Nathaniel Comfort

Nathaniel Comfort is Professor of the History of Medicine at Johns Hopkins University. His interests lie in the histories of genetics, eugenics, genomics, and biomedicine, as well as bioethics. He is the author of The Tangled Field: Barbara McClintock’s Search for the Patterns of Genetic Control (Harvard, 2001) and The Science of Human Perfection: How Genes Became the Heart of American Medicine (Yale, 2012), and editor of and contributor to The Panda’s Black Box: Opening Up the Intelligent Design Controversy. In 2015-2016 he was the Blumberg Professor of Astrobiology at the Library of Congress/NASA. He has written for The Atlantic, The Nation, Nature, Science, the New York Times Book Review, and elsewhere, and has appeared on PBS and National Public Radio. He is working on a biography of the biologist James D. Watson.