Harvard Medical Labcast

Reisa Sperling, HMS professor of neurology at Brigham and Women's Hospital, shares her family's personal connection with Alzheimer's disease and describes ongoing research into early diagnosis and intervention.

And in this episode's abstract, researchers in the lab of George Church use the gene-editing tool CRISPR to inactivate retroviruses in the pig genome with the hope of one day making organs safer for transplant into humans.

Dragana Rogulja, assistant professor of neurobiology at HMS, runs a sleep lab in which hundreds of thousands of fruit flies are studied as they snooze. Rogulja’s goal is to identify genes involved in sleep that are also conserved in human beings.

And in this episode’s abstract, researchers in the HMS Department of Health Care Policy have found that hospitals can be penalized for serving vulnerable populations.

Dominic Hall, curator of the Warren Anatomical Museum in the Center for the History of Medicine at the Francis A. Countway Library of Medicine, talks about how individual medical artifacts can bring to life multiple narratives and inform today’s doctors and researchers. Along the way, he explores just a few of the 15,000 objects in the 160-year-old collection, including a giant skull and a tray of model eyes.

And in this episode’s abstract, researchers at HMS and Mass Eye and Ear recreate ancient viruses to deliver modern gene therapies in mice.

Physician and poet Rafael Campo describes how medicine and poetry are interconnected at the most basic levels. According to this HMS associate professor of medicine at Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, language and metaphor reveal medical and humanistic insights into the body in ways that go far beyond data and checklists.

And in this episode’s abstract, researchers in the lab of HMS professor and Wyss Institute core faculty member Pamela Silver transplant a circadian clock into a non-circadian species.

Robert Truog, a Harvard Medical School professor at Boston Children’s Hospital and director of the HMS Center for Bioethics, teaches doctors and nurses to become more aware of the ethical decisions they make every day—including the conscious and unconscious biases that shape the words they use and the way they frame conversations with patients and families. This kind of “microethics” education aims to help doctors and patients alike achieve more compassionate care.

And in this week’s abstract, a new research tool from the lab of HMS geneticist Stephen Elledge can reveal a person’s entire viral history from a single drop of blood.

John Brownstein, HMS associate professor of pediatrics at Boston Children’s Hospital, explains why your most important Facebook friend might be your doctor. Brownstein, a computational epidemiologist, also describes how our online behavior forms a “digital phenotype” that says more about our health than we might think.

And in this week’s abstract, HMS neurobiologists discover a new pathway in the brain that might help explain how antipsychotic drugs work. Read more about this finding from the lab of HMS neurobiologist Bernardo Sabatini.

David Reich, professor of genetics at HMS, studies modern and ancient DNA to probe human history and learn about health and disease. In this podcast, he shares his excitement about new genetic technologies and tells the story of his winding path from social studies and physics to becoming one of the world's foremost population geneticists. And in this month's abstract, HMS geneticist Connie Cepko is investigating a new antioxidant gene therapy in mouse models of inherited blindness. Read more about her work: Seeing the Light.

For many students and young researchers today, pursuing a career in science can seem more frightening than energizing. A wealth of qualified postdocs seeking a limited number of academic positions, ever-shrinking funding, and pressure to publish all fuel a hypercompetitive atmosphere in which the quality of science can suffer. In this month's conversation, postdocs Kristin Krukenberg and Jessica Polka, lead organizers of Future of Research and authors of the Science article Making Science a Desirable Career, discuss ways the scientific enterprise can be changed to alleviate some of these challenges and make room for the next generation.

And in this month's abstract, a study by genetics professor Susan Dymecki finds a new twist to serotonin neurons in the brain. Read more about the work here.