Biotech

Multiple myeloma is brutal. We may finally have a cure, but American regulatory inertia means that it was discovered abroad.

In the 1940s, scientists made a discovery now fundamental to biology: genes are encoded in DNA. The story involves bacteria, dead mice, and a kitchen cream separator.

A disease that was once a death sentence is increasingly treatable.

Science has largely solved the problem of reproductive ageing for women, but they have to prepare while they’re young.

It’s incredibly hard to deliver drugs to the right organ, especially to reach the brain. Tiny gas-filled spheres that burst on command could change that.

How a single unappetizing shrub became dozens of different vegetables.

The secrets to extending human lifespans might lie in the animals that can already live for centuries.

The first vaccine was a lucky accident. Now we can design new vaccines in weeks, atom by atom.

Generations of microbes evolve in hours, not millennia. By speeding up Darwin’s clock, scientists have watched evolution happen in real time, and it’s changed how we understand natural selection.

Millions of years of evolution have given us genomes that are like giant datasets for drug development. Finally, we are learning how to study them.

For centuries it was a poison. Then colchicine rewrote treatment for gout, heart disease, and later, the debate over drug exclusivity.

For nearly two centuries, pain relief meant effective but addictive opioids. Scientists have finally made something better.

Radiology combines digital images, clear benchmarks, and repeatable tasks. But replacing humans with AI is harder than it seems.

Antibody therapies are four of the world’s ten best selling drugs. If they were cheaper, they could prevent millions of deaths from rabies, malaria, and dengue.

We disinfect water before we drink it. Germicidal ultraviolet could make airborne disease as rare as those carried by water.

Animal drugs are approved much faster than human drugs. Perhaps we could adopt the same model for humans without compromising on safety.

Lead has been all but eliminated in most of the developed world. Doing the same for the rest of the world might not be difficult.

Brain implants are letting people move, speak, and interact with machines using only their thoughts. The first FDA approvals may arrive within five years.

Many women face a choice between career advancement or motherhood. But emerging fertility technologies could allow women to have it all.

Horses bled for antivenom, crabs drained for endotoxin tests, and silkworms boiled for silk. Science can now replace these practices with synthetic alternatives — but we need to find ways to scale them.

What do cryogenics, butterfat tests, and genetic data have in common? They’re some of the reasons behind the world’s most productive dairy cows. Here’s how it all started.

We now have the power to genetically modify entire species by inserting certain genes into them with brute force. Doing this to malaria-carrying mosquitoes could allow us to wipe out humanity’s most deadly killer.

Advance Market Commitments allow us to buy technology from the future to support its development: vaccines, carbon capture technology, and even spacecraft. Here’s how you can start your own.

Too few people donate their organs, dead or alive. How can we make it easier to donate, but avoid the abuses that some fear from cash payments?

I was deliberately infected with Zika to test a vaccine. Human challenge trials like my one could save millions of lives by developing prophylactics more quickly.

Silk is stronger than steel or kevlar. We are already using it to transport vaccines without cold chains and make automatically dissolving stitches. What else could it be used for?

SGLT2, a protein in the kidney, takes glucose out of the urine and puts it in the blood. Blocking this reduces diabetes, heart disease, and kidney disease – but we’re not exactly sure why.

Hundreds of thousands of people die from malaria each year, but it took 141 years to develop a vaccine for it. Advance market commitments could speed things up next time.

As climate change threatens crop yields, we need a second Green Revolution – one that, this time, is driven by genetic engineering.

Nobody had a plan to get vaccines out of freezers and into Americans’ arms – except VaccinateCA. Its CEO tells the story of how a small team brought order to a chaotic rollout.

Fire has almost disappeared as a cause of death in the developed world. A similar approach could do the same for infectious diseases.

Snakebites kill between 80,000 and 140,000 people every year. Better antivenom should be a high priority – thankfully new technology can help.

Bacteriophages – viruses that infect bacterial cells – were almost forgotten in the age of antibiotics. Now as bacterial resistance grows, they may return to help us in our hour of need.

Pregnancy can be arduous, painful and for some women impossible. New technology may allow more women to have children, and save the lives of more prematurely born infants. How do we get there?

We have eradicated smallpox, cured many bacterial diseases, and invented a vaccine for Covid-19 within the year. But for a very long time we haven’t had a single good treatment for obesity.

Alongside all the successes of science in the Covid era, the pandemic has also sparked an outbreak of viral misinformation and sloppy research, revealing the glaring flaws in our scientific system.

Modern psychiatry appears to be at a standstill, wanting for better treatment and a substantive theoretical framework. Evolutionary theory has the potential to reinvigorate the field.

Western democracies appear to have floundered in their responses to Covid-19. Is there a relationship between health and freedom, and can it be unraveled?

Although Viktor Zhdanov’s name is little known today, he spearheaded one of the greatest projects in history. Who was he and what did he do?