This Date in UCSF History: Promising New Abortion Drug
[Originally published in Synapse on Dec. 2, 1993.] Every year there are some four million unintended pregnancies in the United States, approximately 1.6 million end in abortion.
Diet Against Disease
“Tell me what you eat, and I will tell you what you are,” Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, 1826. What you consume...
Increasing Brain Tumor Survival
Nearly 73,000 adults will be diagnosed with a brain tumor in 2016, and for more than one third, their tumor...
What is Science Policy?
As a member of the Science Policy Group, people frequently ask me what science policy entails. This is a difficult...
Finding the Fountain of Youth
For thousands of years, explorers, adventurers, and conquerors have searched for the “fountain of youth,” a magical spring that grants...
Solving the Mystery of Genomic 'Dark Matter'
In human cells, three billion base pairs arrange themselves into sequences of As, Ts, Gs, and Cs to form genes...
End of Zika in Sight?
With the successful creation of DNA vaccines that elicited immune protection from Zika infection, hope is on the rise in...
Suffering from Slow Science Publishing
Information is instant. I remember the moment when this fact of the digital age was made unequivocally clear to me...
Would You Rather?
“Would you rather live forever or die in the next five seconds?” This question was posed to me recently and...
God’s Imperfect Red Pencil
From the perspective of noise, CRISPR systems are modern biology’s closest approximation to Beyonce’s Lemonade or Game of Thrones: buzz-worthy...