If ten science writers were asked to write a book about gene therapy, a biotechnology with roots going back to the 1950s…
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post Eliza’s Journey: Part 1Read more
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post A Checklist for Gene Therapy From the UK Cystic Fibrosis TrialRead more
Washington, D.C. I’m at the American Society of Gene and Cell Therapy annual meeting, one of my favorite conferences. The very first talk provided…
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post Of Tissue-Engineered Vaginas and Default OptionsRead more
I’m old enough to remember textbooks and biology classes that defined being female as a “default option” in human development. If the…
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post Great News For The Progeria CommunityRead more
A repurposed drug that reverses some of the rapid-aging symptoms of Hutchinson-Gilford progeria syndrome also extends life, according to a new…
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post Mutations in 115-Year-Old Provide Perspective for Personal Genome SequencingRead more
Normally, I wouldn’t post about a report that’s already reverberated through the blogosphere, but the finding of hundreds of mutations in the…
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post Celebrating DNA Day, 2014Read more
April 25, DNA Day, commemorates the date in 1953 when James Watson, Francis Crick, Maurice Wilkins, and Rosalind Franklin introduced the structure…
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post Chromosomal Clues to Past Pregnancy LossRead more
Genetics is, in a sense, timeless. DNA sequences stay mostly the same in an individual over a lifetime. Minus the inevitable somatic…
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post Call the Midwife Evokes Cystic Fibrosis in a Simpler TimeRead more
Previous posts bashing SyFy’s Helix and Dan Brown’s Inferno might suggest that I’m hypercritical of TV and films. Happily, the third season premiere of…
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post ALS Treatment (in Cells) – Too Late for Glenn, But Wonderful NewsRead more
I was cutting and pasting a post about Sunday night’s episode of Call the Midwife, which was about cystic fibrosis, when a…
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post Signal Transduction: Poetry in MotionRead more
When I was in school, the scary parts of biology were cellular respiration and the synthesis and degradation pathways of the 20 amino…
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post A Challenge to the Supremacy of DNA as the Genetic MaterialRead more
About a month ago, a news release stood out among the many I get every day: “A challenge to the genetic interpretation…
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post Clinical Whole Genome Sequencing: Not Quite Ready for Prime Time?Read more
When I posted “Why I Don’t Want to Know My Genome Sequence here in November 2012, I got a lot of grief…