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 COVID Complacency: Warnings from Invasion, Station Eleven, and a Research Report
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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…
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post Progress in Treating Genetic Disease: Dwarfism, Inborn Errors, Immune Deficiencies, and a Clotting Disorder
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 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…