The Food and Drug Administration on Thursday approved an experimental treatment for A.L.S., a severe neurological disorder that causes paralysis and death, despite questions about the therapy’s effectiveness. The treatment, conceived about a decade ago by two college students, was approved even though analyses by the F.D.A.’s reviewers concluded there was not yet sufficient evidence…
Look up an image of a tumor on Google, and you’ll probably end up with a brightly colored cluster of cancer cells on a drab background of healthy tissue. But for Lian Narunsky Haziza, a cancer biologist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, the picture looks very different. A tumor may also contain…
He looked at human cells from breast cancers, colon cancers and melanomas and saw the same phenomenon. But blood cancers and glioblastomas, the deadly brain cancers, did not form the cell-in-cell structures. Perhaps, Dr. Carmi reasoned, it might be possible to prevent cancer cells from taking refuge. He decided to examine the genes involved in…
Doctors were unevenly affected by the early stages of the pandemic. While emergency physicians and family physicians worked around the clock, constantly exposed to Covid-19, many physicians in other specialties were able to reach their patients through telehealth appointments and spend more time with their families. Combined with a possible optimism that the worst of…
McKinsey now had another reason to back away from Big Tobacco. But the tobacco companies wanted to keep selling cigarettes, so McKinsey stayed to help them do just that. In addition to Philip Morris, the firm’s clients included R.J. Reynolds, Lorillard, Brown & Williamson, British American Tobacco and Japan Tobacco International. More health warnings followed.…
If it wasn’t clear enough during the Covid-19 pandemic, it has become obvious during the monkeypox outbreak: The United States, among the richest, most advanced nations in the world, remains wholly unprepared to combat new pathogens. The coronavirus was a sly, unexpected adversary. Monkeypox was a familiar foe, and tests, vaccines and treatments were already…
That fall, a friend told the patient about a clinic at New York University that specialized in facial palsies. She quickly found it on the internet: the Facial Paralysis and Reanimation Center. She studied the faces of the doctors at the clinic. Dr. Judy Lee was a specialist in disorders of the ear, nose and…
Natalie Dean, a biostatistician at Emory University, said it was difficult for researchers to establish how exposed people were to monkeypox or their differences in behavior, particularly when dealing with delicate information. “If you can refine it down to a population with a particular exposure, then it’s easier to compare a vaccinated group with a…
It was a startling discovery: Tiny pieces of an unborn baby’s DNA were found floating through its mother’s bloodstream — not inside the mother’s cells, where genetic material is usually found, but rather outside them. But when Dr. Yuk Ming Dennis Lo, a researcher in Hong Kong, described the finding in 1997, it was greeted…
Deciding if and how to share health information can leave daters on a tightrope between vulnerability and vigilance.