The five most-read stories on Scope this week were:
Packard Children’s heart transplant family featured tonight on Dateline: On Wednesday, Dateline NBC broadcasted “Against All Odds,” a one-hour program chronicling the story of the Bingham family whose five children all have signs of the same heart disease, dilated cardiomyopathy. The family first came to Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in 2006, when their oldest daughter, Sierra, needed a heart transplant.
The mystery surrounding lung-transplant survival rates: An October article in the San Francisco Chronicle offered a look at the challenges facing lung transplant patients and explored why a significant number don’t live beyond the five-year mark, despite improvements in survival rates.
Teen cancer researcher Jack Andraka discusses open access in science, stagnation in medicine: Maryland high school student Jack Andraka will deliver the opening keynote at the Stanford Medicine X conference this September. In this Q&A, he discusses developing a novel paper sensor that detects pancreatic, ovarian, and lung cancers, the importance of open access research and remedying stagnation in medicine.
Recent shared ancestry between Southern Europe and North Africa identified by Stanford researchers: In research recently published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (subscription required), Stanford geneticist Carlos Bustamante, PhD, and former postdoctoral scholar Brenna Henn, PhD, show that many southern Europeans share genetic traits of northwestern Africans found in a geographic region called Maghreb. The findings suggest that at least some of the genetic diversity seen in southern European populations is due to gene flow from North Africa that occurred during the past few centuries.
Stanford offers free “Statistics in Medicine” course, starting June 11: Does eating red meat increase your risk of being in a traffic accident? Should you be worried about lead in lipstick? These and other provocative medical questions will be analyzed and discussed in the School of Medicine’s new nine-week online course “Statistics in Medicine” that begins on June 11.
