The autopsy, which comes from the Greek word autopsia, meaning “the act of seeing with one’s own eyes,” is a centuries-old technique and a cornerstone of medical diagnostics. Autopsies can help inform treatments, sharpen diagnoses, and correct misdiagnoses. Without them, death often remains a dense, impenetrable mystery. Nowhere is this more true than when the […]
Read MoreStill, that path is made messier by doing nothing for the countries in West and Central Africa, where monkeypox was first identified decades ago and has been spreading since 2017. Vaccines are not arriving there; Western nations, including the US, have snapped up the limited supply. Nigeria is believed to have been the source of […]
Read MoreHopes that it could be useful for treating people with mild illness have also proved unfounded. In June, a trial of Paxlovid’s effects in standard-risk Covid patients was ended when the treatment failed to significantly relieve the symptoms of those participating. Paxlovid’s usefulness is in protecting at-risk people from experiencing the very worst effects of […]
Read MoreIn a run-of-the-mill business park in Kvistgård, a Danish village about 25 miles north of Copenhagen encircled by forests, lies one of the most crucial solutions for controlling the global monkeypox outbreak. These are the manufacturing facilities of Bavarian Nordic, the biotech company that is the sole producer of the most advanced vaccine for monkeypox. […]
Read MoreThree years ago, I walked from my office in a hospital to meet my boss, a neurosurgeon. On the way, I felt my entire body slow down. After two minutes, I felt something “off” and I turned around to go back. After three steps, I crumpled to my knees to keep from falling and lay […]
Read MoreSecond, the longer this virus continues, the more variants we’re going to have. We don’t know exactly what forms a variant, but for sure one factor is immunocompromised people who have the virus puttering around longer in their system—not for 17 days like me, but for months. The body can’t clear the virus completely. You’ve […]
Read MoreSecond, the longer this virus continues, the more variants we’re going to have. We don’t know exactly what forms a variant, but for sure one factor is immunocompromised people who have the virus puttering around longer in their system—not for 17 days like me, but for months. The body can’t clear the virus completely. You’ve […]
Read MoreYou were one of those people with four doses. That’s right, and I was also able to get a prophylactic monoclonal antibody. That’s probably why I think I got a relatively mild disease. But it persisted for 17 days, and I had to have two courses of Paxlovid. By the way, I don’t think we […]
Read MoreDoctors who care for pregnant people often have to make time-sensitive decisions when lives are on the line. But in the wake of the US Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision, which overturned the national right to abortion, time is no longer on their side. Many states have now implemented tough restrictions that don’t necessarily ban doctors […]
Read MoreTwo months into the international monkeypox epidemic, which so far has caused almost 6,000 infections in the United States and more than 18,000 cases worldwide, it may be old news to say that this disease has visited the US before. In 2003, the virus arrived via exotic pets imported from Ghana, sickening 72 people, including […]
Read MoreIn October 2014, virologist Edward Holmes took a tour of the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, a once relatively overlooked city of about 11 million people in the central Chinese province of Hubei. The market would have presented a bewildering environment for the uninitiated: rows of stalls selling unfamiliar creatures for food, both dead […]
Read MoreSynchron is making tangible progress. In August 2020, the company was granted an investigational device exemption from the FDA, allowing it to become the first company to conduct clinical trials of a permanently implanted BCI. To reach this point took five years and a “huge amount of work,” says Oxley. A trial in Australia followed […]
Read MoreWhen a patient goes into a clinic for an ultrasound of their stomach, they lie down on crinkly paper atop an exam table. A clinician spreads a thick goo on their abdomen, then presses a small probe into it to send acoustic waves into the patient’s body. These waves bounce off their soft tissues and […]
Read MoreMartin Shkreli—the notorious ex-pharmaceutical executive fresh from prison after his 2017 fraud conviction—announced his latest, eyebrow-raising venture this week: the creation of a blockchain-based Web3 drug discovery platform that traffics in his own cryptocurrency, MSI, aka Martin Shkreli Inu. The platform, still in the early development phase, is called Druglike, according to a press release […]
Read More“Yeah, I think that was,” Republican senator Thom Tillis says of Cornyn’s unscientific news clipping. JFK’s Legacy For Tillis, what truly unified the disparate group of progressives and conservatives was data—just not gun data. Instead, he says, their negotiations were most influenced by former president John F. Kennedy. On October 31, 1963, Kennedy signed into […]
Read MoreEven though the researchers only used a RBD from one version of Covid, their vaccine generated a robust polyclonal response—meaning it created multiple antibody types, rather than just one. To Saunders, this is part of the approach’s charm: Creating many antibody types is beneficial, he says, because one that is extremely effective against a certain […]
Read More“This is my life,” Wallach says. “There is nothing else I’d rather be doing. If I was given a billion dollars, today, the first thing I would do is build a superlab.” When Compass came calling, he finally got the golden opportunity to pursue that dream. Maybe not a full-blown, billion-dollar superlab. But a lab […]
Read MoreRing vaccination worked for smallpox because a person-to-person pattern of spread makes it possible to predict and interrupt chains of transmission. The process is straightforward: Find the people most at risk of infection, give them shots. But to take those actions today to curb monkeypox, you have to find cases, you have to identify their […]
Read MoreNow that Congress has failed to pass a bill that would guarantee a right to travel across state lines to obtain an abortion, many are worried that conservative states that have started restricting abortion rights could soon decide to block people seeking abortions from leaving their own state for that purpose. Many Republican lawmakers are […]
Read MoreAnd there are undoubtedly many more bacteria out there that could give us useful new antibiotics to use. But if you find what appears to be a promising one, the next step is to coax it into generating sufficient quantities of antibiotics for analysis—and this can be a real challenge. Antibiotic discovery is “often hindered […]
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