Archive | July 2010
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Linkage 7/30: Our New Dean, Food’s Future
Welcome to Dr. Polonsky Today’s big news on campus is the announcement of Kenneth S. Polonsky, our new dean and executive vice president of medical affairs. The position puts Polonsky, an endocrinologist and diabetes researcher, at the helm of our Biological Sciences Division, the Pritzker School of Medicine, and the University of Chicago Medical Center. […]
Teaching Chicago How to Breathe Easier
In 2008, a twenty-year-old environmental treaty had a dramatic impact upon the care of asthma in the United States. Due to the 1987 ban on chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), the ozone-depleting propellents once found in hair spray and other aerosol-can products, the inhalers used by millions of asthmatics underwent a mandatory switch to a CFC-free version. Unfortunately, […]
Life Lessons from Life’s Randomness
It’s traditional at the University of Chicago to invite a faculty member to deliver the convocation speech, rather than invite an outside speaker as many schools do. This year’s chosen faculty for Spring Convocation (the first campus-wide ceremony since 1929) was a well-known name from the rolls of the Biological Sciences Division: Paul Sereno, our […]
Can Computers Help Scientists With Their Reading?
The public perception of science in action typically involves a person in a white coat pouring brightly-colored fluids in and out of test tubes. Sure, a little bit of that does go on in a laboratory. But before the glassware is broken out, a lot of less glamorous stuff has to happen. Every experiment is […]
Biomedicine’s Next Top Model
There are many today who argue that the future of medicine is in data mining. Massive computational efforts are underway to collect mountains of data from multiple sources – genomic sequencing, clinical trial results, laboratory experiments – and put them to work in the unbiased, abstract mind of the high-throughput supercomputer. The biological world is […]
Dr. FAQ: Ezra Cohen on HPV-Positive Head & Neck Cancer
The concept of viral cancer has only recently begun to take root in public awareness, predominantly through the disease of cervical cancer. Nearly all cases of cervical cancer are now known to be caused by the human papilloma virus, HPV, which is transmitted through sexual contact. The 2006 approval of Gardasil, a vaccine against HPV, […]
Halting Cancer’s Evolution with Synthetic Lethality
In nature, species evolve thanks to those lucky organisms who cheat death. An environmental pressure may come in and kill of a high percentage of critters, but those critters who survive the bloodbath live on to spread their genes. When this bottle-necking occurs in disease-causing bacteria, we call it drug resistance: an antibiotic may knock […]
Linkage 7/16: ED-STDs, Handoff Fumbles, and Avandia
ED and STDs: Unfortunate Acronym Bedfellows With the constant drumbeat of advertisements for erectile dysfunction drugs, most of us can probably recite the list of precautions and side effects by heart by now. Though some of them inspire juvenile giggling (the one about “lasting more than 4 hours,” in particular), one warning is a head-scratcher: […]
Dr. FAQ: Gary Steinberg on Bladder Cancer
On the grim top 10 list of the most common cancers in the United States, familiar faces sit at the top of the charts. Prostate cancer for men, breast cancer for women, lung and colon cancer for both sexes – all are diseases that have inspired massive awareness and fundraising efforts to inform patients and […]
