David Cox
98% of the human genome: We are finally beginning to understand the mystery of ‘dark matter’ junk DNA
Twenty years ago, an enormous scientific effort revealed that the human genome contains 20,000 protein-coding genes ...
The $100 genome: What breaking this accessibility barrier means for the future of genetic testing
In May 2022, Californian biotech Ultima Genomics announced that its UG 100 platform was capable of sequencing an entire human ...
Drilling down on the roots of chronic fatigue syndrome? 200 genetic variants now linked to the disorder
Scientists have discovered possible genetic risk factors involved in chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME). ME/CFS ...
Targeting 2024: The quest to create a universal COVID vaccine
Jonathan Heeney and colleagues face a challenge that has long proved insurmountable for scientists: to develop vaccines that can not ...
Solving the mystery of Epstein-Barr: Virus found in 95% of people leads to hundreds of thousands of cancers a year. Can we develop a vaccine?
In the 1970s, Hank Balfour, a virologist at the University of Minnesota Medical School, was studying the long-term survival prospects ...
Why is it so hard to keep the pounds off after losing a lot of weight?
According to the University of Michigan, about 90% of people who lose significant amounts of weight, whether through diets, structured ...
From ‘anti-cancer’ bread to vitamin-infused veggies, health-boosting gene-edited foods are on the way
While the UK is still very much in the experimental stage of creating gene-edited foods, elsewhere in the world they ...
Tempering optimism: Here’s why the trajectory of COVID’s third wave will be so hard to predict
On June 24, the number of daily infections in the UK crossed 16,000, levels not seen since early February when ...
COVID’s Achilles’ heel: Will the DNA of disease-resistant patients offer clues to blocking the virus?
Mayana Zatz, director of the Human Genome Research Centre at the University of São Paulo has identified 100 couples, where ...
IVF 14-day rule: Scientists and ethicists reconsidering how many days an embryo can be studied outside the womb
As early as 1979, regulators responded to [in-vitro fertilization ethical] concerns by establishing the ‘14-day rule’. It soon became an internationally accepted ...
Can dementia be cured?
Dementia is not just one disease – it has more than 200 different subtypes. Over the past decade neurologists have ...
Heart muscle patches: Reprogrammed blood cells might extend life of heart attack victims
Those who survive [a heart attack] are often left with permanent heart failure – a group which includes approximately 450,000 ...
Could ‘superantibiotics’ save us from rising drug resistance?
The need for new classes of antibiotics has repeatedly been emphasised, with researchers turning to some of the most extreme environments on ...
Genetics and training push athletic ability to the limit
From club runners to Olympians, every athlete has a limit. Scientifically, this limit is defined as the body's lactate threshold ...
