With its role in higher cognitive functions, the cortex represents a significant evolutionary development in mammals, culminating in the enlarged hemispheres of humans and other primates. In the development of…
Fruit flies fight. The males will go after each other, fighting to establish dominance. Edward Kravitz, the George Packer Berry professor of neurobiology at Harvard Medical School, is using the…
When we receive a wound, disease-fighting cells rush to the scene to do combat with bodily invaders. But how does this work? When we receive a wound, cells near the…
Researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health, working with colleagues from the Department of Veterans Affairs, studied some 1,306 Boston area men who were part of the Veterans Affairs…
Combination therapy including protease inhibitors has been available since 1996 for adults with HIV-1 infection. The therapy has slowed the progression of HIV-1 and drastically reduced the rate of mortality…
The job of cells known as iNKT cells is to regulate the immune system’s response to infections and other disorders, ensuring that only diseased tissue, not healthy tissue, is targeted…
When cancer cells begin to do their destructive work, they have accomplices — normal cells that help nourish the cancerous ones. As Jack Lawler, Harvard Medical School associate professor of…
The ends of chromosomes in normal cells eventually unravel, causing the cells to die. This does not happen in cancer cells, however. Cancer cells use an enzyme named telomerase to…
According to the Parkinson’s Disease Foundation, “Parkinson’s disease (PD) is a disorder of the central nervous system that affects between one and one-and-a-half million Americans. Because it is not contagious…
Jeffrey Fredberg is a professor of bioengineering and physiology at the Harvard School of Public Health. His primary research interest is asthma. Fredberg was intrigued by the plasticity of the…
Since the mid-1970s, World Health Organization policies have encouraged integrating mental health services into primary care settings. But no one knows what, if anything, might be working to help those…
In order for us to use our minds for memory, for learning, and so forth, our brains must continually reinvent themselves. How do they do it? A Harvard Medical School…
The first point of contact between anthrax toxin that invades the body and the cells that the toxin will eventually destroy is a protein, known as a “docking” protein or…
Harrison Pope, a Harvard professor of psychiatry, and his colleagues at McLean Hospital, a Harvard-affiliated psychiatric facility in Belmont, Mass., investigated the long-term cognitive effects of smoking marijuana. They recruited…
Researchers analyzed the blood of marathon runners less than 24 hours after they had finished a race. They found abnormally high levels of inflammatory and clotting factors of the kind…
Anthrax is an often fatal disease that is caused by a bacterium. It has been considered a prime biological weapon in the arsenal of terrorists since attacks in the United…
A Harvard Medical School research team has developed a strategy to neutralize anthrax toxin in the body. So far they have tried the treatment in rats. Normally, rats die within…
A substance known as CREB controls gene expression in the brain. It also appears to be active in mood disorders. A group of Harvard researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont,…
A genetic test to determine a person’s chance of getting Alzheimer’s disease is still hypothetical. But scientists are getting closer and closer to being able to determine who is likely…
Findings from a study suggest that gaps exist in the preparedness of physicians to manage the full range of patients, procedures and problems they may encounter. A surprising one in…
An oocyte is an immature egg cell in the ovaries. Before a woman is born, her ovaries will contain about five million eggs. At birth, about three million of those…
A woman is born with just so many egg cells, called oocytes. When she begins ovulating, she has about 400. Even though that may seem like a lot, considering the…
In 1876, a German professor described a treatment that led to rapid improvement in two men who were suffering from what doctors now recognize as classic type 2 diabetes. In…
It’s a frightening — and increasingly common — problem. A patient seeks treatment for a particular ailment in a hospital and develops an entirely different disease: a bacterial infection that…
A team led by a Harvard researcher has identified a new type of cancer that primarily affects young girls. Sara Vargas, an instructor in pathology at Harvard Medical School and…
Scientists have long thought of aging as a complex process affected by perhaps a thousand genes. So a recent discovery by Harvard scientists that a gene or genes located on…
For more than 20 years researchers at Harvard and elsewhere have been looking at the long-term health effects of eating certain types of foods. These researchers now have a good…
When doctors diagnose and plan treatment for breast cancers they look for various indicators of how aggressive they are and what treatments will work best. Two-thirds of breast tumors are…
Each year almost 30,000 people in the United States are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. About the same number of people are killed by it. Pancreatic cancer is the fifth-leading cause…
Macular degeneration results from the malfunctioning or loss of function of photo-sensitive cells in the retina. According to the Macular Degeneration Foundation, more than 13 million people in the United…
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