NIH
A Crack in the Safe of Genomic Studies
As genotyping becomes cheaper and more routine, the optimism about the medical benefits is laced with paranoia about genetic privacy. Personal genetics businesses promise the tighest security with their customers’ DNA test results, electronic medical records build in layers of encryption and protection, and the 2008 Genetic Information Nondiscrimination Act forbids insurance companies and employers […]
Stimulating the Hunt for Asthma Genes
In the recent kerfuffle over the national debt, one of the rhetorical flashpoints was the $800 billion “stimulus package” pushed by the Obama administration in 2009 to fight the economic slowdown. Though the benefits of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act on unemployment and the economy are fiercely debated, the impact upon the scientific world […]
Linkage 4/8: Exciting Bumps, Shutdown Ripples
In physics, there’s nothing better than an unexpected result. Wednesday, Fermilab scientists unveiled the graph at left and caused figurative rioting in the streets of the physics community, confirming months of rumors about an exciting new result from the suburban Chicago facility (You can watch video of the presentation here). It’s a big score in […]
Saving Lives & Lungs with Cleaner Stoves
By Dianna Douglas Cooking indoors over firewood and dung is a tough habit to break for billions of poor people around the world. But Sola Olopade, MD, professor of medicine and family medicine, found a way. He wanted to stop women from hunching for hours over open fires inside their houses, cooking with babies strapped […]
Linkage 3/4: Budget Backlash, Overprevention, Mass Extinction
In Washington, the fight over budget cuts is well underway, as a Republican majority in the House and a Democratic majority in the Senate tussle over the best way to reduce a multi-trillion dollar federal deficit. The first bill of the new House, H.R.1, set federal appropriations for the rest of fiscal year 2011 (ending […]
Podcast Episode 0.2: Stretching, Whipple at 90, NIH Cuts
Welcome to pilot episode 2 of our Medical Center research news podcast. We’re keeping the water wings on for now as we continue to refine the format and discover all the technical struggles inherent in podcasting, but please do listen and give us feedback on how we’re doing – and if you have good ideas […]
A Christmas Present for Geneticists
On Christmas morning this year, most people hoped to find an iPad, a puppy, or a luxury car wrapped in a giant red bow under their tree. But geneticists received their present a day early, in the form of two landmark papers published on Christmas Eve in the journal Science. The two extremely dense data […]
The Glue that Binds a Large Project
Scientific grants are usually given out one investigator at a time, funding a single laboratory’s research. But as the questions of science grow larger, and the technology needed to answer those questions grows ever more specialized and expensive, funding collaborative grants becomes increasingly common practice. One type of multi-investigator grant has been dubbed a “glue” […]
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 […]
Rewriting the Hypertension Equation
I’m spending today doing some intense video editing for pieces that will be on the site over the next two days, so here is science writer Greg Borzo with a guest post about a study released last month by University of Chicago researchers. The study proposes a new equation for calculating the survival expectations of […]
