The New Biology

From matchbook-sized models of living human organs to the surprising alternative-energy implications of symbiotic giant clams, the work of three new faculty members represents the changing face of bioscience at Penn.

Dangerous Ideas

PIK Professor Dorothy Roberts exposes how the myth of biologically distinct races—forged in the era of slavery—continues to poison the present, affecting attitudes and policies on everything from child welfare to medical treatment.

Imagination Man

Scott Barry Kaufman has been called “the leading empirical creativity researcher of his generation.” Now he wants to use the tools he’s developed to unleash the “quiet potential” of vulnerable people—including kids like him—and help them flourish.

That Roosevelt

Penn Law professor, legal scholar, and novelist Kermit Roosevelt III is doing his best to live up to the family name—including, in his latest book, by tackling cousin Franklin’s executive order authorizing the confinement of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps during World War II.

Our Labs, Our Health?

In Risky Medicine, History and Sociology of Science Professor Robert Aronowitz argues that today’s fixation on diagnosing and managing risk factors rather than treating diseases leads to anxiety and stress, over-diagnosis of conditions and overuse of drugs, and radical treatments that are unnecessary or harmful.

Walking on a Wire

One hundred years after a Penn professor was famously fired for his political views, a campus symposium on academic freedom wrestled with a familiar question: Are universities still homes of free speech and inquiry?

Pulling Weeds

David Casarett used to just say No when his hospice and palliative-care patients asked about using medical marijuana as a treatment or to relieve their symptoms. After researching and writing his new book, Stoned, his answer is “a lot more nuanced.”

Plastic Fantastic

Penn Medicine’s Frances E. Jensen is a leader in studying how the brain develops and what that means for learning, behavior, and the treatment of disease at different ages. For her book on the teenage brain, she drew on the latest neuroscience findings—and the experiment going on in her own home.

Elementary

Even in the era of Big Science, some of the greatest discoveries start with someone—Penn physics professor and Nobel contender Charles Kane, for instance—just sitting in a room and thinking.