Pharmaceuticals
The Search for the Explanation behind Sudden Unexplained Death
During an uneventful afternoon on March 19, 2012, Guy and Lena Wolfe laid their daughter, three-month old Mia Roance Wolfe, down for a nap. Within twenty minutes, she was dead. Mia had been a perfectly healthy baby, having just completed her routine checkup without any problems. However, the same absence of problems resulted in the [...]
Shifting Hormones: Consequences of Sleep Deprivation
Sleep, a process as natural to most humans as breathing, often remains unappreciated until the painful symptoms of its absence—the lethargy, impaired cognition, and increased appetite known to many—manifest themselves. Sleep’s importance was bluntly unveiled in an 1894 study that deprived dogs of sleep until they died. “In contrast to dogs dead from starvation, those [...]
The Modern Doctor
“Well, they like to save lives. So anything’s okay, as long as life continues. It doesn’t matter if you’re hooked up to a million machines.”1 Margaret Edson’s play, Wit, details the hospital life of Dr. Bearing, an English professor slowly dying of cancer. What is striking about the play is that her doctor, Jason Posner, [...]
Predicting Disease: How Technology in the Future Might Change Healthcare
What if disease could be predicted before it happened? No, this is not a fictional health-care version of Minority Report, but a possible end science is quickly developing towards. What began as an inquiry into how diseases are passed on to offspring has been steadily progressing towards a disease-predicting mechanism that could drive the future [...]
Regenerative Medicine: A Peek into the Future
Regenerative medicine is a growing field that offers the potential to repair and replace damaged cells, tissues, and organs by using those that are specially grown. Thus, instead of merely providing treatments to heal damaged body parts, as with transplants, doctors would be able to treat the underlying cause of the disease. Scientists and researchers [...]
Carcinogens: Case Studies of FDA Foul-Ups
Most Americans consider the FDA an infallible guiding force for consumption-related information and decisions. Yet a closer examination of its “approved” lists may reveal the FDA’s dated and inaccurate notions of certain substances, especially known carcinogens, that are still found in everyday consumer goods like soft drinks, coffee, bread, and bottled water. Unfortunately, the FDA’s [...]
Classification of Intelligence: Addressing the Misconceptions and Benefits
In our society today, “intelligence” is often referred to colloquially; few understand the cognitive complexities and nuances behind this commonly used term. By correcting misconceptions and encouraging a more thorough understanding of intelligence and its classifications, our society will be better equipped to fight cognitive disorders. The general population’s idea of intelligence is mostly related [...]
Life Extension: Moral and Ethical Ramifications
Ever since the dawn of mankind, humans have sought to conquer their mortality. Ultimately though, ancient quests for longevity, like the Spanish search for the Fountain of Youth, have yielded nothing. Recent advances in medicine and biology have finally made this timeless desire a possibility in the near future. Through techniques like caloric reduction and [...]
Organs-on-Chips: Rethinking Animal Testing
If a technology developed by a group at Harvard’s Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering gains widespread adoption, it could disrupt the entire pharmaceutical research and development industry. In both academia and industry alike, research involving the discovery and development of drugs and toxins has almost always involved overcoming certain degrees of in vivo animal [...]
Serial Killers, the Brain, and the Mind: Empathy Research in Current Society
“I am the most cold-blooded son of a bitch you’ll ever meet…I just liked to kill, I wanted to kill.” Such were the words of the infamous serial killer Ted Bundy. Ted Bundy was a psychopath, suffering from a disorder characterized by “aggressive narcissism” and a “socially deviant lifestyle.” These two traits are clinically diagnosed [...]
The Fight Against Superbugs
While the term “superbugs” sounds like a concept from a science fiction novel, it is far from fiction. This phenomenon is in fact a dangerous reality of our times. Various types of bacteria have become immune to the antibiotics that are used to treat them, leading to the spread of diseases, thousands of deaths, and [...]
Fighting Cancer by Inhibiting Telomerase
Finding new ways to improve cancer therapies has presented opportunities and challenges to biomedicine and biotechnology. After learning that telomere length might serve as an effective predictor of cancer risk and survival, scientists have looked to these chromosomal ends for purposes that go beyond their use as signals of cell deterioration. By inhibiting telomerase, a [...]
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