Our health depends on vitamins, and to understand that dependency, it helps to understand the history of vitamins. As I wrote in an article in Science Times this week, our ancestors have probably needed vitamins for billions of years. By studying how we and other species make vitamins, scientists hope to find new ways to keep us healthy — perhaps even by using vitamins as a weapon against our enemies.

There are two ways of getting those vitamins: making them or eating them. Our microbial ancestors probably made many of their vitamins, but later much of that ability was lost. Our primate ancestors lost the ability to make their own vitamin C about 60 million years ago.

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In 1602, a Spanish fleet was sailing up the Pacific coast of Mexico when the crew became deathly ill. “The first symptom is pain in the whole body that makes it sensitive to touch,” wrote Antonio de la Ascensión, a priest on the expedition. “Purple spots begin to cover the body, especially from the waist down; then the gums become so swollen that the teeth cannot be brought together, and they can only drink, and finally they die all of a sudden, while talking.”

The crew was suffering from scurvy, a disease that was then both bitterly familiar and deeply mysterious. No one knew why it struck sailors or how to cure it.

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Scientists have found the oldest DNA evidence yet of humans’ biological history. But instead of neatly clarifying human evolution, the finding is adding new mysteries.

In a paper in the journal Nature, scientists reported Wednesday that they had retrieved ancient human DNA from a fossil dating back about 400,000 years, shattering the previous record of 100,000 years.

The fossil, a thigh bone found in Spain, had previously seemed to many experts to belong to a forerunner of Neanderthals. But its DNA tells a very different story.

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The days of scrawled doctor’s notes are slowly coming to a close. In the United States, 93 percent of hospitals are now using at least some electronic medical records and 2.2 percent have given up paper records completely, according to the consulting firm HIMSS Analytics.

The federal government has been pushing for electronic medical records for a decade, arguing that they will improve health care and bring down costs. That is still a matter of debate. Critics charge that the system is hobbled by poorly designed software and that some hospitals are using electronic medical records to bill more for the same services.

Continue reading “Linking Genes to Diseases by Sifting Through Electronic Medical Records” →