Richard E. Lenski
Hannah Distinguished Professor
Michigan State University

Email: lenski@msu.edu

Rich filling vials.
Notation in labbook
On March 13, 2017: Rich makes the 10,000th transfer.

The Long-Term Evolution Experiment has moved has moved to Texas -- check out the LTEE website

generations of e. coli evolution and counting.

The long term lines celebrate 50,000 Generations

Interesting article that looks to the LTEE, along with many infectious disease experts, for insights: Delta won’t be the last variant. What will the next ones bring? by Dhruv Khullar in The New Yorker (11 Aug 2021)
The lab's research appeared in a Veritasium video (18 June 2021)
Our research is mentioned in Sarah Zhang's The 500-Year-Long Science Experiment in The Atlantic (27 January 2019)
Carl Zimmer reports in the New York Times on the Scence Article Repeatability and Contingency in the Evolution of a Key Innovation in Phage Lambda by current and former lab members: Justin R. Meyer, Devin T. Dobias, Joshua S. Weitz, Jeffrey E. Barrick, Ryan T. Quick, and Richard E. Lenski (26 January 2012). You can also listen to Justin's Science podcast.
New York Times, Science News, Discover, New Scientist, Nature, and msnbc report our recent findings on evolvability (March 2011)
BEACON, an NSF Center for the Study of Evolution in Action, is funded and announced (17 February 2010)
Tanguy Chouard writes in Nature on the role of mutations in evolution (February 2010)
The Greatest Show on Earth (2009) by Richard Dawkins discusses our work at length
Carl Zimmer blogs our latest research: A New Step in Evolution (June 2008)
New York Times article on bacterial evolution: Fast-Reproducing Microbes Provide a Window on Natural Selection (June 2007)

A poem by the late Nobel Prize winning Polish Poet Wislawa Szymborska: Maybe All This has a nice resonance with the work we do on the Long Term Evolution Experiment. From The New Yorker (Nov. 1992).
For those interested in the tension between science and religion, and my own thoughts on the subject, here are links to a passage that I admire from a book written in the 1700s, my portion of a public dialogue with a theologian in 1998, and - especially for educators - a brief summary of the evidence for evolution.