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Posts
The Human-Tuberculosis Arms Race
Coming soon! Read more...
Calling Bullshit with Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West
In this interview, produced in collaboration with Harvard Science in the News, I talked with University of Washington professors Carl Bergstrom and Jevin West about their book on misinformation, which was adapted from their long-running course of the same name.
Read more... Climate Feedback Cycles
In the last few years, we have witnessed a significant increase in weather-related disasters throughout the world. Droughts, wildfires, heat waves, hurricanes, and floods have all become more extreme. These are largely driven by increases in global temperature, which is caused by the huge amount of carbon dioxide (CO2) that humans have released into the atmosphere.
Read more... Reversing Climate Change with Geoengineering
In a 2002 essay, Dutch atmospheric chemist Paul Crutzen popularized the name “Anthropocene” for the current geologic time period. Though unofficial, it is widely accepted by scientists because of how drastically humans have altered the Earth. We have cleared forests, built cities, diverted waterways, replaced wild animals with domestic ones, created billions of tons of plastic waste, and perhaps most significantly, changed the climate.
Read more... Vaccinologist Maurice Hilleman
Maurice Hilleman was a microbiologist, vaccinologist, inventor, and public health advocate of the 20th century. He developed several vaccines that are now given routinely to children and have increased the American lifespan by 30 years. However, he has received little recognition for his work, and few people know his name.
Read more... Simulating the Spread of Disease
In this post, I’m going to discuss another simulation in Python to demonstrate an infectious disease spreading in a population. The source code for the simulation can be found in the Github repository here. I also want to acknowledge Professor Justin Bois at Caltech for writing the software package iqplot and for his guidance in data analysis over the past few years.
Read more... Unusual Infectious Agents
I’ve mentioned in previous posts that giant viruses are an unusual group of viruses because they share some characteristics with bacteria. In this post, I will discuss some other viruses and infectious agents that also bend the rules. These include viroids, satellite viruses, and prions.
Read more... Viruses in the Environment
When we think of viruses today, we imagine tiny disease-causing invaders. The COVID-19 pandemic has brought viruses to the forefront of people’s minds, and we are constantly looking for ways to avoid, kill, and fight off viruses. Many well-known viruses do cause diseases in animals and plants, but a far greater number of viruses are necessary for the survival of cellular life, either for an individual species or an entire ecosystem. Viruses help maintain the health of the oceans, and still others can help our immune systems develop.
Read more... Orcas: Wolves of the Sea
The 2010 killing of trainer Dawn Brancheau at SeaWorld Orlando came as a shock to the world. Brancheau was an experienced trainer who had worked with orcas for 15 years. The day of her death, she was performing a show with Tilikum, a large male killer whale, who drowned her. According to SeaWorld executives, orcas and other performing animals, such as dolphins and sea lions, live good lives in captivity with medical care and loving trainers. The death of Dawn Brancheau was a freak accident due to trainer error, they said. But it wasn’t.
Common Cold Coronaviruses
Most people are now familiar with the cold-causing coronaviruses, so in this post, I'm going to discuss some information related to their origins and evolution.
Read more... The Lurking Threat of Henipaviruses
In this post, I am going to discuss Henipaviruses of the family Paramyxoviridae (which includes measles, mumps, and respiratory syncytial virus) because they are little-known but very lethal RNA viruses. They emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries and have the potential to cause large outbreaks in the future because the human population lacks immunity.
Read more... The Age of Zoonoses
Pathogens are zoonotic if they are transmitted from animals to humans. Zoonotic viruses have recently been brought to the world's attention by SARS-CoV-2, but their pandemic potential has long been recognized. In 2012, seven years before the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, David Quammen published Spillover, a book about several prominent zoonotic pathogens. He spent years interviewing and accompanying field epidemiologists, virologists, veterinarians, doctors, and others about emerging zoonoses, as well as intriguing nuances of familiar threats like malaria. It is a phenomenal book, and I highly recommend it.
Zoonotic Spillovers
Read more...The Persistence of Influenza
In this post, I am covering some topics related to influenza, including antigenic shift vs. drift, immunodominance, and original antigenic sin (OAS). These aren’t unique to influenza, but they have been well characterized in influenza, one of the most common human viruses. Read more...
Herd Immunity
In this short post, I’m going to discuss the importance of herd immunity and vaccination using a simulation performed in Python to demonstrate a simple model of a random infectious disease spreading in a population, in which people move around on a square grid. The source code for the simulations can be found in a Jupyter Notebook here.
Read more... Live-Attenuated Vaccines and Trained Immunity
One of the hypothesis for why children appear to have less severe cases of COVID-19 than adults is that childhood vaccines may provide general immunity to all pathogens by boosting the innate immune system. In this post, I’m going to discuss the concepts of trained immunity and non-specific vaccine protection. Read more...
Variations in the Severity of COVID-19
In this post, I will cover some of the hypotheses of why COVID-19 is more severe for some people than others. Much of this information comes from clinical observations of COVID-19 patients that are correlated with poor disease outcomes, and scientists and physicians and hypothesize that these could be linked to disease progression.
Read more... Vaccines and Treatments for COVID-19
This is the second of my posts, in which I cover the primary medications and vaccines undergoing testing for COVID-19. For an introduction to the science of COVID-19, see this page. This post is not exhaustive because there are numerous candidates in early development, but I describe how vaccines and the immune system work and potential safety issues around vaccines and treatments.
Read more... Introduction to the Science of COVID-19
This post is an overview of the science of COVID-19 based on information from scientific papers, government agencies, and media outlets. In future posts, I will discuss in more detail topics like vaccines/treatments, zoonotic virus spillovers, viral evolution, SARS-CoV-2 in the context of other viruses, and demographics of patients.
Read more...