Today: all about the double helix.

If they’re his cells and medically viable agents are being derived from his body, it seems intuitive to me that he should be the one to decide what’s done with it.

— On today’s Fresh Air, bioethicist Harriet Washington details how genes and tissues are increasingly being patented by pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies. Those firms, she argues, are focused more on their profits than on the medical needs of patients.

The Dance Your PhD contest winner was just announced. It’s…..Microstructure-Property relationships in Ti2448 components produced by Selective Laser Melting: A Love Story [finalists here]

Nathan Wolfe travels to the viral hot spots of the world, where viruses first jump from animals to humans. The scientist spends his days tracking emerging infectious diseases before they turn into global pandemics. [above: h1n1 from the CDC]

On today’s Fresh Air, how various insects mate: “Damsel flies have a type of scoop on their penis which they can use to drag out the sperm from a previous male and replace it with their own. It means that if [one male] is able to displace the sperm of another male, then the genes for being able to displace the genes of another male are going to be the ones that fertilize the female … So her offspring are going to be able to displace sperm.”

[pictured: a pair of flies mating on a leaf via Alex Wild]

After losing both of his legs in a climbing accident, biophysicist Hugh Herr says he became motivated to do something worthwhile with his life. Today he runs the Biomechatronics group at the MIT Media Lab and designs better prosthetic limbs for other amputees: “My biological body will degrade in time due to normal, age-related degeneration. But the artificial part of my body improves in time because I can upgrade.” [complete interview here]

The Stages of Cancer Development (via the National Cancer Institute)