Health

Harvard researchers have identified a pair of genes that appear to be responsible for allowing a specific strain of bacteria in the human gut to break down Lanoxin — a widely prescribed cardiac drug — into an inactive compound, as well as a possible way to turn the process off.

Researchers have long understood that genetics can play a role in susceptibility to cholera, but a team of Harvard scientists is now uncovering evidence of genetic changes that might also help protect some people from contracting the deadly disease.

Harvard Professor Martin Nowak and Ivana Bozic, a postdoctoral fellow in mathematics, show that, under certain conditions, using two drugs in a “targeted therapy” — a treatment approach designed to interrupt cancer’s ability to grow and spread — could effectively cure nearly all cancers.

Harvard researchers have generated long-lasting blood vessels from reprogrammed human cells. The study in the mouse model reveals both the potential and remaining challenges to vessel regeneration.

“The Road to Vital Therapy,” part of the Broad’s Institute’s midsummer science lecture series, discussed how researchers are tapping the human genome, hoping to create effective treatments for vexing afflictions.

With classes in plant morphology fading in universities across the country, an Arnold Arboretum short course is seeking to plug the hole, bringing in top botany graduate students and postdoctoral fellows for an intensive, two-week course.

Australian scientist Stephen Simpson’s locust research has led to insights on human nutrition.

Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified in the most aggressive forms of cancer a gene known to regulate embryonic stem cell self-renewal, beginning a creative search for a drug that can block its activity.

Harvard nutrition experts and leaders of the food industry met this week at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to discuss recommendations for changing menus of everything from restaurants to cafeterias to prepared foods in an effort to improve the American diet and lessen the environmental impact of the foods we eat.

Specialists examines the country’s obesity problem from several angles at an HMS-MGH forum.

As part of Professor Gonzalo Giribet’s Biology of Invertebrates class, students make closely observed, highly detailed sketches of animals they study in the lab.

Ministers of health from around the world came to the Harvard Kennedy School this week as part of a leadership workshop, co-sponsored with the School of Public Health, to improve health leadership globally.

Harvard researchers have demonstrated that the levels of barium in teeth correspond with breast-feeding. Importantly, they said, the barium levels can remain in fossils that are thousands of years old. This provides new opportunities to study breast-feeding behavior among Neanderthals and early humans.

Dan W. Brock of Harvard Medical School on Wednesday delivered the 63rd George W. Gay Lecture in Medical Ethics at the School, focusing on population bioethics.

Jay Winsten of the Harvard School of Public Health hopes to recruit entertainers for a campaign to reduce distracted driving.

Researchers from Harvard-affiliated Brigham and Women’s Hospital (BWH) are the first to report that synthetic silicate nanoplatelets (also known as layered clay) can induce stem cells to become bone cells without the need of additional bone-inducing factors.

Led by Joshua Sanes and Jeff Lichtman, a group of Harvard researchers has made a host of technical improvements in the “Brainbow” imaging technique.

A team at Tel Aviv University in Israel and the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has just discovered an exoplanet using a new method that relies on Einstein’s special theory of relativity.

In a new paper, Professor of Psychology Richard McNally and graduate student Don Robinaugh say that while people suffering from complicated grief — a syndrome marked by intense, debilitating emotional distress and yearning for a lost loved one — had difficulty envisioning specific events in their future, those problems disappeared when they were asked to imagine an alternate future that included their lost loved one.

Two Harvard Stem Cell Institute researchers have identified a protein in the blood of mice and humans that may prove to be the first effective treatment for the form of age-related heart failure that affects millions of Americans, a study says.

A slowdown in the growth of U.S. health care costs could mean a savings of as much as $770 billion on Medicare spending over the next decade, Harvard economists say.

Fifty years after its founding, the Harvard School of Public Health’s Department of Global Health and Population took time for reflection and a look ahead on April 25 during an all-day symposium at the School.

An organismic and evolutionary biology course this semester has formed a virtual classroom with other universities to examine the holdings of museum collections and the vast amount of data they contain and integrate them into the classroom.

Researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have discovered a hormone that holds promise for a dramatically more effective treatment of type 2 diabetes, a metabolic illness afflicting an estimated 26 million Americans.

The Forum at Harvard School of Public Health explored the high cost of inaction on children’s health on Tuesday, from long-term disabilities caused by failing to provide AIDS medications to major opportunities lost because of poor health, education, and economic opportunity.

Using an unusual decision-making study, Harvard researchers exploring the question of motivation found that rats will perform a task faster or slower depending on the size of the benefit they receive, suggesting they maintain a long-term estimate of whether it’s worthwhile for them to invest the energy.

Using a new, stem cell-based, drug-screening technology that could reinvent and greatly reduce the cost of developing pharmaceuticals, researchers at the Harvard Stem Cell Institute have found a compound that is more effective in protecting the neurons killed in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis than are two drugs that failed in human clinical trials.

An international team of researchers has decoded the genome of a creature whose evolutionary history is both enigmatic and illuminating: the African coelacanth

Members of the Harvard community responded to the Boston Marathon attacks and offered thoughts about both the physical and mental injuries they caused.

Lest you think you’re at the top of the evolutionary heap, looking down your highly evolved nose at the earth’s lesser creatures, Marlene Zuk has a message for you: When it comes to evolution, there is no high or low, no better or worse.