Tina Hesman Saey

Senior Writer, Molecular Biology, Science News

Science News senior writer Tina Hesman Saey is a geneticist-turned-science writer who covers all things microscopic and a few too big to be viewed under a microscope. She is an honors graduate of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln where she did research on tobacco plants and ethanol-producing bacteria. She spent a year as a Fulbright scholar at the Georg-August University in Göttingen, Germany, studying microbiology and traveling. Her work on how yeast turn on and off one gene earned her a Ph.D. in molecular genetics at Washington University in St. Louis. Tina then rounded out her degree collection with a master’s in science journalism from Boston University. She interned at the Dallas Morning News and Science News before returning to St. Louis to cover biotechnology, genetics and medical science for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. After a seven year stint as a newspaper reporter, she returned to Science News. Her work has been honored by the Endocrine Society, the Genetics Society of America and by journalism organizations.

All Stories by Tina Hesman Saey

  1. Health & Medicine

    Surprise! Most ‘color vision’ cells see only black or white

    Cone cells in the eye’s retina can see black, white or color. The black and white ones may create sharp outlines and edges that color-sensing cones then fill in like parts of a coloring page.

  2. Climate

    Globe’s non-Africans all descend from a single move out of Africa

    Look back far enough and everybody’s ancestors were African no more than 72,000 years ago. Climate scientists would up that date to perhaps 100,000 years ago.

  3. Animals

    Tasmanian devils begin to resist infectious cancer

    A deadly contagious cancer is spreading among Tasmanian devils. But the animals are evolving resistance, a new study finds.

  4. Science & Society

    Pokémon no! Playing the popular game while driving is risky

    Dangerous moves: Over a recent 10-day period, tens of thousands of people were playing Pokémon Go while driving — and tweeting about it.

  5. Chemistry

    Chemistry Nobel honors pioneers of world’s smallest machines

    Three chemists are being honored with a Nobel Prize for their pioneering work creating itty bitty machines, including a microscopic ‘nanocar.’

  6. Life

    How a moth went to the dark side

    Peppered moths and some butterflies are icons of evolution. Now scientists have found a gene responsible for making them so.

  7. Animals

    The turning of wolves into dogs may have occurred twice

    The process of turning wolves into dogs, called domestication, may have occurred twice — in the East and the West — ancient DNA suggest.

  8. Brain

    A ‘cocktail’ in the brain can trigger sleep

    A new study finds that a ‘cocktail’ of chemicals in the brain can directly cause mice to fall asleep or waken.

  9. Genetics

    Genes: How few needed for life?

    Scientists rebuilt a microbe using its old genes. But not all of them. They used as few building-blocks as they could get away with and still have the life-form survive.

  10. Fossils

    Neandertal toe contains human DNA

    DNA from a 50,000-year-old Neandertal woman’s toe bone shows humans left a mark on the ancient species — and much earlier than scientists had thought.

  11. Life

    Cell recount: People host far fewer germs

    Since the 1970s, microbiologists have been saying bacteria outnumber human cells in our bodies by about 10-to-1. A new analysis says that old number was a “fake” fact — and gross exaggeration.

  12. Animals

    Gene editing swats at mosquitoes

    A new genetic technique can render insects that spread malaria unable to reproduce.