its central purpose. Today the calendars of nations are punctuated by holidays to celebrate wars won and to perform memorial services for those who died waging them. Public support is best fired up by appeal to the emotions of deadly combat, over which the amygdala—a center for primary emotion in the brain—is grandmaster. We find ourselves in the “battle” to stem an oil spill, the “fight” to tame inflation, the “war” against cancer. Wherever there is an enemy, animate or inanimate, there must be a victory. You must prevail at the front, no matter how high the cost at home.

From the NYRB archives, Gore Vidal:

On the morning of Friday, September 20, 1985, the first equinoctial storm of the year broke over the city of Rome. I awoke to thunder and lightning; and thought I was, yet again, in World War II. Shortly before noon, a car and driver arrived to take me up the Mediterranean coast to a small town on the sea called Castiglion della Pescáia where, at one o’clock, Italo Calvino, who had died the day before, would be buried in the village cemetery.

Calvino had had a cerebral hemorthage two weeks earlier while sitting in the garden of his house at Pineta di Roccamare, where he had spent the summer working on the Charles Eliot Norton lectures that he planned to give during the fall and winter at Harvard. I last saw him in May. I commended him on his bravery: he planned to give the lectures in English, a language that he read easily but spoke hesitantly, unlike French and Spanish, which he spoke perfectly; but then he had been born in Cuba, son of two Italian agronomists; and had lived for many years in Paris.

It was night. We were on the terrace of my apartment in Rome; an overhead light made his deep-set eyes look even darker than usual. Italo gave me his either-this-or-that frown; then he smiled, and when he smiled, suddenly, the face would become like that of an enormously bright child who has just worked out the unified field theory. “At Harvard, I shall stammer,” he said. “But then I stammer in every language.”

An excerpt from Eric Kandel's The Age of Insight, in Scientific American:

Semir Zeki of University College London found that the orbitofrontal region is also activated in response to other, subtly pleasurable images that we interpret as beautiful. Zeki conducted a study in which he first asked volunteers to examine a large number of portraits, landscapes, and still lifes. He then had the volunteers classify the art, irrespective of category, on the basis of whether they found the painting beautiful or ugly. Zeki imaged the volunteers’ brains as they looked at the paintings and found that all of the portraits, landscapes, and still lifes, regardless of whether the viewer saw them as beautiful or ugly, lit up the orbitofrontal, prefrontal, and motor regions of the cortex. Interestingly, however, the pictures ranked most beautiful activated the orbitofrontal region most and the motor region least, whereas the pictures ranked ugliest activated the orbitofrontal region least and the motor region most. The activation of the motor region of the cortex suggests to Zeki that emotionally charged stimuli mobilize the motor system to be prepared to take action to get away from the stimulus in the case of ugliness or threat and toward the stimulus in the case of beauty or pleasure. Indeed, as we know, fearful faces also activate the motor region of the cortex.

Beauty does not occupy a different area of the brain than ugliness. Both are part of a continuum representing the values the brain attributes to them, and both are encoded by relative changes in activity in the same areas of the brain. This is consistent with the idea that positive and negative emotions lie on a continuum and call on the same neural circuitry. Thus, the amygdala, commonly associated with fear, is also a regulator of happiness.

For every evaluation of emotion, from happiness to misery, we use the same fundamental neural circuitry. In the case of art, we evaluate a portrait’s potential for providing new insights into another person’s psychological state. This discovery, by Ray Dolan and his colleagues at University College London, was based on a set of studies in which volunteers viewed faces whose expression of sadness, fear, disgust, or happiness was gradually changed from low to high intensity.

Hannah Tennant-Moore in n+1:

“The original role of the artist as visionary is the correct one,” Jeanette Winterson writes in her essay “Imagination and Reality” (1997). When art was funded by the church, Winterson reminds us, “the artist and his audience were in tacit agreement; each went in search of the sublime.” Today most patrons of the arts are secular liberals who see art as either a reminder of beauty in an imperfect world or a social inquiry into the world’s imperfections. Perhaps this is why Winterson—the author of nineteen novels and a household name in Britain—has been widely celebrated as a writer of magical realism and shrewd fairytales, but has not been critically appreciated for what she feels is the supreme goal of fiction: to be “as successful as religion used to be at persuading us of the doubtfulness of the seeming-solid world.”

