Archive | May 2010
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Linkage 5/28: Pre-Memorial Day Edition
Since it’s one of those days where I feel like one of the few people working a full day, I’ll keep the links brief. Regular programming will resume next Tuesday. 1) You can set your watch by the timing of the predictable backlash to major scientific announcements, particularly in this age of instant internet vetting. […]
A Cancer Target Pulls a 180
Scientists will be the first to admit that science sometimes makes mistakes. Though debates and changing theories are often seized upon by everyone from anti-vaxxers and climate change skeptics as flaws in the scientific process, the constant revision is actually the key to science’s strength, gradually building accuracy through trial and constructive error. Still, it’s […]
The Promise of a Near-Miss
A critical step in the design of any clinical trial is picking the right primary endpoint, the result that will usually make or break the study. That’s more difficult than it sounds – one’s hope is to cure a disease or relieve a patient’s symptoms, but choosing the best specific measure for those goals is […]
Parkinson’s Disease: A Learning Disorder?
Occasionally, drugs produce beneficial mysteries – effects that are useful to physicians despite being largely unexplained. Levodopa (L-dopa), the most commonly-used treatment for the symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, is meant to replace dopamine, the neurotransmitter lost as the disease progresses to its most severe stages. Clinicians recognize that the benefical effect builds up slowly over […]
Videos: Heart Health & Risk
Last October, a group of Illinois legislators visited the University of Chicago Medical Center for two days of education and discussion about cardiovascular medicine and health care reform, part of a nationwide “Legislator in the Lab” program. In addition to laboratory tours and panel discussions, the legislators and their staffs heard a series of brief, […]
Linkage 5/20: Synthetic Life? & Phineas Gage
The biggest science story of the year may have broken yesterday, though it’s hard to say either the topic or the source was a surprise. J. Craig Venter, one of the driving forces of the Human Genome Project, announced via the Institute that bears his name the creation of the first synthetic cell – a […]
The Science Fair at the End of Med School
Medical students are busy people. Whether they’re working through phonebook sized texts their first two years or learning to navigate the hospital halls over the last two years, free time is at a premium. So when a medical student makes room in their busy schedule for a research project, it’s a commendable feat of calendar […]
Q&A: A New Kind of Cancer Vaccine
At the end of April, an FDA approval marked the end of a long regulatory road for an interesting drug with an even more interesting history: Provenge. Though it’s usually described as a vaccine for metastatic prostate cancer, that terminology is a bit misleading, as unlike traditional vaccines it doesn’t work by exposing an individual […]
From the Rain Forest to the Laboratory
Venomous animals such as snakes, scorpions and spiders are typically the stuff of phobias for most people. But the toxins those creatures have developed to immobilize and kill their prey are actually some of nature’s most finely-tuned weapons, sharpened by millions of years of evolution to hit a particular molecular target. For Zoltan Takacs, an […]
The Lost, Species-Scrambling Extinction
In the Devonian Period of roughly 400 million years ago, fish were the masters of Earth, filling the seas and rivers with enormous diversity from the 30-foot-long Dunkleosteus to lobe-finned fishes like the modern lungfish. Then, 359 million years ago, something happened. The fossil record tells a clear before-and-after story: Dunkleosteus and its family members, […]
