Usually I hate to dignify the views of proponents of creationism and intelligent design by discussing them. Their views are so off-base, that they are not worth time. But as their influence grows, we do need to ensure that they don’t gain ground. With this in mind, Clive Thompson has written a wonderful piece in …
The other night, I was in a restaurant with my family, and my kids’ golf coach asked me what I did. I told him I was a Professor of Microbiology. Then he asked me, ‘What is that virus that kills athletes….mersa…?’ He was referring to multiple drug-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA, which I reminded him …
There is an interesting article on ArsTechnica this week by Hannibal entitled Blogging and job prospects: from the academy to the SCOTUS. The basic premise is that one’s soul is usually bared in a blog, and topics are often discussed that would never be addressed in a job interview. He quotes from an article in …
Influenza is an acute respiratory disease that occurs both in yearly outbreaks, or epidemics, and in much larger, global outbreaks called pandemics. Predicting the next pandemic strain is an important goal because advance preparation of a vaccine could save many lives. The outbreaks of avian influenza in east and southeast Asia in 2003-2004 has lead …
This past week the vaccine against influenza made world news when the British government suspendend the manufacturing license of a Liverpool factory that produces the vaccine. The factory is owned by Chiron, which had hoped to sell influenza vaccine produced there in the U.S. As a consequence, the U.S. will fall about 48 million doses …
In “The River: A Journey to the Source of HIV and AIDS”, Edward Hooper claims that HIV-1 was introduced into humans in Kisangani, Democratic Republic of the Congo in the 1950s. He suggests that the stocks of oral poliovirus vaccine (OPV) that were being used in clinical trials were produced in cultures of kidney cells …
