Featured series 
Tag: Work in Progress
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Health
Meditation dramatically changes body temperatures
Harvard researcher Herbert Benson, who has been studying a meditation technique known as “g Tum-mo” for 20 years, says that “Buddhists feel the reality we live in is not the ultimate one. There’s another reality we can tap into that’s unaffected by our emotions, by our everyday world. Buddhists believe this state of mind can…
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Science & Tech
American females at highest risk for murder
A female in the United States is three times more likely to be murdered than a female in Canada, five times more likely to be murdered than a female in Germany, and eight times more likely to be murdered than a female in England and Wales. The U.S. female homicide victimization rate is five times…
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Health
Death protein may cause neural tube defects in babies of diabetic mothers
A research report provides a possible explanation for a class of birth defects that appears to be on the rise. A protein normally involved in programmed cell death may, as a consequence of high blood sugar, mistakenly tell cells of the nascent neural tube to die. Even with good control of diabetes, the risk for…
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Science & Tech
Nanowire used to sense cancer marker
Professor Charles Lieber and his students have made wires whose thinness is measured in atoms instead of fractions of an inch. That allowed Lieber’s team to develop what is likely to be an important scientific tool, a coated wire capable of detecting low levels of a protein that marks the presence or recurrence of prostate…
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Science & Tech
Mustard shows backbone in its own defense
Over the past few years, accumulated evidence from many scientists suggests that plants, animals, and insects share common elements in their innate skirmishes with potential pathogens. In the Feb. 28, 2002 issue of the journal Nature, plant scientists at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard and their colleagues have reported another striking similarity. The researchers identified…
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Health
Alien abduction claims examined
Richard McNally, a Harvard professor of psychology, and his colleagues recruited six women and four men who claimed they had been spirited away by extraterrestrials, some of them more than once.
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Science & Tech
Physicians warn of nuclear terrorist threat
In a new study, Lachlan Forrow, director of ethics support services at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. and his co-authors used software developed by the U.S. Defense Threat Reduction Agency to calculate the impact of a 12.5 kiloton nuclear explosion –- the same size as the…
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Science & Tech
Genetic computation tells man from microbe
By one estimate (based on bacteria counts in the colon or stool samples), microbes that call our bodies home outnumber human cells 10 to 1. Most of the bacteria, viruses, and other microbes are harmless or even beneficial. But others are suspected of being at the root of mysterious chronic diseases such as rheumatoid arthritis,…
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Health
Researchers eye earliest triggers of age-related macular degeneration
Age-related macular degeneration is the leading cause of blindness for Americans over 60 years of age. It affects more than 14 million people. But how it attacks the macula, the center of the retina, is a controversial question. The macula is where the cones — the color and light sensing cells of the eye —…
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Science & Tech
Physicians vs. the Internet
Each day, about 7.5 million people in the United States use the Internet to get health information, while less than 3 million consult their doctors. Of the 110 million Americans who surf the Internet, more than 60 percent use it for health advice. But many doctors are worried because they believe there is much misinformation…
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Health
Study links Western dietary pattern with greater risk for type 2 diabetes in men
About 16 million Americans have type 2 diabetes, which can cause blindness, kidney failure, and heart disease. Now researchers from the Harvard School of Public Health have linked a diet high in consumption of red meat, processed meat, high-fat dairy products and refined grains, combined with obesity and inactivity, with a high risk for type…
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Health
FDA approves Gleevec as oral treatment for gastrointestinal stromal cancer
George Demetri, medical director of the Sarcoma Center at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, was the lead investigator of a clinical study that looked at using Gleevec, an oral therapy, to treat occurrences of gastrointestinal stromal tumor. GIST, as it is known, is a rare form of sarcoma…
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Health
Mouse model devised that develops asthma
A Harvard research team led by Laurie Glimcher, Irene Heinz Given professor of immunology at the Harvard School of Public Health and a Harvard Medical School professor of medicine, two years ago discovered a molecule that they named T-bet. T-bet seemed to help control the immune system response by determining the actions of helper T…
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Health
Cell surface proteins can have pro- and anti-angiogenic face
Angiogenesis is the process by which cancer tumors develop a network of blood vessels to feed them, so that they may continue their growth. The strategy that cancer cells use to attract blood vessels to them involves a series of chemical messages. Researchers think of this as a type of cellular kidnapping, luring the blood…
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Health
Researchers find better way to predict childhood brain tumor outcomes
About 2,000 children a year are diagnosed with medulloblastoma, or brain tumor. In a study, researchers examined gene expression patterns from 99 patient tumor samples of three different types of brain tumors. In addition to distinguishing tumor types from each other, the study found strong expression of a signaling protein known as “Sonic Hedgehog,” which…
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Health
Can weight loss decrease heart disease in type 2 diabetes?
