Last year, Ardem Patapoutian got a tattoo. An artist drew a tangled ribbon on his right arm, the diagram of a protein called Piezo. Dr. Patapoutian, a neuroscientist at Scripps Research in San Diego discovered Piezo in 2010, and in 2021 he won a Nobel Prize for the work. Three years later, he decided to memorialize the protein in ink.

Piezo, Dr. Patapoutian had found, allows nerve endings in the skin to sense pressure, helping to create the sense of touch. “It was surreal to feel the needle as it was etching the Piezo protein that I was using to feel it,” he recalled.

Continue reading “Mapping the Sense of What’s Going On Inside” →

Gene-editing therapies offer great hope for treating rare diseases, but they face big hurdles: the tremendous time and resources involved in devising a treatment that might only apply to a small number of patients.

A study published on Wednesday outlines a new approach that could make the process more efficient and less costly. Writing in the journal Nature, researchers presented a path toward a gene-editing strategy that could eventually be standardized for many different rare diseases, instead of personalized edits for each one.

Continue reading “New Gene-Editing Strategy Could Help Development of Treatments for Rare Diseases” →

The discovery of the structure of DNA in the early 1950s is one of the most riveting dramas in the history of science, crammed with brilliant research, naked ambition, intense rivalry and outright deception.

There were many players, including Rosalind Franklin, a wizard of X-ray crystallography, and Francis Crick, a physicist in search of the secret of life. Now, with the death of the American geneticist James Watson at 97 on Thursday, the last of those players is gone.

Continue reading “The DNA Helix Changed How We Thought About Ourselves” →

In Paola Arlotta’s lab at Harvard is a long, windowless hallway that is visited every day by one of her scientists. They go there to inspect racks of scientific muffin pans. In every cavity of every pan is a pool of pink liquid, at the bottom of which are dozens of translucent nuggets no bigger than peppercorns.

The nuggets are clusters of neurons and other cells, as many as two million, normally found in the human brain. On their daily rounds, the scientists check that the nuggets are healthy and well-fed.

Continue reading “What We Can Learn From Brain Organoids” →