Most teenagers feel confident in their ability to navigate the world and believe they could survive on their own if necessary. However, adults over 40 would likely agree that their 20s were a time of significant personal growth as experiences continued to shape who they became. In other words, our 20s are still considered formative [...]
How were the first building blocks of life formed from the primordial soup? While answers to such questions may not directly lead to the development of new drugs, sometimes we have an intrinsic need to seek knowledge for its own sake. Sometimes, it’s just pure curiosity: what exactly has Mother Nature been up to for [...]
It has been known for some time that one's attitude and outlook on life can affect their susceptibility to getting sick and the degree and pace of their recovery. In short, having an upbeat attitude and optimistic view of their current and future life tends to be beneficial in this regard. However, the molecular mechanisms [...]
Most people understand that there are few things more important for your health than exercise. Less well understood is that the most important thing of all is not to exercise vigorously several days/week, but rather to merely move during the day. If you can accomplish that, it will have tremendous impacts on your health. In [...]
2023 summer workshops are now scheduled! We will offer online workshops as well as residential and commuter options at UC Berkeley, UCSD and UCLA, and commuter-only workshops at our Alameda, CA location. See the Biomedical Camps tab for details.
Here is a fantastic and important study from renowned American scientist Doug Hanahan from the Swiss Institute for Experimental Cancer Research (ISREC)/Ludwig Institute in Lausanne. First, some background: 1. Immunotherapy – therapies that train the immune system to attack tumors – have revolutionized oncology. Less clear, however, is why some patients respond better than others, [...]
Infectious disease has shaped human evolution for millennia. During epidemics/pandemics, susceptible individuals with unfavorable genetics succumb to disease prior to reproducing while individuals with genetics that favor survival pass on their genes to subsequent generations. The current Covid-19 pandemic is the most recent of these events. Pre-vaccine, Covid-19 had a death rate of 1-2% for [...]
Congratulations to Barry Sharpless (Scripps Research Institute), Carolyn Bertozzi (Stanford U.), and Morten Meldal (U. Copenhagen) for the 2022 Noble Prize in Chemistry for the discovery and development of “click” chemistry, which has proven to be a revolutionary chemical tool for drug discovery and basic biomedical research. Barry Sharpless deserves particular recognition for being just [...]
After a billion years of evolution, the immune system is exquisitely evolved to fight infectious disease. Humans learned to harness this power in the form of primitive vaccines against smallpox hundreds of years ago. But in 2022, we have the knowledge and technology to supercharge vaccination to cure or prevent all manner of disease, both [...]
An update on progress stimulated by AlphaFold's revolutionary protein folding algorithm generated using AI. AlphaFold