Featured series 
Tag: Biotechnology
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Nation & World
Halting rising violence against health care workers
Law School discussion weighs effectiveness of legislation, technology, policies.
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Nation & World
Lesson from Latin America for U.S. abortion rights movement
A panel on abortion rights and reproductive justice in Latin America explored the factors behind landmark decisions liberalizing abortion laws in Mexico and Colombia.
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Health
It may be increasingly legal, but it doesn’t mean cannabis is safe
Neuroscientist says the jury’s still out on effects on neurodevelopment of fetuses, teens.
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Science & Tech
Are Google and smartphones degrading our memories?
It’s been 20 years since Daniel Schacter first published his groundbreaking book on memory errors. In a recent talk he discussed some of those new findings, including how technology is helping and hurting.
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Health
Telehealth works, but upgrade is still needed, say experts
Telehealth is experiencing a pandemic-induced boom that experts say has helped patients maintain contact with their doctors and lowered barriers to access for many. It’s important, should the change become permanent, to ensure equal access to all communities.
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Health
In soda tax fight, echoes of tobacco battles
Taxes on sugary drinks are potentially effective tools to fight the obesity epidemic and advocates are drawing lessons from the long battle against tobacco as they plot what they know will be a tough road ahead.
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Science & Tech
A SWIFTer way to build organs
A new technique called SWIFT (sacrificial writing into functional tissue) ultimately may be used therapeutically to repair and replace human organs with lab-grown versions containing patients’ own cells.
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Science & Tech
Pancreas on a chip
Islet-on-a-chip technology allows clinicians to easily determine the therapeutic value of beta cells for any given patient.
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Science & Tech
A new spin on an old question
Understanding how DNA and proteins interact — or fail to — could help answer fundamental biological questions about human health and disease.
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Science & Tech
Speeding up single-cell genomics research
Harvard researchers have devised a time-saving method that makes it possible to speed up the process of profiling gene regulation in tens of thousands of individual human cells in a single day, a development that promises to boost genomics research.
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Science & Tech
Editing genes at the source
Study shows how genes could be edited in stem cells within intact organs, without having to remove them from their normal environment. The new approach could treat a variety of diseases.
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Health
As the end nears, who’s in control?
Advocates and opponents of medical-aid-in-dying laws, also called physician-assisted death, gathered at Harvard Medical School for a two-day conference organized by the HMS Center for Bioethics.
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Campus & Community
Learning to understand their own DNA
Harvard gives local high school students hands-on experience with biotechnology.
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Arts & Culture
Seeking ethical clarity
A group of students from China, Japan, and the United States — including four from Harvard — grappled with ethical concerns in a discussion led by Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor of Government Michael Sandel.
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Health
An opening for measles
In the wake of the recent measles outbreak, a panel of experts convened at Harvard Law School to discuss the ethical, legal, and public health issues around vaccination.
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Health
‘Heart disease-on-a-chip’
Harvard scientists have merged stem cell and “organ-on-a-chip” technologies to grow, for the first time, functioning human heart tissue carrying an inherited cardiovascular disease. The research appears to be a big step forward for personalized medicine, because it is working proof that a chunk of tissue containing a patient’s specific genetic disorder can be replicated…
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Campus & Community
Learning life in the lab
Chelsea High students got to sample the techniques of genetic engineering in Harvard’s Science Center as part of a two-year program to bring biotechnology to science classes in 50 schools.
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Health
An experiment gone horribly awry
Victims of U.S. syphilis experiments in Guatemala are still awaiting compensation that may or may not come, even as new laws passed in the wake of 9/11 make it harder, in some circumstances, to sue disease researchers for wrongdoing, panelists at Harvard Law School said.
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Health
The rise of medical tourism
In his new book, I. Glenn Cohen, a Harvard Law School assistant professor and a Radcliffe Fellow, explores the lucrative and legal dimensions of the growing practice of traveling to another country for health care.
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Nation & World
A constitutional question
A panel of legal scholars examined whether health care reform is constitutional during a panel at Harvard Law School.
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Science & Tech
By ‘putting a ring on it,’ microparticles can be captured
To trap and hold tiny microparticles, research engineers at Harvard have “put a ring on it,” using a silicon-based circular resonator to confine particles stably for up to several minutes.
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Health
Novel artificial pancreas controls blood sugar more than 24 hours
An artificial pancreas system that closely mimics the body’s blood sugar control mechanism was able to maintain near-normal glucose levels without causing hypoglycemia in a small group of patients. The…
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Science & Tech
Carol Robinson: Pushing a technology’s boundaries
The distinguished chemist Carol Robinson has used mass spectrometry throughout her career to tackle increasingly complex problems in biology. When she delivered the Radcliffe Institute’s first Lecture in the Sciences…
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Health
Defibrillators may have little benefit for older, sicker patients
Defibrillators are commonly recommended to patients with heart failure to prevent sudden cardiac death, but beyond having heart failure, there is a lack of criteria to identify the appropriate patients…
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Health
Predicting risk of stroke from one’s genetic blueprint
A new statistical model could be used to predict an individual’s lifetime risk of stroke, according to the results of a study by Harvard researchers at the Children’s Hospital Boston Informatics Program.
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Campus & Community
Newsmakers
Alfred Goldberg, cell biology professor at Harvard Medical School (HMS), recently received a $15,000 cash prize as the recipient of the 11th annual Jacob Heskel Gabbay Award for Biotechnology and Medicine from Brandeis University.
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Health
Patrick announces $1B initiative
Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick Tuesday (May 8) announced a $1 billion biotech initiative to secure Massachusetts its position as a world leader in biotechnology and stem cell science.