It’s been nearly a decade since my book The Forever Fix: Gene Therapy and the Boy Who Saved It, was published. The…
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post Progress in Treating Genetic Disease: Dwarfism, Inborn Errors, Immune Deficiencies, and a Clotting Disorder
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post Menkes Disease Treatment on the Horizon, After Nearly Three Decades
Headlines often trumpet the latest in gene editing, RNA drugs, or gene therapy. The less buzzy, but more classic strategy of providing…
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post A Glimpse of the Ocean’s Twilight Zone Through Environmental DNA
To most people the Twilight Zone evokes memories of Rod Serling’s iconic TV series of the 1950s and 1960s, or the less…
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post Looking Back 20 Years After the Unveiling of the First Human Genome Sequence
I’m about to begin revising the 14th edition of my human genetics textbook. In normal times, I’d have amassed technical articles and…
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post Leaping Lizards Regenerate Limbs, Thanks to CRISPR and Stem Cells
I’ve admired the cockroach’s ability to regrow lost legs since learning about them while working on my PhD in developmental genetics ages…
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post Antibody Cocktails Against Future COVID Variants, Thanks to Global Consortium CoVIC
“Give us your antibodies” might be the mantra of the The CoVIC Consortium, a global group of eclectic experts who introduce a…
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post Does a Vitamin Deficiency in the Brain Lie Behind Huntington’s Disease?
The Huntington’s disease (HD) community has recently experienced setbacks, but a new research report may reignite hope, from an unexpected source: the…
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post How the Tabby Got Its Stripes
In 1902’s Just So Stories, Rudyard Kipling famously explained how the leopard got his spots in what would today be deemed an…
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post New COVID Vaccines and More: A Perusal of ClinicalTrials.gov
The pandemic has upended many practices, among them peer review of technical medical and scientific articles. Lax Peer Review + Social Media…
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post The Tomorrow War on Amazon Prime Echoes COVID: Science from the Past Saves Humanity’s Future
Scary monsters, time travel, and a female protagonist plucked from The Handmaid’s Tale cast: what could be better? A Derivative Plot with…
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post New Target for Treating Huntington’s Disease: Controlling Runaway DNA Repair
When results of a clinical trial of a treatment for a rare disease are disappointing, feelings of despair among hopeful affected families…
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post Returning to Live Music and How a Tiny Mutation Sent Delta All Over the World
A few nights ago I went to my first live music show since pre-pandemic times: Ann Wilson, the vocalist from Heart. She…