Crispr Wants to Feed the World
Ten years after its discovery, the implications of Crispr genome editing are profound and far-reaching, and we are only getting started. This tool, adapted from a bacterial immune system, allows…
Microbial Cocktails Are More Than a Gut Feeling
In 2023, our understanding of the microbes that live inside the human gut will lead to new ideas for medicine. Today, we know that gut microbes help develop and sustain…
A Drug to Treat Aging May Not Be a Pipe Dream
Life expectancy in the best-performing countries has been increasing by three months per year every year since the early 1800s. Throughout most of human history, you had a roughly 50–50…
The Magic of mRNA Will Push Medical Advances for Everyone
mRNA is one of the first molecules of life. While identified six decades ago as the carrier of the blueprint for proteins in living cells, its pharmaceutical potential was long…
Get Ready to Play ‘Guess the Viral Variant’
2020 was the year of Covid lockdowns, 2021 the year of vaccines, and 2022 the year of worldwide reopening. 2023 will be the year of variant prediction. The first Covid…
It’s Time to Focus on Reproductive Longevity Research
Women’s ovaries age prematurely, at more than twice the rate of other organs. Why that is remains a mystery to scientists, making it one of the most important unanswered questions…
The Pandemic Uncovered Ways to Speed Up Science
The pandemic highlighted broad problems in research: that many studies were hyped, error-ridden, or even fraudulent, and that misinformation could spread rapidly. But it also demonstrated what was possible. While…
Scientists Are Developing Portable Technology to Detect Foodborne Viruses
A team of international researchers from the US and the UK have received a grant of $750,000 to develop portable, rapid biosensors capable of detecting noroviruses and mycotoxins in foods…
Antibodies Are Being Created to Fight Disease in New Ways
Around halfway through 2022, we will have witnessed a number of significant breakthroughs in ways in which we can engineer the body’s immune system to fight disease. The pandemic has…
4 Dead Infants, a Convicted Mother, and a Genetic Mystery
That evening she wrote an email to Folbigg’s lawyer and said she was in. As she dug into the investigation, she assumed that her scientific work would help guide the…