Tag Archives: yale university

A doctor’s love affair with medicine and literature

For Anna Reisman, M.D., it was a summer novel that pointed her to a career in medicine. 

As a rising Yale senior and English major with no thought of becoming a doctor, she read Thomas Mann’s classic 1924 novelThe Magic Mountain, a tale of tuberculosis patients at a Swiss sanatorium. Surprised by her own fascination with the disease, she went on to read physician-writers Oliver Sacks, M.D., Richard Selzer, M.D., HS ’61, and Lewis Thomas, M.D. Soon she was a medical student at New York University. (more…)

Read More

A ‘home run’ approach: Yale lab finds new ways to synthesize HIV inhibitor

Yale University chemists have created a new process for synthesizing an organic, nitrogen-based compound that inhibits HIV.

The process represents a fundamentally different approach to synthesizing alkaloids, which are naturally occurring compounds that contain nitrogen. The new approach uses a set of starting materials that do not require the usual tempering of nitrogen’s reactive tendencies. (more…)

Read More

Best dads on the planet? Let’s start with these little guys

The world’s finest fathers just might be covered with fur and live in the trees of Argentina.

They’re owl monkeys, and a growing body of research indicates that males of the species do much of the nurturing, childrearing, and protecting of offspring. They should be at the top of any Fathers Day list for the animal kingdom, a Yale University biological anthropologist says. (more…)

Read More

Drug-resistant lung cancer may have Achilles heel

Drugs introduced more than a decade ago that target mutations in a protein known as the epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) held the promise of personalized treatments for a common form of non-small cell lung cancer. But most patients quickly develop resistance to these drugs and are left with few or no treatment options, because it has been very difficult to design new drugs that act selectively upon the drug-resistant form.  (more…)

Read More

Ancient snakes — a new hiss-tory

The ancestral snakes in the grass actually lived in the forest, according to the most detailed look yet at the iconic reptiles.

A comprehensive analysis by Yale University paleontologists reveals new insights into the origin and early history of snakes. For one thing, they kept late hours; for another, they also kept their hind legs. (more…)

Read More

A better grasp of primate grip

Scientists are coming to grips with the superior grasping ability of humans and other primates throughout history.

In a new study, a research team led by Yale University found that even the oldest known human ancestors may have had precision grip capabilities comparable to modern humans. This includes Australopithecus afarensis, which appears in the fossil record a million years before the first evidence of stone tools. (more…)

Read More

Creating a malaria test for ancient human remains

Ancient malaria patients, the anthropologist will see you now.

A Yale University scientist has developed a promising new method to identify malaria in the bone marrow of ancient human remains. It is the first time researchers have been able to establish a diagnostic, human skeletal profile for the disease, which is transmitted by mosquitoes and continues to infect millions of people a year. (more…)

Read More

Thick-skinned dinosaur gets the last laugh

In life, Tyrannosaurus rex usually got the best of the less fearsome duck-billed dinosaurs, or hadrosaurs: T. rex ate them.

But in death, the plant-eating hadrosaurs have proved more resilient than their carnivorous predators — and apparently all other dinosaurs — at least by the measure of their skin. (more…)

Read More