My first encounter with microbiologist Justin Sonnenburg, PhD, came when I was researching "Caution: Do Not Debug," an article I wrote five years ago for …
Tag: immunology
Chronic fatigue syndrome gets more respect (and a new name)
As has been widely reported, an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report released yesterday acknowledged that chronic fatigue syndrome is a real and serious disease and renamed the …
A discussion of vaccines, “the single most life-saving innovation ever in the history of medicine”
In a recent, in-depth interview with KCBS Radio, now available online, Stanford immunologist Mark Davis, PhD, called vaccines “the single most life-saving medical innovation ever …
With a Gates Foundation grant, Stanford launches major effort to expedite vaccine discovery
The vaccine field got a major boost today with the announcement that the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation will invest $50 million in a new …
Is honey the new antibiotic?
...Well, not quite. But recent research shows that honey does have infection-fighting properties surprisingly similar to the common antibiotic ampicillin. And even more importantly, honey …
In human defenses against disease, environment beats heredity, study of twins shows
I'm one of those people who've paid to have their genomes analyzed for the purpose of getting a handle on susceptibility to this or that …
Silicon Valley entrepreneur Sean Parker establishes allergy center at Stanford
Here at Scope, we’ve often written about the life-threatening nature of allergic reactions and the work that Stanford scientists are doing to understand dangerous allergies. …
Patients' reaction to ME/CFS coverage in Stanford Medicine magazine
In the last few weeks, Stanford published two articles on chronic fatigue syndrome, a.k.a. myalgic encephalomyelitis, and the outpouring of positive feedback from ME/CFS patients …
Knight in lab: In days of yore, postdoc armed with quaint research tools found immunology's Holy Grail
A human has only about 25,000 genes. So, it’s tough to imagine just how our immune systems can manage to recognize potentially billions of differently shaped …
Unbroken: A chronic fatigue syndrome patient’s long road to recovery
“Fatigue is what we experience, but it is what a match is to an atomic bomb,” said Laura Hillenbrand, the author of Unbroken, about how …
Stanford Medicine magazine traverses the immune system
If you want to understand the human immune system, try studying humans - not mice. That's what Mark Davis, PhD, urges in a special report …
Cool video of the intestinal immune system
Anyone who has ever eaten a rancid food-truck taco has a gut-level feeling for what it’s like to have the human immune system launch a …