By Michele Lyons
Tuesday, March 21, 2017
What do Presidents Lincoln, Wilson, Eisenhower, and Bush have in common? They all supported the creation of a group of scientists, elected by their peers, to advise the government on matters of science and technology. In honor of Women’s History Month, we’re focusing on the women NIH scientists who’ve been elected to the National Academy of Sciences to serve their country with their expertise.
By Michael Gottesman
Tuesday, March 7, 2017
Alexis Shelokov, who studied the polio virus at the NIH in the 1950s and was a powerful scientific force in what would become the famed NIAID Laboratory of Infectious Diseases in Building 7, died on December 12, 2016, in Dallas, Texas. He had a prolific scientific career that took him around the world.
By IRP Staff Blogger
Monday, February 27, 2017
Roberto Weigert is a cell biologist who specializes in intravital microscopy (IVM), an extremely high-resolution imaging tool that traces its origins to the 19th century. What’s unique about IVM is its phenomenal resolution can be used in living animals, allowing researchers to watch biological processes unfold in organs under real physiological conditions and in real time.
By Michele Lyons
Tuesday, February 7, 2017
Sometimes as a museum curator, I come across a box in the collection with a vague marking and full of bits and pieces of … something. One of the coolest things is finding out what that something was and who created it. This photo shows pieces from the NIH lab of Dr. Stanley Sarnoff, dating from 1954-1962.
By IRP Staff Blogger
Thursday, January 26, 2017
For gene therapy research, the perennial challenge has been devising a reliable way to insert safely a working copy of a gene into relevant cells that can take over for a faulty one. But with the recent discovery of powerful gene editing tools, the landscape of opportunity is starting to change. Instead of threading the needle through the cell membrane with a bulky gene, researchers are starting to design ways to apply these tools in the nucleus—to edit out the disease-causing error in a gene and allow it to work correctly.
By Michael Gottesman
Tuesday, January 10, 2017
To paraphrase President Obama from his guest editorial in the November issue of Wired magazine, there’s never been a better time to be alive. One NIH institute leading us into the future is the National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering (NIBIB), which supports avant-garde investigators at the nexus of engineering and the physical and life sciences with innovations that improve global health.
By Michele Lyons
Friday, January 6, 2017
How does the brain know that what we’re looking at is standing still or moving? Dr. Robert H. Wurtz developed methods for studying the visual system, a technique now widely used for the study of higher brain functions, to find the answer to that question.
By IRP Staff Blogger
Tuesday, November 29, 2016
In a new study of families affected by Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD), National Institutes of Health (NIH) Intramural researchers have identified different connections in the brain that children may inherit from their parents and are linked to the disorder.
By IRP Staff Blogger
Tuesday, November 15, 2016
The surprising results of an animal study are raising hopes for a far simpler treatment regimen for people infected with the AIDS-causing human immunodeficiency virus (HIV). Currently, HIV-infected individuals can live a near normal life span if, every day, they take a complex combination of drugs called antiretroviral therapy (ART). The bad news is if they stop ART, the small amounts of HIV that still lurk in their bodies can bounce back and infect key immune cells, called CD4 T cells, resulting in life-threatening suppression of their immune systems.
By Hoo-Chang Shin
Tuesday, November 1, 2016
If you were going to train an artificial intelligence (AI) system to understand and accurately diagnose medical images, what kind of information do you think would be most effective: lots of general image data, or small amounts of specific data?
