As I write this, I’m sitting in the University of British Columbia/Vancouver General Hospital (UBC/VGH) Eye Care Centre, where my husband, Chuck, is completing post-tests at the conclusion of a six-month study on prosopagnosia, otherwise known as face blindness. The condition isn’t treatable with drugs – not yet, at least – but it’s nonetheless disabling, prompting researchers at several centers in North America and Europe to work collaboratively and seek to help patients carry on with their lives. Clinical studies of prosopagnosia have, so far, informed researchers more about the causes and structural manifestations of the disease than about potential...

Pop quiz . . . which market is valued higher, illegal drugs or prescription drugs? Although drug lords and cartels are not apt to file annual reports, the United Nations estimates that 5 percent of the global population now takes illegal drugs that account for an approximate $430 billion black market industry that, fortunately, still trails the $800-plus billion prescription drug market. Of course, government keeps both markets in check for the sake of public safety. It seizes illegal drugs and takes the criminal kingpins to trial in the illegal market, thereby devaluing the illicit drug revenue stream. In the...

SAN FRANCISCO ‑ I’m enough of a geek that I actually enjoy the details, devil and all, and so I love covering scientific conferences. At the same time, they can be daunting. So much scientific progress is incremental. A case in point: This year’s conference handbook for the annual meeting of the American Association for the Study of Liver Diseases (AASLD) comes to over 1,500 pages, most of them describing minor advances. As I sat in a San Francisco café Saturday morning, simultaneously soaking up the atmosphere and sifting through some of those abstracts in preparation for the weekend, though,...

Racial profiling – long in the realm of bad law enforcement – was criticized as bad medicine, too, in a recent paper by scientists from the Mount Sinai School of Medicine. The reason? As the authors put it, “cosmopolitan cities now include many individuals whose genetic heritage is drawn from multiple continental origins.” In other words, there’s no such thing as racial purity. In their paper, which was published in PLoS ONE and which you can find here (http://ow.ly/4YxK6) the team genotyped nearly 1,000 participants of Biobank, a program that collects DNA and plasma samples to aid in genomic and...