Scientists at Osaka University in Japan have just created baby mice with two dads. That’s right: these mice have two parents, and both parents are males. How did they do it, and what might this mean for humans? Well, as reported recently in the journal Nature, it wasn’t easy. The scientists fertilized 630 eggs to get just seven mouse pups, but all seven mouse pups appeared normal and grew into fertile adults. Let’s dig into the process just a little bit. The research team, led by biologist Katsuhiko Hayashi, first took cells from male mice, and they had to somehow re-program the cells to ..read more

We still don’t know where Covid-19 started, although we’re pretty sure it started in or near the city of Wuhan, China. The leading theories are that it started either in the Huanan Wholesale Seafood Market (in Wuhan), a live animal food market, or in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV), a large virus research center in another part of the city. We might never know, because we’d need access to all of the viruses being studied at WIV in late 2019, and those viruses might not even exist any longer. I’ve been on the fence about this question since the pandemic started (as I wrote here and ..read more

Illustration by Erik English This past week, a government-appointed panel of scientists released a new report recommending 13 actions the U.S. government should take to control “gain-of-function” research that has the potential to create deadly new pathogens. This has been a long time coming, but the first thing I want to point out is that this is just an advisory panel. The government hasn’t done anything yet. Let’s unpack what happened, shall we? First, the panel is called the NSABB: the National Science Advisory Board for Biosecurity. The new report, which was at least 3 years in t ..read more

Headline from a debate about vaccine hesitancy, from December 2020. I keep getting into debates with people about the safety and efficacy of vaccines. I’m not talking about anti-vaxxers (though I’ve encountered plenty of them), but level-headed, rational people who genuinely have doubts. Usually their doubts about vaccines come from dubious sources, but there’s so much misinformation out there, often coming from people with the letters M.D. or Ph.D. after their names, that I can understand why it’s confusing. So let me engage in what is sometimes called “both-sides-ism” (a disparagi ..read more

Telomeres are one of the keys to aging. We’ve known this for decades, and the scientists who first figured it out won the Nobel Prize in 2009. (One of them was my former colleague at Johns Hopkins University, Carol Greider.) Not surprisingly, many people have been trying, ever since, to use this discovery to slow down or reverse the aging process. No luck so far, but that doesn’t mean you can’t spend money on your telomeres. Over the past decade or so, a number of companies have started offering to measure your telomere length, which they suggest will tell your true, biological age. Sometime ..read more

The mRNA vaccines for Covid-19 are an amazing story: a new vaccine developed in a matter of weeks for a brand-new virus, SARS-CoV-2, at the beginning of the pandemic in early 2020. Clinical trials moved forward at record speed, and by December of that year we had an approved vaccine that was safe and over 90% effective against Covid-19. Why not use this mRNA technology for other vaccines, especially for the flu? When I asked this question last year, I didn’t realize that a group of scientists at the University of Pennsylvania were already hard at work making this idea a reality. They’ve just ..read more

More than ten years ago, I wrote that it was time to get football out of our universities because the sport was corrupting the universities’ mission. Not surprisingly, I got a lot of pushback about that, but I’ve continued to make this point, both here at Forbes and in The New York Times. This weekend, I watched a college football game for the first time in years. I was struck by how much worse things are–and by worse, I mean driven by money. Don’t get me wrong. Football is entertaining for its millions of fans, and college football is extremely popular, especially for those who live in ..read more

  A week ago, Vanity Fair and ProPublica published a long exposé on the origins of Covid-19, in which they revealed new evidence of a lab leak in the Wuhan Institute of Virology (WIV) in November 2019. The big reveal: the report makes it appear much more likely than before that Covid-19 originated through an accident at WIV, where presumably one of the scientists was exposed to the virus. The new evidence in the ProPublica report largely centers on the work of a translator, Toy Reid, who claims to have a unique gift for interpreting the “secret language of Chinese officialdom.” Even nati ..read more

Schematic of the Covid-19  virus, SARS-CoV-2 After all the controversy over the past few years about gain-of-function research on viruses, especially the Covid-19 virus, I thought this kind of work was on hold, at least in the U.S. Indeed, the controversy grew so hot that NIH issued a statement in May of 2021 declaring that it wouldn’t support such work. Nonetheless, some scientists continue to pursue gain-of-function work. In a new study, just released on the preprint server bioRxiv, a group of virologists at Boston University did the following. They took the Spike protein from ..read more

In case you haven’t heard, there’s now a new set of vaccine booster shots that protect against the latest variant of Covid-19, BA.5. This new variant is highly infectious, and the original vaccine doesn’t protect people against it as well as it protected against earlier variants. Now, before someone takes that last sentence out of context, let me emphasize that the original Covid-19 vaccines are still highly effective at preventing severe disease and hospitalization. Anyone who isn’t vaccinated would be well-advised to get one of those, if that’s their only option. But the new vaccines protec ..read more