Over the past year or so I’ve been engaging in a bit of science-writing masochism. I’ve been asking a few short  questions and trying to get some answers from people who’ve spent years grappling with them. For example:

In tomorrow’s New York Times, I tackle my next question: What is a gene?

This article emerged out of a lot of conversations with my editor over the past few months. We marveled over the steady stream of intriguing studies on genetics that were being published–studies that were pushing us to expand our ideas about things we took for granted, like the very nature of genes. So I started talking to scientists who are looking closely at the human genome. Some are studying