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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...
Advances, limitations, and potential at the cutting-edge of cancer care.
Music exists in every human culture and drives a multibillion-dollar industry, and yet the vast majority of people who enjoy music do instinctively, without any formal training. So where does music come from, and what is is good for? Drawing from studies in neuroscience, psychology, clinical science, and data science, Dr. Psyche Loui will discuss why we feel emotions in re...
Technology is transforming how we provide medical care, improve diagnostics, share information, and extend the reach of public health. From disposable syringes that deliver a calibrated dose of medicine before self-destructing to 3-D printers that recreate the facial structures of combat-injured veterans, seemingly intractable problems are being met with cutting-edge solut...
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...
Williams, Jordan, James, Brady. They’re among a growing class of the superstar athletes delivering career-best performances well past what's been considered peak age for their sports. As this phenomenon becomes more common, it begs the questions how and why now? How are experience and maturity winning out over inevitable, natural physical decline? Athletes in the 30s and 4...
Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) haunts some 300,000 veterans who have returned from Afghanistan or Iraq. Drugs and psychotherapy provide only partial relief. Increasingly, vets are turning to other techniques, including meditation, yoga and breathwork, to heal their trauma, sense of isolation, and anger, and to reclaim their lives. Researchers have shown that Sudarsh...
Organs are in desperately short supply. In the US alone, more than 124,000 people are on transplant waiting lists, and as many as 30 Americans die every day waiting for a donated organ. Trafficking in human body parts and transplant tourism are big business around the world, and “body bazaars” that bring together wealthy organ buyers and impoverished organ sellers are thri...
Best known to the public as the Trump Administration’s White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, physician Deborah Birx is a clinical immunologist who has also served as US Global AIDS coordinator and a colonel in the US Army. Challenged to speak the truth about COVID-19, she balanced candor and political pragmatism to get out accurate information. Her new book, Sile...
Not since the atomic bomb has a technology so alarmed its inventors that they warned the world about its use. Not, that is, until the spring of 2015, when biologist Jennifer Doudna called for a worldwide moratorium on the use of the new gene-editing tool CRISPR — a revolutionary new technology that she helped create — to make heritable changes in human embryos. The cheapes...
As the COVID-19 virus began to burn across the globe last year, virologist Nathan Wolfe had been studying how viruses cross over from wild animals to humans. He was also among the scientists and public health experts sadly prescient about something that is now abundantly clear: The world is woefully unprepared to prevent the spread of novel viral threats. In this conversat...
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...
Few drugs are as powerful as the human immune system. By generating an acute inflammatory response, it allows the body to defend against microbial invaders, cancer-causing cells, and environmental toxins, and helps heal injuries and infections. But there are also cracks in the system that can turn the body against itself, triggering autoimmune diseases. How do we tamp down...
Knowledge about the human microbiome, those trillions of bacteria, viruses, and other microbes that inhabit our bodies, is revolutionizing medicine just as mapping the human genome continues to do. Indeed, what we are learning could take us even further because the microbiome can be altered by diet, exercise, and stress control. Computational biology, DNA sequencing, and o...
Medical errors in hospitals rank as the third leading cause of death in the United States, exceeded only by cancer and heart attacks, according to researchers at Johns Hopkins University. At least 200,000 preventable deaths occur annually in these institutions of healing, although some researchers say the true number may be double that. Hospital-acquired infections, diagno...
The average annual cost of cancer drugs in the US now exceeds $100,000 and the price of more than 200 generic drugs doubled from 2013 to 2014. That puts them far out of reach for countess ailing people, including many with decent insurance. The industry argues that it needs the revenue for the complex and expensive research that leads to better treatments, but pharmaceutic...
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...
New insights into human biology and the ability to manipulate molecules both large and small are rapidly accelerating medical innovations. By employing genetic engineering to empower immune cells, scientist-physicians are bringing new treatment options to people with cancer. Mapping the neural circuitry involved in mood disorders points the way towards deep brain stimulati...
Anyone who has ever had a pet understands how deeply connected human beings are to the animals who serve as our companions, lessen our stress, and perhaps offer a buffer against cognitive decline. Puppy play date, anyone? Honeybees help to protect our food supply, vision-impaired people rely not only on seeing-eye dogs but also on seeing-eye horses, and animal research has...
Once associated mostly with IV poles and standard-issue hospital gowns, health-related design has entered a new era with creative and functional products that observe, inform, soothe, and connect. A stuffed animal named Chemo Duck helps children with cancer express their emotions; new digital health records give nurses in Rwanda the tools to provide quality care and improv...