The New York Times, June 5, 2019

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A skeleton in Siberia nearly 10,000 years old has yielded DNA that reveals a striking kinship to living Native Americans, scientists reported on Wednesday.

The finding, published in the journal Nature, provides an important new clue to the migrations that first brought people to the Americas.

“In terms of peopling of the Americas, we have found close to the missing link,” said Eske Willerslev, a geneticist at the University of Copenhagen and a co-author of the new paper. “It’s not the direct ancestor, but it’s extremely close.”

Decades of research by archaeologists and linguists suggests that people first came to the Americas at the end of the last ice age, by 14,500 years ago. The route, most experts believe, was a land bridge that connected Alaska and Siberia across what is now the Bering Sea. Continue reading “Who Were the Ancestors of Native Americans? A Lost People in Siberia, Scientists Say” →

The New York Times, June 5, 2019

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Some of the scenes in Mark Honigsbaum’s “The Pandemic Century” were so vivid they had me drafting movie treatments in my head. Midway through the book, I was picturing a doctor climbing the front steps of a rowhouse in Annapolis, Md., in the winter of 1930. His knock on the door goes unanswered, so he makes his way inside. An auto mechanic is sprawled in a living room chair, muttering in a feverish sleep. His wife wanders in from the bedroom, shouting gibberish. From the kitchen, her mother emerges unsteadily, a rattling cough rising up from deep in her lungs.

The camera cuts to a wire bird cage suspended from the ceiling. Lying on the bottom is a dead parrot, claws up.

The great parrot fever outbreak of 1930 has slipped from our collective memory. But at its peak, it was the stuff of panicked headlines — “Parrot Disease Fatal to Seven” in The Los Angeles Times, for example. From coast to coast, parrots were passing pathogens to their owners. Over the course of six months, upward of 800 cases of parrot fever were recorded worldwide, and 33 Americans died. The ranks of the dead included some of the scientists who were struggling to identify the outbreak’s cause. Continue reading “Ebola, H.I.V., Spanish Flu, SARS — the 20th Century’s Deadliest Hits” →

The New York Times, May 8, 2019

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To scientists like Michael Snyder, chair of the genetics department at Stanford University, the future of medicine is data — lots and lots of data.

He and others predict that one day doctors won’t just take your blood pressure and check your temperature. They will scrutinize your genome for risk factors and track tens of thousands of molecules active in your body.

By doing so, the doctors of the future will identify diseases, and treat them, long before symptoms appear. Continue reading “In This Doctor’s Office, a Physical Exam Like No Other” →