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Rural residents photograph ailing chickens to monitor the spread of Avian flu, mountaineer adventurers collect scat samples so microbes in isolated locations can be identified, and sailors take water samples that reveal the plastic afloat in the world’s oceans. These citizen scientists are ordinary people who collect data in the field that support researchers warning of di...
Advances, limitations, and potential at the cutting-edge of cancer care.
Research that can generate transformative, high-impact biomedical and health breakthroughs, from the molecular to the societal, is gaining traction as the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H) gets off the ground. Launched by federal legislation in March 2022, ARPA-H will make pivotal investments to stimulate dynamic health solutions that can reshape millio...
Seth Berkley, the CEO of GAVI, talks about the importance of vaccines in addressing global health challenges, the role of public-private partnerships in tackling inequities, and new advances in vaccine development.
Dr. J. Craig Venter, one of the pioneers in human genome sequencing, talks about coming opportunities to use genomics, advanced technology and machine learning to custom-tailor individual care and fundamentally alter the practice of medicine.
Our drive to create makes us unique among living things. What is special about the human brain that enables us to innovate? Why don’t cows choreograph dances? Why don’t alligators invent speedboats? Drawing on their upcoming book, The Runaway Species: How Human Creativity Remakes the World, neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt examine the evolutionary...
With advances in testing and technology, the world of professional sports is beginning to use data to evaluate athlete health and to predict — and ideally, prevent — injury. Experts equipped with 3D motion capture technology are now essential members of team training staffs. Are these new technologies and recovery interventions increasing player longevity? Will cost-effect...
The recent leaps of science—sequencing the human genome, advancing the world-changing technology of CRISPR, deepening knowledge of the brain—owe much to Francis Collins’s brilliant mind and steady hand. Who better, then, to talk about what transformative discoveries come next? Genomics, immunotherapy, precision medicine, new uses for mRNA technology, and other interdiscipl...
What is life? Where do its boundaries begin, and where do they end? These are some of the simple yet daunting questions science writer Carl Zimmer explores in his new book, Life’s Edge: The Search for What It Means to Be Alive. From the coronavirus to consciousness, Zimmer seeks to demonstrate that biology, for all its advances, has yet to achieve its greatest possible tri...
Despite all of the scientific advances in genomic sequencing, genetic testing, and gene editing, science writer Carl Zimmer suggests we lack a rich understanding of what heredity means and how traits travel from one generation to the next. Cultural and environmental conditions have complex and nuanced influences on human biology, personal and family characteristics are not...
Pharmaceutical advances are expanding, with some exciting new drugs already on the market and others ready to emerge from the pipeline. These therapeutics offer fresh hope for combatting perilous infections, such as multi-drug resistant tuberculosis, and neglected tropical diseases, which affect more than one billion people every year. But it takes more than product devel...
Advances in health and medicine no longer rest entirely in the hands of scientists and clinicians. Patients and citizen activists are stepping up to influence research priorities, crowd-source data, and scour arcane medical literature in search of novel experimental approaches. Often, they are motivated by personal experiences, the refusal to accept that a disease lacks tr...
As health care systems change, public agencies and professional organizations are increasingly saying that physicians need not be the sole purveyors of primary care – and indeed, that supply shortages dictate they can not be. A wider use of physician assistants and advanced practice nurses, innovations in care delivery, and new uses for telehealth and electronic communicat...
Individual genetic makeup and the genetic signature of diseases vary tremendously, but the goal of matching them with custom-tailored treatment remains in its infancy. Precision medicine, which uses the powerful tools of molecular biology, genomics, and bioinformatics, promises great advances. Much of the early focus of the field is on cancer, where researchers are studyin...
We live in an interconnected world of volatility and disruption. Systems are linked in a web of dizzying and only partially visible complexity, and change in any one domain has a swift impact on many others. Join Andrew Zolli in a walking tour of emerging tools – such as next-generation satellite imagery, social media, and advanced analytics – that allow us to make sense o...
In 2021—five decades after President Richard Nixon declared a War on Cancer—some 1.9 million new cancer cases were diagnosed and the scourge killed more than 600,000 Americans. Yet we have made extraordinary progress on the battlefront in the same time frame. Childhood leukemia can often be cured, death rates for colorectal, cervical, and prostate cancer have fallen by hal...
When it comes to biomedical research, Earth’s gravity can be an obstacle, making it harder to program stem cells into viable organs, obscuring the crystalline structure of proteins, and interfering with cellular communication channels. The possibility of using space to advance science is no longer an exercise in imagination as biotech start-ups begin sending experiments in...
Thanks to the genius of biochemists such as Jennifer Doudna, who’s credited with the co-discovery of CRISPR, our biggest scientific advances in the near future may easily come by way of the genome-editing technology. CRISPR enables scientists to change or remove genes quickly, with a precision only dreamed of just a few years ago. But just how far are we willing to go to e...
The COVID-19 pandemic forced the world to grapple with a long-standing truth: that poor diversity in early and late stage medical research remains a major threat to health equity. Overcoming barriers and challenges to fair representation in research and development will not happen overnight, nor can it be achieved by a single institution. In order to pioneer lasting and su...