In 1816, a young doctor named John Polidori was offered the position as traveling physician to George Gordon, Lord Byron. Polidori was saturnine, caustic, ambitious, well-educated and handsome. He had graduated from medical school at 19 (as unusual then as now) and this offer came not a year later. Over the objections of his family, he accepted. Polidori had literary ambitions; here was an amazingly famous poet asking him to join him on a tour of the Continent. It must have felt like fate was tugging him along. In confirmation of how well things were going, a publisher offered him 500 pounds to keep a diary of his travels with [...]

"We've been able to show that both heredity—information storage and propagation—and evolution, which are really two hallmarks of life, can be reproduced and implemented in alternative polymers other than DNA and RNA." —Dr. Philipp Holliger of the UK Medical Research Council's Laboratory of Molecular Biology discusses his and his colleagues's recent success in "mimicking the chemistry of life in synthetic versions of DNA and RNA molecules." This means that I am going to have to rework the bracketology chart I've been keeping in my head about How Mankind Will Perish. "Devoured by synthetic life forms we've created ourselves" is going to have to be at least a two seed. [...]