Can weight loss decrease heart disease in type 2 diabetes? That’s the question being asked by Harvard researchers and others based at three Boston medical centers. In a nationwide study conducted locally at Massachusetts General Hospital, Joslin Diabetes Center and Beth Israel-Deaconess Medical Center, researchers will gain valuable information about the relationship between weight loss…
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Science & Tech
Study examines data withholding in academic genetics
Eric G. Campbell, of the Institute for Health Policy at Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, and his colleagues recently surveyed geneticists and other life scientists at the 100 U.S. universities that received the most funding from the National Institutes of Health in 1998. Data was received from a total of 1,240 geneticists and…
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Health
Minimally invasive surgical procedure offers limited benefits for colon cancer patients
A national clinical trial compared the effects of standard colon cancer surgery with a newer, minimally invasive procedure for removing tumors called laparoscopic surgery. Researchers from Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and the Mayo Clinic and their colleagues found that compared with patients who had the standard operation, those who had the minimally invasive surgery were able…
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Science & Tech
Human genome sequence yields new tool for microbe-hunting
Microbiologists have traditionally identified pathogens (disease-causing organisms) by growing them in a laboratory dish from a sample of infected tissue. But not all pathogens can be cultured this way. Molecular tools do exist and have been used to identify some new disease organisms, but they have major limitations. But a new microbe-hunting method holds promise…
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Science & Tech
Tuning the system: Program buffers health care collisions
The Health Care Negotiation and Conflict Resolution program at the Harvard School of Public Health, led by Leonard Marcus, trains health care professionals to minimize the conflicts that inevitably arise. The four-step program outlined below is called “Walk in the Woods” after a famous story about arms control negotiators who found common interests that led…
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Health
Link found between body rhythms and circadian clock, light
The brain’s circadian clock is a tiny cluster of neurons behind the eyes. This cluster of cells sends out signals that control the body’s daily rhythms. New research from Harvard Medical School has started us on the path to understanding better how this process works. The possible implications of understanding how the circadian clock works…
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Health
Discovery could aid in therapeutic cloning, clamping down on cancer
“Our focus is to understand the very first few steps that drive a cell to become an intestinal cell instead of a muscle cell,” says Yang Shi, Harvard Medical School associate professor of pathology. Shi and his research team, working with worms, recently found a key molecule, CBP-1, that pushes young embryonic cells to become…
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Health
Biostatisticians crunch data vital to AIDS research, genetics
Broadly defined, statistical genetics is the development of methods to analyze DNA. In recent years, the term has been more specifically applied to gene mapping, or the search for locations of genes related to diseases, and to the analysis of drug therapies. Statistical genetics plays a significant role in what some experts predict to be…
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Health
Lack of protein ApoE in brain may raise Alzheimer’s risk
Brain cells are protected from possible contamination by substances in circulating blood by what is known as “the blood-brain barrier.” Researchers have many questions about precisely how this protective mechanism works. Recently, Harvard Medical Sschool researchers identified a protein that supports the blood-brain barrier. When a molecule, apolipoprotein E (apoE), is absent, the barrier becomes…
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Science & Tech
Minority patients face barriers to optimum end-of-life care
Eric Krakauer is an instructor in medicine at Harvard Medical School and part of Massachusetts General Hospital’s Palliative Care Service. He and his colleagues have been concerned that, according to many national studies, minorities do not receive the same level of health care that non-minorities do. This is particularly true in the area of what…
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Health
Study adds to the understanding of musical pitch perception
There are differences in the sounds of two voices or two musical instruments even if they hit the same note, and somehow the brain knows that. A new study shows that the auditory cortex, an area of the brain that interprets sound, is important for frequency processing and pitch perception. The research findings, published in…
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Science & Tech
Structure in dust around Vega may be signature of planet
Vega, located 25 light years away in the constellation Lyra, is the brightest star in the summer sky. Observations of Vega in 1983 with the Infrared Astronomy Satellite provided the first evidence for large dust particles around another star, probably debris related to the formation of planets. This discovery likely inspired Carl Sagan to place…