Category: Articles

It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right

Posted on by admin

The New York Times, June 25, 2011

Link

One of the great strengths of science is that it can fix its own mistakes. “There are many hypotheses in science which are wrong,” the astrophysicist Carl Sagan once said. “That’s perfectly all right: it’s the aperture to finding out what’s right. Science is a self-correcting process.”

If only it were that simple. Scientists can certainly point with pride to many self-corrections, but science is not like an iPhone; it does not instantly auto-correct. As a series of controversies over the past few months have demonstrated, science fixes its mistakes more slowly, more fitfully and with more difficulty than Sagan’s words would suggest. Science runs forward better than it does backward.

Continue reading “It’s Science, but Not Necessarily Right” →

The Visitors That Came to Stay

Posted on by admin

The Wall Street Journal, June 18, 2011

Link

We are part virus. This bizarre yet inescapable fact has been revealed over the past 30 years, as scientists have spelunked their way through the human genome and encountered stretches of DNA with the telltale chemical signatures of viruses. All told, they’ve found 100,000 such segments so far. As Frank Ryan explains in “Virolution,” these pieces of virus DNA ended up in our genome through a peculiar kind of infection. From time to time, viruses slipped their DNA into the eggs and sperm of our ancestors. Parents then passed down the virus DNA to their offspring.

Continue reading “The Visitors That Came to Stay” →

A Tiny Key to a Terrible Lock

Posted on by admin

Discover, June 16, 2011

Link

For tens of millions of Americans, pain is not just an occasional nuisance—a stubbed toe, a paper cut—but a constant and torturous companion. Chronic pain can be focused on an arthritic knee or a bad back, diffused throughout the body, or even located virtually in an amputated limb. It can linger for years. And it can transform the world so that merely the light brush of a finger is an agonizing experience. The daily devastation can be so intense that people with chronic pain are up to six times as likely as those who are pain-free to report suicidal thoughts.

Continue reading “A Tiny Key to a Terrible Lock” →

E. Coli: Rise of the Superbacteria

Posted on by admin

Newsweek, June 5, 2011

Link

When Philip Tarr heard the first reports of a massive outbreak of E. coli in Europe recently, they had a sickeningly familiar ring. Tarr, a microbiologist at Washington University, is an expert on the strains of E. coli that have periodically wreaked havoc in the United States. In 2006, for example, E. coli on contaminated spinach infected 199 people in the United States, causing kidney failure in a number of cases. The European outbreak seemed to fit the pattern: people were infected with E. coli apparently after eating contaminated vegetables.

Continue reading “E. Coli: Rise of the Superbacteria” →

Viral Outbreaks in Dogs Yield Clues on Origins of Hepatitis C

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, May 30, 2011

Link

Hepatitis C is, in some ways, a high-profile disease. Worldwide, an estimated 200 million people are infected with the virus. Some of them will suffer cirrhosis, liver cancer and even death. Celebrities like Steven Tyler of Aerosmith and “American Idol” have spoken publicly of their infections. 

But mysteries still shroud the disease. Typically spread through drug injections, blood transfusions and sexual contact, hepatitis C can quietly cause liver damage for 20 years or more before victims become aware that they are ill. “Worldwide, it’s causing devastation,” said Brian Edlin, an epidemiologist at SUNY Downstate Medical Center in Brooklyn.

Continue reading “Viral Outbreaks in Dogs Yield Clues on Origins of Hepatitis C” →