The origin of your noggin
Author: Dr Liam Hurst, 16th July 2019 ‘Where do you get your brains from?!’ Perhaps your parents have said this to you? I bet even Einstein’s mother or Hawking’s father have thought this about them. Being bright can be a…
Human Germline Editing – What’s the big deal?
Author: Dr. Jonathan Appleby, PhD; Chief Scientific Officer, Cell and Gene Therapy Catapult, 14th May 2019. In November 2018, He Jiankui, gave a presentation at the second international summit on Human Genome Editing (1). During the presentation, social media led…
One image at a time: using cryoEM to unpick how viruses infect cells
Author: Dr Alan Parker, 25th April 2019 Over the last few years a wave of virus-based therapies has progressed through late stage clinical evaluation and to (or near to) the market place. Therapeutic viruses are now being harnessed to correct…
A final chance to breathe: Could gene therapy cure cystic fibrosis lung disease?
Author: Alexandra McCarron, PhD student; Cystic Fibrosis Airway Research Group, University of Adelaide, 14th March 2019. Imagine a newborn baby. She looks perfectly healthy on the outside, but on the inside, her DNA contains one simple spelling error that causes…
Cracking the enthesis code
Author: Subashan Vadibeler, Undergraduate Student; University of Malaya, 22nd February 2019 The very thought of an injury is enough to send chills running down the spine of those involved in sports. And we know exactly why this fear exists because…
Overcoming the disconnection
Author: Beth MacLeod, Undergraduate Student; University of Dundee, 1st February 2019 We all have a universe inside our head. A hundred billion neurons making connections with one another, constantly firing and passing messages from our brain, down the spinal cord,…
Rare is not so rare
Author: Helena Meyer-Berg; DPhil Student; University of Oxford I want to find a treatment for a disease. The disease is inevitably fatal within the first months of life, but it is rare. It only affects one in one million live…
It’s an ECR life?
Author: Alan Parker, 27th November 2017 Who’d be an Early Career Researcher (ECR) these days? Long gone are the halcyon days where you complete your PhD (commonly taking between 5 and 10 years to do so) then walk straight into…
Mitochondrial donation: pronuclear transfer progress
Author: Professor Rafael J. Yáñez-Muñoz, Royal Holloway University of London Mitochondria produce ATP and are generally considered the powerhouses in the cells that make up the human body. They are vital to normal cell function and mitochondrial defects can…