Sharon Begley has written a lovely article on Tanzi and Moir’s research on the antimicrobial properties of amyloid beta and the outrageous difficulty they have had getting NIH to fund their work. They noted that study after study has found no benefit from...
The history of medicine is replete with examples of the disasters that result when clinical practice is guided by theory alone. For instance, in the early 20th century sudden infant death was attributed to suffocation caused by an enlarged thymus.1 Thousands of...
The paper George Williams published in 1957 about senescence has inspired much of the field of evolutionary medicine. I never heard about it in medical school, but the evolutionary biologists I was talking with at the University of Michigan in the 1980’s said I...
Enormous interest is being generated by a new open access article in PLoS Biology: Identifying genetic variants that affect viability in large cohorts, by Mostafavi, H., Berisa, T., Day, F. R., Perry, J. R. B., Przeworski, M., & Pickrell, J. K....
This week’s British Medical Journal has an article “The antibiotic course has had its day,” by Llewelyn et al., that recommends against taking antibiotics for a full standard course. It goes further to challenge the WHO advice to take antibiotics...
