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On trailblazing geneticist Pardis Sabeti, who balances being in a rock band with her work in computational genomics: “There’d be plenty of people eager to talk to Sabeti before long. That October, she was the lead author on a paper published in Nature that laid out her discovery’s ‘profound implications for the study of human […]

A group of young doctors from the Clinical Excellence Research Center at the Stanford School of Medicine are looking for new models to make health care better and more affordable: “Patel was second up in the presentation, a little nervous and barely tall enough to be seen behind the podium. She stated the problem in […]

Researchers are studying the residents of the island of Ikaria to figure out why so many of them live well into their 90s and beyond: “Following the report by Pes and Poulain, Dr. Christina Chrysohoou, a cardiologist at the University of Athens School of Medicine, teamed up with half a dozen scientists to organize the […]

How 19th Century American farmers became convinced that dead relatives could rise from their graves and feed on them as vampires: “The skeleton had been beheaded; skull and thighbones rested atop the ribs and vertebrae. ‘It looked like a skull-and-crossbones motif, a Jolly Roger. I’d never seen anything like it,’ Bellantoni recalls. “Subsequent analysis showed […]

An inquiry into a neighbor’s suicide leads a man to discover links between heavy marijuana use and psychosis among people who suffer from mental illnesses: “One afternoon recently, I met Dr. Roger Roffman, professor emeritus at the University of Washington’s School of Social Work, in his office up on Roosevelt Way. He has a calm […]

What can hospitals learn from a national restaurant chain like Cheesecake Factory? “‘It is unbelievable to me that they would not manage this better,’ Luz said. I asked him what he would do if he were the manager of a neurology unit or a cardiology clinic. ‘I don’t know anything about medicine,’ he said. But […]

[Not single-page] A reflection on a mother’s life, and how advancements in medicine have extended our life expectancy, and have made it more difficult for us to die: “ME: ‘Maybe you could outline the steps you think we might take.’ DOCTOR: ‘Wait and see.’ NEUROLOGIST: ‘Monitor.’ DOCTOR: ‘Change the drugs we’re using.’ MY SISTER: ‘Can […]

When do we really die? Is it when the heart stops—or is there a certain point that brain death means actual death? As we make advances in medicine, it’s raising new questions about what’s final. An excerpt from Teresi’s new book, The Undead: “Michael DeVita of the University of Pittsburgh recalls making the rounds at […]

[Not single-page] Still, a man who at 105—he’ll be 106 on December 19—has never had a life-threatening disease, who takes no cholesterol or blood-pressure medications and can give himself a clean shave each morning (not to mention a “serious sponge bath with vigorous rubbing all around”), invites certain questions. Is there something about his habits […]

If neither party is proposing effective solutions to the cost crisis, and political deadlock in Washington is preventing the consideration of new ideas, are we doomed to witness a slowly collapsing health care system that eventually will provide adequate care only to those who can afford to pay? In his latest book on health care,7 […]