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” →

Jay Falk: The project that was terminated was on this hummingbird, the white-necked jacobin. The males in this species have a deep blue iridescent head, a bright white belly and a white tail, which they’re constantly spreading and showing off to each other. And the females look very different. They have a mottled gray throat and belly, and then their tail is very dark, almost black. But 20 percent of the females look nearly identical to the males. Why, if you’re a female, would you want to look like a male?

Continue reading “He Studied Why Some Female Birds Look Like Males” →