In 2008, John Porter, a Washington, D.C. lawyer and former Republican member of Congress, stood in front of a group of scientists at a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement…

An 86-year-old patient arrives with a grisly foot injury.1 It’s badly infected—not a surprise, given his chronic untreated Type 2 diabetes. What is surprising is that meropenem,…

Part of Vittorio Sebastiano’s job is to babysit a few million stem cells. The research professor of reproductive biology at Stanford University keeps the cells warm and moist deep…

When I ask Jack Gilbert about the future of medicine, he tells me what he recommends to his graduate students before they head into surgery, “When you go to cut someone open, you…

Biologist Eric Verdin considers aging a disease. His research group famously discovered several enzymes, including sirtuins, that play an important role in how our mitochondria—the…

Years ago when I was conducting my doctoral research on the evolutionary history of men among a remote indigenous community of hunter-gatherers living in the forests of South America,…

In my memories of the Scottish hospital, the sky is always blue, though I know that can’t be completely accurate. Summer was waning, and as my friends and I had already experienced,…

When she was a practicing occupational therapist, Elizabeth Fain started noticing something odd in her clinic: Her patients were weak. More specifically, their grip strengths, recorded…

Corals are marine magicians. As colonies of the tiny ocean organisms grow, they transform the calcium that circulates in seawater into enormous limestone reefs. These reefs—which…

For years, Ali Khodadoust walked around with his heart literally open to the world. In 2012 surgeons replaced his aortic arch and unknowingly planted bacteria. The bacteria secreted…