The Future of Fighting the Flu: My Feature in The Atlantic

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A few weeks ago I went to my local drug story a got a flu vaccine. So far <knock on lab bench> I’ve had a pretty healthy flu season. But there’s a fair chance I may get the flu anyway this winter, because flu vaccine effectiveness is modest compared to vaccines for many other diseases. What’s more, I’ll need to head back next year to the store to get another shot. That’s because flu vaccines today are still based in some fundamental ways–in their production in chicken eggs and in the molecules they target on viruses–on World War II-era science.

I’ve written an article for the December issue of the Atlantican article for the December issue of the Atlantic about how we got into this strange situation, and how scientists are trying to bring our fight against flu into the twenty-first century. Check it out.

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Old Age In the Embryo: My New Matter Column for the New York Times

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PHOTO BY ED UTHMAN VIA CREATIVE COMMONS

One of the hallmarks of aging is a process called senescence. Cells stop dividing and release a distinctive blend of chemicals that cause inflammation and other effects. It’s thus a big surprise that scientists have now found senescent cells in embryos. For my new column for the New York Times, I take a look at this remarkable similarity between old and new–and how it changes our understanding of how we developed from an egg. Check it out. 

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Signs of Aging, Even in the Embryo

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, November 21, 2013

Link

In 1961, two biologists named Leonard Hayflick and Paul Moorehead discovered that old age is built into our cells. At the time, many scientists believed that if healthy human cells were put in a flask with a steady supply of nutrients, they would multiply forever. But when Dr. Hayflick and Dr. Moorehead reared fetal human cells, that’s not what they found. Time and again, their cells would divide about 50 times and then simply stop.

Cells that stop growing this way came to be known as senescent.

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A Long Way Left Up Darwin’s Mountain

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TABLE MOUNTAIN. BY WARRENSKI VIA CREATIVE COMMONS

One of the things I like about a long-running blog is that I can revisit long-running stories whenever I feel like it. And one of the longest of those stories has been unfolding in a lab at Michigan State University since 1988. That year, a biologist named Richard Lenski began rearing Escherichia coli from a single microbe. The bacteria, which he raised in a dozen separate flasks, all faced the same challenge: endure a starvation diet that their lab-pampered ancestors had not suffered.

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Wolf to Dog: Scientists Agree on How, but Not Where

Posted on by Lori Jia

The New York Times, November 14, 2013

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Where did dogs come from? That simple question is the subject of a scientific debate right now. In May, a team of scientists published a study pointing to East Asia as the place where dogs evolved from wolves. Now, another group of researchers has announced that dogs evolved several thousand miles to the west, in Europe.

This controversy is intriguing even if you’re not a dog lover. It illuminates the challenges scientists face as they excavate the history of any species from its DNA.

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