Sarah Zhang
Whether you use Ozempic, Wegovy, Mounjaro or Zepbound, you’re going to hit a weight-loss plateau. Then what?
Everyone hits a weight-loss plateau, but the race is on for next-generation drugs that can help patients lose even more ...
Vaccinating the elderly: An unappreciated strategy to reduce COVID deaths
No other basic fact of life matters as dramatically as age for COVID. Other common factors associated with risk—race, diabetes, ...
COVID force shift: Surge in milder variant focus global adaptation strategy rethink
Now Omicron is sweeping across state after state—even highly vaccinated ones—and new cases are shooting up and up. The virus ...
What’s next for ‘living with COVID’? America’s path to endemicity is lined with potholes
The answers were simpler when we thought we could vaccinate our way to herd immunity. But vaccinations in the U.S ...
Sperm donor controversy: Does everyone have a right to know their biological parents?
In the United States, where anonymous donation is still technically offered, some donor-conceived people are asserting a right to know ...
Winter COVID guide: What we need to know about our second pandemic year
For nearly two years now, Americans have lived with SARS-CoV-2. We know it better than we once did. We know ...
We will all likely get COVID. How can we adapt to living with the virus?
We don’t know exactly how the four common-cold coronaviruses first came to infect humans, but some have speculated that at ...
‘Two Americas’: How politics will shape our emergence from the pandemic
Newton, [Massachusetts] is an outlier even among outliers: More than 95 percent of people older than 30 have gotten at ...
When might the Delta variant reach its peak?
We will soon get the first glimmers of data that show how Delta behaves when all restrictions are lifted in ...
With widespread COVID vaccine hesitancy, the US may never reach herd immunity. Where will that leave us?
For COVID-19, the herd-immunity threshold is estimated to be between 60 and 90 percent. That’s the proportion of people who ...
Why the mounting number of coronavirus mutations portends a potentially troubling future
For most of 2020, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19 jumped from human to human, accumulating mutations at a steady rate ...
Should you abort a fetus with Down syndrome as the Danish do almost universally?
[I]n 2004, Denmark became one of the first countries in the world to offer prenatal Down syndrome screening to every ...
What you should and shouldn’t worry about in the small print when a COVID vaccine is approved
Over the next few months, the companies behind the leading [COVID] vaccine candidates will start releasing the first data from ...
Vaccine chaos: Doses likely released first are the hardest to deploy
[T]he COVID-19 vaccine will be a whole new challenge. “The COVID situation is significantly different and more complex than anything ...
Permanent readjustment: Why COVID-19 is here to stay
If there was ever a time when this coronavirus could be contained, it has probably passed. One outcome is now ...
Quest for a coronavirus vaccine ‘reinvigorating’ anti-vax conspiracy theories
There is no COVID-19 vaccine, but there are already COVID-19 vaccine conspiracies. Even as vaccines for the disease caused by ...
Breast milk breakthrough on the horizon? Growing mammary cells to create casein and lactose
The inconvenient truth about breastfeeding is that breasts are, invariably, attached to a person. A person who could get too ...
Tracing evolution of mammalian hearing: Essential ear bones were once part of the jaw
One hundred and twenty million years ago, when northeastern China was a series of lakes and erupting volcanoes, there lived ...
Anonymous no more: AncestryDNA test reveals identity of woman’s stem cell donor
In 2017, Holly Becker took an AncestryDNA test, and the results, she would only later learn, exactly matched those of ...
FDA regulatory dilemma: Are fecal transplants drugs, human tissue, or something new?
For the past several years, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration has been trying to figure out how to regulate ...
‘Illogical and inappropriate’: How anti-vaxxers use 23andMe genetic tests to avoid vaccines
San Francisco’s city attorney subpoenaed a doctor accused of giving illegal medical exemptions from vaccination, based on “two 30-minute visits ...
‘Stranger than doctors could have imagined’: Boy born without one type of brain cells
Even before he was born, it was clear that the boy’s brain was unusual—so much so that his expecting parents ...
‘Evolution in action’: How did this common gut bacteria turn lethal?
For three decades, the deadly bacteria sat in cold storage. Normally, Enterococcus faecalis lives harmlessly in the human gut. One particular strain, ...
DNA testing uncovers fertility doctor’s decades-old dark secret
The first Facebook message arrived when Heather Woock was packing for vacation, in August 2017. It was from a stranger claiming to ...
Huntington’s risk spawns niche IVF market for people who don’t want a diagnosis
When Jennifer Leyton was going through IVF, her doctors would tell her very little. They turned off the ultrasound screen ...
DNA of the dead: Genetic testing companies offering to use envelopes licked by the deceased
In the past year, genealogists have been abuzz about the possibility of getting DNA out of old stamps and envelopes ...
What explains twins that are ‘somewhere in between’ fraternal and identical?
A few years ago, Michael Gabbett got a call from a very confused ob-gyn. A woman had come in pregnant ...
‘Google of sorts’: DNA database harnesses power of genome sequences
In 2015, scientists discovered a pig in China that would set off a frantic, worldwide search. The pig carried bacteria ...