A paper in the most recent issue of Trends in Molecular Medicine gave a scathing indictment of randomized clinical trials of alternative medicine. Such trials, authors David Gorski of Wayne State University and Stephen Novella of Yale University wrote in their paper "Clinical trials of integrative medicine: testing whether magic works?", have increased tremendously in the past 20 years. And they have not improved medicine overall.
"Recalling a memory is not like playing a tape recorder," Susumu Tonegawa told reporters. "It is a creative process." Normally, that creativity comes from the organism – man or mouse – doing the remembering. But Tonegawa, who is at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and his colleagues have managed to be creative with mouse memories, by altering the association between so-called episodic memories and the emotions that accompanied them.
Polio was declared an eradicable disease in 1988, and although the global polio eradication initiative missed its original goal of wiping the disease off the face of the planet by 2000, it certainly seems possible to get there.
Using deep sequencing of candidate genes, researchers have identified mosaic mutations – mutations that exist in only some of the body's cells, because they arose as a result of a copying error during cell division rather than being present in the sperm or egg – in about a third of patients with malformations of the cerebral cortex.
Polio was declared an eradicable disease in 1988, and although the global polio eradication initiative missed its original goal of wiping the disease off the face of the planet by 2000, it certainly seems possible to get there.
Scientists have reported that Tekmira Pharmaceuticals Corp.'s experimental drug candidate TKM-Marburg (NP-718m–LNP) was able to prevent monkeys from becoming seriously ill after Marburg virus infection, even when treatment was not started until the animals showed signs of viremia.
One of the biggest side effects of antibiotics may come not at the time of treatment, but years later. Scientists have shown that treatment with antibiotics early in life permanently altered the metabolism of mice, predisposing them to obesity.
Any HIV-infected person has T cells that are infected with the virus but are not dividing. That so-called quiescent state means that they are not actively contributing to disease, because the virus cannot hijack cellular machinery that is not active in the first place. But it also means they are immune to antiretroviral treatment (ART), which only targets actively dividing virus.
Researchers have found a way to destroy tumors by directly injecting them with spores of Clostridium novyi, a bacterium that thrives in anaerobic conditions and, therefore, prefers exactly the kind of cancer that other therapies have a hard time getting to: the poorly vascularized core of large tumors.
