I’ve been covering medical discoveries at UVA for about five years now. The two stories that have hit the biggest in the media have been focused ultrasound, which I told you about here, and Jonathan Kipnis’ discovery of a previously unknown connection between the brain and immune system. You’d think…
John Herr died unexpectedly in late September. Dr. Herr was the director of our Center for Research in Contraceptive and Reproductive Health. He was working on a new form of birth control for men, and he was the creator of SpermCheck, a male fertility test you can find in pharmacies…
Early on in this gig, I was asked to write a release about crystallography. This was a challenge, because I had no idea what crystallography was. I replied that you don’t see stories about crystallography in the mainstream press, which is true. But it’s also a shame, because, it turns…
If you look at photographs of our Dr. Jeff Elias and the focused ultrasound equipment, you’ll notice the images tend to be fairly similar. That’s because they have to be taken from outside the room where the equipment is located. The ultrasound is guided by magnetic resonance imagery, and that…
Have you heard of the curse of knowledge? It’s the notion that people forget what it’s like not to know something, and it’s one of the greatest challenges of my job. I try to get the press to come talk to our researchers and doctors, but then I have to…
People often write me asking about clinical trials, the testing grounds for new treatments. They’ll have read about a discovery and want to know if it’s made its way into human testing. A lot of the time, unfortunately, that isn’t the case, because of the slow and methodical nature of…
