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

    Humans might be able to hibernate during space travel

    Scientists are studying how animals hibernate and developing new technologies to help humans sleep through space travel.

  2. Health & Medicine

    Explainer: Why it’s easier to get sick in the winter

    Low humidity helps viruses survive, and cold weather blunts some of the body’s immune responses — making colds and other viral infections more likely.

  3. Health & Medicine

    An asthma treatment may also help tame cat allergies

    Adding a therapy used to treat asthma improved cat allergy symptoms for more than a year, a small study found.

  4. Animals

    If mosquitoes vanished, would we miss them? Vampire spiders might

    Vampire spiders get their meals from blood-filled Anopheles mosquitoes. But if those insects disappear, the spiders will likely adapt.

  5. Health & Medicine

    Should we use a genetic weapon against mosquitoes carrying malaria?

    One gene drive to eliminate malaria seems to work in the lab. Now it’s time to ask local people if they want it released in the wild.

  6. Health & Medicine

    Examining Neandertal and Denisovan DNA wins a 2022 Nobel Prize

    Svante Pääbo figured out how to examine the genetic material from these hominid ‘cousins’ of modern humans.

  7. Health & Medicine

    Explainer: What is mpox (formerly monkeypox)?

    Once rare, the viral disease monkeypox exploded onto the global scene for the first time in 2022.

  8. Health & Medicine

    Dogs and other animals could aid the spread of monkeypox

    Now that monkeypox has spread to a dog, researchers fear other species could help the virus become widespread outside of Africa for the first time.

  9. Health & Medicine

    To test for COVID-19, a dog’s nose can match a nose swab

    Dogs can sniff out COVID-19 cases as well as PCR tests can — and are better at ID’ing cases having no symptoms, a new study finds.

  10. Health & Medicine

    A 2021 Nobel goes for discovering how our body reads touch sensations

    David Julius and Ardem Patapoutian found nerve-cell sensors for temperature, pain and pressure.

  11. Health & Medicine

    COVID-19 can infect kids — and risks sickening some severely

    Not all are equally impacted. Even among supposedly low risk groups, concerns intensify as the super-contagious delta variant sweeps across the globe.

  12. Health & Medicine

    What is the role of in-person classes in COVID-19’s spread?

    New data haven’t shown that schools pose a big coronavirus risk to kids and their families, despite fears that they might.