Medicine

Most visits to a doctor or hospital occur when a patient feels under the weather, but is unsure of the cause of the symptoms or the best way to treat them. For example, sniffles and a sore throat could be caused by seasonal allergies or the flu, each of…

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-- On a Monday morning, as he was sorting through Petri dishes of Staphylococci he had left on his laboratory bench before going on vacation, Dr. Alexander Fleming noticed one that had become contaminated with mold. Fungal contamination was not…

Scientists have shown that resveratrol and resveratrol-like molecules may prolong life, but how might they do this?

The problem with pills Did you know that when you take a pill, the active ingredient in that pill diffuses throughout your entire body? When you have a headache you may take an over-the-counter pain medication, but this drug does not just concentrate in…

Think back to the last time you took medicine — perhaps it was a pain reliever or some cough syrup. What were you thinking about as that medicine was digested? Chances are, you weren’t thinking about the origins of the drug, but scientists and doctors…

-- You may have recently heard of the first person to be cured of human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the virus that causes acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS). Timothy Ray Brown was HIV-positive and also had acute myeloid leukemia, a cancer that…

-- Synthetic biologists are a new breed of researchers: part-scientist, part-engineer. Building on the work of more traditional biologists, synthetic biologists try to use what we know about biology to engineer new functions into living things, such as…

-- Scientists and prostate cancer patients alike cheered when the FDA approved Provenge, the first therapeutic vaccine for prostate cancer, in April 2010. A few months later, a second group of researchers published a clinical study that suggested the…

A study published this summer in the journal Science found, for the first time, significant success in preventing HIV infection using a vaginal microbicidal gel [1]. This finding is an important step in our understanding of HIV prevention and in curbing…