As if the waves of novel variants of “interest” and “concern” sweeping the planet haven’t been enough, and we find versions of…
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post SARS-CoV-2 Pops Up, Mutated, Beyond the Respiratory Tract
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post Rare Disease Day 2022: Juvenile Huntington’s Disease
In honor of Rare Disease Day 2022, February 28th, I’m reposting a DNA Science story from nine years ago. February 16th was…
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post Converting Donor Lungs to Universal Blood Type O Could Boost Organ Supply
Lung transplants can be lifesaving for patients with end-stage lung diseases such as cystic fibrosis, COPD, pulmonary fibrosis, sarcoidosis, and pulmonary hypertension…
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post COVID Complacency: Warnings from Invasion, Station Eleven, and a Research Report
When Mark Twain wrote “Truth is stranger than fiction,” he wasn’t imagining people watching tales of an alien invasion and a pandemic…
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post Yellow Mealworm Genome Sequence May Ease Farming Insects for Food
I have a special fondness for the yellow mealworm, Tenebrio molitor. As a child, I fed the mealworm stage of this beetle…
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post Omicron Evolves and the Covidization of Scientific Publishing
Just as we thought Omicron was rolling across the US and into oblivion, a new “subvariant” has arrived and is, again, taking…
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post DNA in Strange Places: Hippo Poop, Zoo Air, and Cave Dirt
Many years ago, a dear friend took me to the Detroit zoo to see the Hippoquarium. Much to my delight, the resident…
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post Pandemic Predictions Take a Turn Towards the Positive – Finally
An end may be in sight. For the first time since the pandemic began, I listened to a press briefing from medical…
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post Please Help My Liberian “Son” Achieve his Dream as an Infectious Disease Physician
For many years I’ve ended editions of my human genetics textbook with a request for students to email me to share their…
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post Sandy From the Mountains Dies, Leaving a Message to the Unvaxxed
Five days ago, Sandy’s husband allowed the staff in the ICU to turn off her life support, and COVID claimed yet another…
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post Pandemic Too Fast to Follow as Three Waves of Infection Wash Over the US: Delta, Omicron, and Flu
Next Tuesday, December 21, marks two years since the China CDC Weekly acknowledged the first “cluster of pneumonia cases with an unknown…
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post How Watson and Crick Predicted the Origin of Omicron and Laid the Groundwork for COVID-19 Vaccines
The tantalizing final sentence to James Watson and Francis Crick’s landmark 1953 paper in Nature introducing the genetic material, DNA, is almost…