Featured series 
Health
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U.S. innovation ecosystem is envy of world. Here’s how it got started.
Economist who studies technological change looks at public-private research partnership amid rising questions on federal funding
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Did a socially awkward scientist set back airborne disease control?
In talk on new book, Carl Zimmer theorizes key researcher’s discoveries were undercut by his personality
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You went to the doctor and came out feeling worse
Psychologist who studied ‘medical gaslighting’ explains how caseload pressures contribute to the problem and when we should call it something else
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A dietary swap that could lengthen your life?
Study finds replacing butter with plant-based oils cuts premature death risk by 17 percent
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New hope for repairing eye damage once thought untreatable
Stem cell therapy safely restores cornea’s surface in clinical trial
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Cancer? No, thank goodness, it’s just high cholesterol.
Cardiovascular disease remains nation’s top cause of death, but patients seem too casual about prevention, experts say
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Treating advanced lung cancer with light
Photodynamic, or light, therapy was approved by the Food and Drug Administration in December 1998. The FDA has also approved using lasers for treatment of advanced stages of cancer of…
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Shadow proteins in thymus may explain how immune system gets to know its own body
Researchers recently identified a protein that appears to work by turning on in the thymus, which lies beneath the breast bone, the production of a wide array of proteins from…
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Researchers switch cancer off and on in mice
An antibiotic added to the drinking water of mice stops the progress of leukemia. Harvard researcher Claudia Huettner cannot do the same thing in humans, unfortunately, but through such experiments…
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Oldest known flowering plants identified by genes
Flowering plants now number 250,000 different species, including virtually all the vegetables and grains we eat, as well as most of the food of the animals that we consume. “It’s…
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‘Take two aspirin and call me manana’
Harvard Medical School is attempting to bridge the language barriers that sometimes arise in medical settings. A set of three medical phrasebooks was first offered in 1999 in three different…
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Jolie-Pitt Foundation Donates $2 Million to Global Health Committee to Fight HIV/AIDS and Tuberculosis in Ethiopia
The Global Health Committee (GHC) has announced it will receive $2 million dollars from the Jolie-Pitt Foundation to bring life-saving medicines to Ethiopians suffering from HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis. The money…
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Paying attention to attention: How active is hyperactive?
McLean Hospital researcher Martin Teicher and his team believe that the surest way to separate youngsters who have attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) from those with other problems is to…
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Diving into the gene pool
Maryellen Ruvolo, professor of anthropology, specializes in the analysis of human and primate family trees using DNA data, a subfield of molecular evolution. She is probably best known for her…
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Electromagnets used in treating depression
Recent studies by Harvard researchers at McLean Hospital in Belmont, Mass., have enlarged the body of knowledge about a promising, though still experimental, treatment for a variety of psychiatric disorders.…
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Aging Brains Lose Less Than Thought
It’s considered a dreaded inevitability of growing old—you lose thousands of brain cells every day. This idea has been a centerpiece of scientific dogma and popular lore for 40 years.…