Mitochondrial DNA: a maternal gift
Marshall Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States Human haplogroup tree rooted at Mitochondrial Eve. By Wapondaponda. 2009. Via Wikimedia. CC BY-SA 3.0 DNA is arrayed on twenty-three pairs of chromosomes in human cell nuclei. It is coiled tightly around proteins called histones that together with DNA form a chromosome. The largest chromosome carries several […]
Ancient Greek plague and coronavirus
Patrick Bell Belfast, Northern Ireland Plague in an Ancient City by Michael Sweerts, ca 1650. Credit Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Introduction Homer’s Iliad, Sophocles’ Oedipus the King, and Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War have been termed “the three earliest, and arguably most influential, representations of the plague in Western narrative.”1 This […]
The first description of DNA: a six million dollar letter from Francis to Michael Crick
Marshall A. Lichtman Rochester, New York, United States Figure 1. The boyish appearing James Watson (left) and the Francis Crick with their three-dimensional model of DNA in their Cavendish Laboratory office at Cambridge University, United Kingdom. Circa 1953. Photo credit: A. Barrington Brown/Science Photo Library. Via the Rockefeller University Digital Commons. In the April […]
Bleeding science dry: the history of scientific racism and blood
Matthew Casas Kansas City, United States Help the Red Cross. U.S. Food Administration. Educational Division. Advertising Section. 1917 – 1919. National Archives Catalog, identifier 512661. One might be familiar with the expression “We All Bleed Red.” But what exactly does blood have to say about our “humanity”? Ripe with good intention, the aforementioned mantra […]
Blood relics and contemporary memory
Robbie Porter Worcester, England Basement room of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, where the Russian Imperial Family were executed. Investigator Nicholas Sokolov apparently recovered 13 drops of blood from here. Source In the National Maritime Museum at Greenwich there is an exhibit, carefully preserved in an environmentally conditioned case, which is amongst its most […]
Blood and pernicious anemia
Omar Alzarkali Batavia, New York, United States Page from Diagnostic methods, chemical, bacteriological and microscopical, a text-book for students and practitioners by Ralph Waldo Webster. 1914. Accessed via the Internet Archive. Contributed by Gerstein – University of Toronto. Blood is powerful. The mere sight of it can cause an adult to fall to the […]
Eugenics: historic and contemporary
JMS Pearce Hull, England, United Kingdom Moral judgments, changing ethical criteria, and the broader concepts of good and evil are always controversial, and often dangerous. Prominent amongst such judgments are those relating to population control and the wider, ill-defined field of eugenics. Hidden, and often ignored or denied in these conversations, is the underlying […]
The Brothers Grimm under the knife
Valerie Gribben San Francisco, California, United States The fairy tales of the Brothers Grimm (1916). Magic-infused fairytales and modern medicine are intertwined as closely as the curving double helix of DNA. Do you doubt this? Well, let us start by acknowledging that the word “magic” has to a large degree regrettably lost its luster. […]
A legacy of pain: heredity and migraines
Terri Sinnott Chicago, Illinois, United States Fig 1. Left to right: 2 Aspirin+2 Tylenol®+ 1 can of Coca-Cola®+ 2 Sudafed®; Excedrin® + Sudafed®; Imitrex® capsule; Excedrin® + Caffeinated Coffee; 1 Maxalt-MLT® + 4 Aleve®; Imitrex® by injection Sinnott Family Collection A reporter doing a story on migraines asked me about my family’s tendencies toward them.1 […]