The Story of Molecular Biology of the Cell
The Body Scientific By Richard Kessin Years ago, a biology student from Manila wrote to me about earning a PhD at Columbia University. At the time, I was the Director of the PhD program in the Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology at the Columbia University Irving Medical Center. Every year we recruited a number […]
Omicron, That’s Enough
The Body Scientific By Richard Kessin What have the scientific, pharmaceutical and medical communities done to stifle SARS-CoV-2 infections? There are currently 18 advanced trials of different vaccines, 64 possible new treatments and 23 potential or approved antiviral drugs. The mRNA vaccines from Pfizer and Moderna provide robust protection, but they are expensive and need […]
Omicron Rates Starting to Come Down
The Body Scientific by Richard Kessin A few months ago, we were anticipating the reopening of public life. But events intervened. First, the protection of the two-dose vaccines started to subside. Second, unvaccinated patients, including children, were sickened by the furiously infectious Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2. More patients survive the Omicron virus than Delta, many […]
How Will the Covid Pandemic End?
The Body Scientific By Richard Kessin In an extraordinary 20 months, science has tackled the SARS-CoV-2 virus (the novel coronavirus that can lead to Covid-19) and made vaccines for adults and children. Scientists have developed monoclonal antibodies that help if given early, and we now have the first drugs that could stop infections or tilt […]
Artificial Intelligence Takes to the Ice
The Body Scientific By Richard Kessin My wife does not like clutter. When she sees 50 issues of Nature, the British science magazine piled on my desk, she gets a little peremptory. “Out!” she said. I decided on the dignity of an orderly retreat. I had been looking for subjects to write about in what […]
The Quickening Pace of Covid-19 Vaccine Delivery, and a Question Not Answered
The Body Scientific by Richard Kessin Three vaccines have passed Phase 3 tests—that last step before submitting the data to the FDA for an Emergency Use Authorization (EUA). These are the two vaccines made by Pfizer and by Moderna, both of which consist of an mRNA molecule wrapped in lipid. When injected into muscles the […]
Covid-19 Vaccines in Clinical Trials
The Body Scientific by Richard Kessin On January 10, 2020, Chinese scientists published the genome sequence of a novel virus by depositing a file in Genbank, a digital resource for DNA sequences at the National Institutes of Health. People at the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Disease used that sequence to make a vaccine, […]
The End of the Beginning: Covid-19 Clinical Trials
By Richard Kessin It takes gall to channel Churchill’s World War II phrase, especially when we could be looking forward to the beginning of the end. But let’s keep our attention on the development of SARS-CoV-2 vaccines. All of the vaccines are designed to present a SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein to the human immune system and […]
Masks, Mistakes and Progress on Covid-19
By Richard Kessin We are currently arguing about masks and disease prevention. Virologists and others (including me) thought that because the Covid-19 virus is so small, it would pass through a normal surgical mask. But masks are useful because viruses come packaged in large respiratory droplets that are blocked by the mask, and they also […]
Coronavirus: What is to be done?
By Richard Kessin By Richard Kessin We live in evolutionary competition with microbes—bacteria and viruses. There is no guarantee that we will be the survivors. The aphorism from Joshua Lederberg, a founder of molecular biology, is remarkable for its humility and for the challenge it defines. Before the germ theory of disease, which appeared in […]