This clarity of artistic purpose is not surprising coming from a woman raised as a fanatical Pentecostal. Winterson’s only childhood companion—one does not endear oneself to secular 10-year-olds by embroidering THE SUMMER IS NEARLY ENDED AND WE ARE NOT YET SAVED on one’s gym bag—was her adoptive mother, a “flamboyant depressive” who punished Winterson by locking her in the coalhole for hours and telling her that “the devil led us to the wrong crib.” Winterson inured herself against loneliness with the conviction that she was destined for religious greatness: she began writing sermons and preaching to her congregation when she was still a child. But after Winterson’s mother discovered her romantic love for another girl, her church subjected her to an exorcism that involved being locked in a room with no food or heat for three days, while church elders alternately prayed for her and beat her. At 16, Winterson left home and turned to literature.

Could this be the last time? The customary intrigue that surrounds the arrival of a new Bob Dylan studio album – and this is his 35th – was stirred by its title: Tempest. Given that The Tempest was Shakespeare’s final play, and we know that Dylan is a student of the Bard, could this be the 71-year-old artist’s way of telling us that with this record he’s calling it quits? Dylan himself has appeared to pooh-pooh the question, telling Rolling Stone last week: “Shakespeare’s last play was called The Tempest. It wasn’t called just plain Tempest. The name of my record is just plain Tempest. It’s two different titles.” Nonetheless, that same report called the album “dark”; according to the LA Times “a darkness has replaced the instrumental interludes, buoyancy and lightness of his last three albums”; while Billboard in the US said that “death … is a dominant subject on Tempest”.

more from Caspar Llewellyn Smith at The Guardian here.

The wood cabin’s kitchen is dark and cramped. At the table sits Witch with a bowl in front of her. In her hand she holds a wet sponge with which she is wiping the phosphorus off matchboxes. Dark red droplets drip into the bowl. Witch’s hands are red and bony, and she herself is as dark as an overdone roast potato. She has a mop of dark wiry hair. Outside the window are the sickly beds of the vegetable garden. The sky is leaden. At the gas cooker stands a thin man called Misha. His matchstick arms hold an enamel saucepan lid over the burner. On it are crushed tablets of Sedalgin, an analgesic rich in codeine. “This is the way to wash matches,” she says, turning to me.

more from Marina Akhmedova at Eurozine here.

There are moments, reading this midwesterner who has thought seriously about his subjects and now wishes to speak plainly about them, that the voice on the page—its erudition tempered by politeness or maybe humility—carries an echo of the tone of the late David Foster Wallace. Indeed, Wallace himself shows up later in the book, more than once. By then, though, Magic Hours has taken a turn for the worse. The further the book goes—the essays arrive chronologically—the clearer it becomes that its rubric about “Creators and Creation” is a flimsy bag thematically. Bissell’s real subject here is something closer to “success,” or even “fame.” And success does not seem to suit him.

more from Tom Scocca at Bookforum here.

Anita Desai in Prospect:

