When a new variant of the COVID-19 virus appeared in the UK as 2020 drew to a close, I didn’t think it…
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post Mutants Come to Saratoga: COVID New Variants ExplainedRead more
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post What Do Non-identical Identical Twins Have to do with COVID-19? Mutation!Read more
Identical twins Stella and Desiree Vignes were born in 1938 in a Louisiana town so small that it wasn’t on any maps…
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post Ignoring Pandemic Warnings and Links to my 54 COVID ArticlesRead more
Hindsight is 2020, perhaps literally, when it comes to COVID-19. A compelling narrative predicting that a deadly virus – specifically, a coronavirus…
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post The First COVID-19 Vaccines: What’s mRNA Got To Do With It?Read more
Most of us have an intuitive understanding of how a vaccine works: show the immune system a bit of a pathogen, or…
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post Why Do Males Fare Worse With COVID-19? A Clue From Calico CatsRead more
Early on in the pandemic, a worse clinical scenario for the male of the species emerged. A study published mid-May from Italian…
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post Dr. Paul Offit Talks COVID Vaccines, With JAMA’S Howard BauchnerRead more
Science and medical writers have been under an avalanche of information for nearly a year now, as we translate technical information about…
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post Worse Than COVID? The Tasmanian Devil’s Contagious CancerRead more
It’s hard to imagine anything worse than the horrors at our hospitals right now. But in a recent JAMA webinar, Nicholas Christakis…
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post Thinking About Thanksgiving? A Reminder of What COVID-19 Can Do To A Human BodyRead more
My blog posts around Thanksgiving are predictably dull: Turkey Genetics 101, The Peaceable Genomes of Pumpkins. But 2020 is like no other…
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post Genetic Clues in the Goop of a COVID SwabRead more
The components of certain things are meant to remain mysterious. The ingredients of sausage. A burger’s slimy secret sauce. The recipe for…
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post Can Some Antibodies Worsen COVID-19? The Odd Situation of EnhancementRead more
Antibodies are supposed to be the good guys. The proteins, built of distinctive Y-shaped pieces, enter the bloodstream early in infection, pouring…
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post A Drug Trio for COVID-19: Precedents in Cystic Fibrosis, HIV/AIDS, and Hepatitis CRead more
Teaming treatments has long been a strategy to quell cancer, override mutations, and fight viruses. Will that be a winning strategy against…
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post A Conversation with CRISPR-Cas9 Inventors Charpentier and DoudnaRead more
Congrats to Jennifer Doudna and Emmanuelle Charpentier for winning the Nobel Prize in Chemistry, 2020. The idea to edit DNA sequences and…