Scope is an award-winning medical blog produced by a team of writers at Stanford University School of Medicine.
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Stanford is one of three Bay Area universities to participate in a new collaboration announced today by the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative. That’s the initiative created by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan, MD, after the birth of their daughter in 2015. When it launched, the Initiative focused on education, but today they unveiled a …Read More
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The typing in this video is driven directly by brain signals in a monkey (yes, monkeys typing Shakespeare!). It’s one of a series of studies testing technology that could allow people with movement disabilities to communicate. Engineer Krishna Shenoy, PhD, and graduate student (and then postdoctoral fellow) Paul Nuyujukian, MD, PhD, had tested previous iterations …Read More
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I recently went to meet Alice Ting, PhD, in her new Clark Center lab, not long after her arrival from MIT. Ting came to Stanford with appointments in genetics, biology and, by courtesy, chemistry, and a lab bustling with students working on projects relating to technologies for studying living cells in exacting molecular detail. Ting …Read More
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Here’s a conundrum: Medical technology saves lives every day, but it has also been one of the key drivers of health-care cost increases. How do you get the advances without the costs? The leaders of the Stanford Byers Center for Biodesign have been training new medical-device innovators for 15 years now, with great success. But on …Read More
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Cancer immunotherapies have been big news in the past few years, particularly after former President Jimmy Carter’s melanoma was successfully treated with one such immune-stimulating therapy. What I hadn’t known before working on a recent story is that all immunotherapies currently available activate the immune system in the same way (they aim for a pair …Read More
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The first research paper to describe a new phenomenon gets all the glory. A high profile publication. A great line on the scientist’s CV. Another step toward tenure. What about the paper that verifies or fails to verify the phenomenon? That researcher rarely gets anything. No gold star, no celebration, notta. That’s why so few scientists …Read More
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In what might be reassuring news to many of us, psychologist Kalanit Grill-Spector, PhD, and research associate Kevin Weiner, PhD, have found evidence of our brain’s resilience. The pair, along with colleagues in France and Belgium, were looking at a particular part of the brain that feeds information to a network involved in face recognition. They’d been …Read More
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This story would be a simple tale of helpful new technology – of which I’ve written a lot – but it also goes to show how new technology can reveal fundamentally new biology. In this case: a surprise discovery that could be important for understanding immune disease and treating cancer by immunotherapy. A key part of biology – from understanding basic …Read More
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The other day I received an email from Stanford psychologist Russell Poldrack, PhD, letting me know about a new study, about which he wrote, “A format for how people should arrange their files probably sounds like the most boring thing on earth.” I really couldn’t have agreed with him more. File storage? Yawn. But he …Read More
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I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for neuroscience research. Who doesn’t want to know how and why we behave the way we do? Or how a bunch of mushy grey goo can make us witty or wise? It turns out that in addition to being fascinating, neuroscience is also quite beautiful. The Stanford Neurosciences Institute …Read More
