On August 6, the first cloned Przewalski’s horse was born in Texas. Kurt began with a cell nucleus from another of his…
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post A Cloned Przewalski’s Horse Evokes Memories of the Catskill Game Farm
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post How the Various COVID Vaccines Work
COVID vaccine hesitancy is on the rise, perhaps in the wake of pressure to speed approval beyond scientific reason. But I think…
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post Extinction of the Woolly Rhino: Ancient Genomes Point to Climate Change, not Overhunting
Two views of the forces behind extinction of the woolly rhino elegantly illustrate how scientific thinking shifts to embrace new knowledge &ndash…
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post Progress and a Setback in Treating Rare Genetic Diseases: Hemophilia A, CLN1, SMA, and DMD
In these strange days of the pandemic, it’s easy to forget that people are still sick with the illnesses that we’ve always…
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post How COVID-19 Arose and Amplified Along the Meat Supply Chain
Early in this unforgettable year, a wet market in Wuhan, China, emerged as a possible step along the way, if not the…
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post She Had Her Own Mutation, Sequencing Led to a Treatment and Major Genetic Discovery – Then She Died of COVID
It isn’t often that an investigation of a single patient who has a devastating, unrecognized disease leads to finding an existing drug…
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post COVID Genomes Paint Portrait of an Evolving Pathogen
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unfolding story told in numbers. While news reports focus on the number of tests, cases, hospitalizations, and…
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post Can Past Coronavirus Infection Protect Against COVID-19? Hints from Smallpox Vaccine
In ordinary times, a new report describing experiments on bits of smallpox scabs nestled in Civil War museum artifacts would have been…
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post A Tale of Two Clinical Trials: Gene Therapy for a Rare Disease and a Vaccine for COVID-19
Encouraging preliminary findings in a phase I clinical trial for a COVID-19 vaccine were widely reported as soon as the paper appeared…
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post Gastruloids Stand In for Early Human Embryos
Remember human embryonic stem (hES) cells? We don’t hear much about them anymore. And so I was surprised to see an application…
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post Two Views of Leeches, A Century Apart
Two genome sequences of the European medicinal leech Hirudo medicinalis have just been revealed in a pair of papers, and the unexpected…
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post How an Antibody Cocktail Against COVID-19 Channels the 3 Stooges – But is a Great Idea
“You imbecile!” bellowed Moe Howard as he stuck a finger up the nose of Curly. Moe the bully would often flick his…