A few weeks ago, I noticed a surprising metric when posting my weekly DNA Science blog – at year's end, I'd hit #500!
That got me thinking. Looking back, which blog post was the most important? The answer came to me quickly – but it's not what I would have expected when I began more than a decade ago.
The Birth of DNA Science
When St. Martin's Press was about to publish my book about gene therapy in 2012, my agent urged me to start blogging. I needed to widen my audience beyond college students forced to buy my textbooks and readers of the articles I'd been cranking out since the 1980s.
The book that kickstarted DNA Science was The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It. It's a history of gene therapy told through the voices of the patients, families, researchers, and clinicians behind the first FDA approvals, which didn't come until 2017.
I launched a website and blog, "Genetic Linkage," through the Author's Guild. Soon, an editor at Public Library of Science asked me to post Genetic Linkage at PLoS. We renamed it DNA Science.
To continue reading, go to DNA Science, where this post first appeared.