The New York Times, October 7, 2020
EDITING HUMANITY
The Crispr Revolution and the New Era of Genome Editing
By Kevin Davies
In July 2019, MIT Technology Review took a break from its usual beats, such as artificial intelligence and biotechnology, to offer some news from the world of book publishing.
Continue reading “The Promise and the Reality of Gene Editing”
The New York Times, October 7, 2020 (with Katherine Wu and Elian Peltier)
The Nobel Prize in Chemistry was jointly awarded on Wednesday to Emmanuelle Charpentier andJennifer A. Doudna fortheir 2012 work on Crispr-Cas9, a method to edit DNA. The announcement marks the first time the award has gone to two women.
“This year’s prize is about rewriting the code of life,” Goran K. Hansson, the secretary-general of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, said as he announced the names of the laureates.
Continue reading “Nobel Prize in Chemistry Awarded to 2 Scientists for Work on Genome Editing”
The New York Times, October 6, 2020 (with Noah Weiland)
The Food and Drug Administration released new guidelines on Tuesday for coronavirus vaccine developers — a step that had been held up for two weeks by top White House officials. The guidelines make it highly unlikely that a vaccine could be authorized by Election Day.
The move, which was cleared by the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, appeared to be an abrupt reversal a day after The New York Times reported that White House officials, including Mark Meadows, the chief of staff, were blocking the guidelines. Top F.D.A. officials were caught by surprise when they learned midafternoon that the new guidelines had been cleared.
Continue reading “In Reversal, White House Approves Stricter Guidelines for Vaccine Makers”
…and here we are in October, with the President of the United States hospitalized for Covid-19. Not the timeline I would have expected us to follow back in March.
It looks as if the President’s infection was involved in one way or another with a superspreading event at the White House last Saturday. No one should be surpised that the coronavirus can spread this way. Scientists have been warning us for months now. Here’s a story I wrote back in June. Continue reading “Friday’s Elk, October 3, 2020”
The New York Times, September 24, 2020
The vaccine maker Novavax said Thursday that it would begin the final stages of testing its coronavirus vaccine in the United Kingdom and that another large trial was scheduled to begin next month in the United States.
It is the fifth late-stage trial from a company supported by Operation Warp Speed, the federal effort to speed a coronavirus vaccine to market, and one of 11 worldwide to reach this pivotal stage. Novavax, a Maryland company that has never brought a vaccine to market, reached a $1.6 billion deal with the federal government in July to develop and manufacture its experimental vaccine, which has shown robust results in early clinical trials.
Continue reading “Novavax Enters Final Stage of Coronavirus Vaccine Trials”