Colm Tóibín’s new book is called New Ways to Kill Your Mother: Writers and their Families (Penguin) but the key is in the subtitle. This collection of essays is by no means restricted to mothers. It is the entire family that needs to be destroyed, it seems, if an artist is to realise his vision. In India that has been the tradition through the ages. The soul demands the abandonment of family and society in order to achieve another level of being. Hence the Sufi artistic tradition: poets such as Rumi and Hafiz had to retreat into their own worlds to hear the music of another. Such iconoclasts acquired respect, reverence, even awe, not only because of their spiritual transcendence but for their artistic achievements, which are loved because they have no link to society or family, but take one to another realm. It is something of that secular transcendence one might experience in reading a book: an escape, brief and fleeting but all the more intense and poignant for that, into another life, extinguishing the boredom, failure and despair of one’s own. The paradox for the writer is that he is trapped—to a much greater extent than the composer or the painter—in the very stuff he wishes to escape. The stuff is, unfortunately, what nourishes his work: society and family. The writer does not have to travel to an office. Generally, his workplace is his home. This is awkward for both writer and family, as we see in Tóibín’s portrait of John Cheever: living in a suburban home in Ossining, New York that he loathed, wishing he could leave, while his family just as ardently wished he would. What is to be done about a writer in the family? Different families cope in different ways, as Tóibín relates. Not all can be as supportive as WB Yeats’s wife George. She conveniently discovered a talent for channelling the voices of spirits and joined Yeats in séances, which provided the inspiration for much of his poetry and his work on occult astrology, A Vision. She was rich, independent and capable, buying her husband a romantic ruin of a tower at Ballylee in which to write his poetry. With him she endured its lack of electricity and water. She also tolerated his love affairs and accommodated his mistresses with the same stoicism. At the other extreme is the family of the Irish playwright JM Synge. He was dominated by his mother, a fanatical Methodist who deplored his association with the stage and, even after his success in the Dublin and London theatre, ignored his work and its importance. Yet another contrast is provided by the family of the German writer Thomas Mann—a terrifying witches’ brew of incest, sexual ambiguity and suicide. After touring this chamber of horrors with Colm Tóibín, I can see that I was a fortunate child. At home I sat at a round green table in a corner of my room through the long, torpid afternoons, filling one notebook after another with my scribbling. I was given the label “the writer in the family,” just as a sister who enjoyed cutting up her dolls and then bandaging and stitching them together was named “the doctor in the family.” Neither of us escaped our designated fates—or ever really considered it.

The writing I did as an adult took place, like my childhood writing, in the midst of a family of four children. I am often asked by the practically-minded, “How did you manage to write all those books while raising your children?” I explain that having them was what allowed me to stay home and write instead of going out to work or, worse, entering Delhi society. I did so by obediently following their routine: going to my desk as soon as they left for school, then putting my papers away before they came home. I kept to this routine all through the school term, then suspended writing during their holidays or when they were in bed with the measles. It instilled a rhythm in me that continued even after they had all left home. It was my discipline, and don’t all writers fall back on just that—discipline? It also became a habit for me, as smoking cigarettes might be for another.

PICTURE: WB Yeats and his wife George in 1923: she bought him a tower in which to write and tolerated his mistresses.

More here.

What History Fails to Mention

What history fails to mention is

Most everybody lived their lives
With friends and children, played it cool
Left truth & beauty to the guys
Who tricked for bigshots, and were fools.

Gary Snyder
from Left Out in the Rain
North Point Press, 1986

From Nature:

Jay Bradner has a knack for getting the word out online. You can follow him on Twitter; you can become one of more than 400,000 online viewers of the TEDx talk he gave in Boston, Massachusetts, last year; you can see the three-dimensional structure of a cancer-drug prototype created in his laboratory and you can e-mail him to request a sample of the compound. Bradner, a physician and chemical biologist at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute in Boston, makes defeating cancer sound easy — one just has to play tricks on its memory. “With all the things cancer is trying to do to kill our patient, how does it remember it is cancer?” he asked his rapt TEDx audience. Bradner says that the answer lies in epigenetics, the programmes that manage the genome. DNA serves as the basic blueprint for all cellular activity, and DNA mutations have long been known to have a role in cancer. But much of a cell's identity is determined by modifications to chromatin, which comprises DNA and the proteins that bind and package it. Epigenetic instructions, in the form of chemical marks that cling to chromatin, tell cells how to interpret the underlying genetic sequence, defining a cell's identity as, say, blood or muscle. Findings over the past ten years have strongly implicated dysregulation of epigenetic instructions in cancer, where growth-driving genes express like crazy and genes that keep cell division in check are silenced. Bradner's aim is to create a drug that can rewrite those instructions so that cancer cells forget what they are and cease their deadly proliferation.

Bradner thinks that this epigenetic approach could strike down one of cancer's most treacherous drivers, the DNA-binding protein Myc. Myc is involved in up to 70% of cancers but is generally considered 'undruggable', because the active parts of its structure are not accessible to the kinds of small-molecule drugs that chemists generally create. “Myc is one of those things that people dream of targeting,” says Dash Dhanak, head of cancer epigenetics at GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) in Collegeville, Pennsylvania.

More here.