Tina Hesman Saey

Tina Hesman Saey

Senior Writer, Molecular Biology

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 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine, the Endocrine Society, the Genetics Society of America and by journalism organizations.

All Stories by Tina Hesman Saey

  1. Life

    Central dogma of genetics maybe not so central

    In thousands of genes, RNA frequently fails to accurately transcribe DNA.

  2. Life

    1000 Genomes pilot a hit with geneticists

    The first stage of a project to probe human genetic diversity has found millions of new variations.

  3. Life

    Splices of time

    Organisms distinguish day and night by shifting the way genes are interpreted.

  4. Life

    Molecular Evolution

    Investigating the genetic books of life reveals new details of 'descent with modification' and the forces driving it.

  5. Life

    More than a chicken, fewer than a grape

    A decade after the completion of the Human Genome Project, the exact number of human genes remains elusive.

  6. The Why of Sleep

    Brain studies may reveal the purpose of a behavior both basic and mystifying.

  7. Dying to Sleep

    Getting too little sleep can impair body and brain and could even be deadly.

  8. Life

    Bacteria strut their stuff

    Videos show that microbes can walk on hairlike appendages.

  9. Life

    To researchers’ surprise, one Pseudomonas infection is much like the next

    Consistent genetic changes in the lung bacteria that commonly plague cystic fibrosis patients are a welcome discovery because they may point to new treatment strategies.

  10. Life

    A thousand points of height

    A study finds heaps of genetic variants that influence a person’s stature, but even added together they don’t stack up to much.

  11. Health & Medicine

    How the brain chooses sides

    A new study reveals where and how people decide which hand to use for a simple task.

  12. Life

    Imperfect mimics

    Reprogramming techniques may not produce exact embryonic stem cell replicas.