Hektoen International

A Journal of Medical Humanities

Tag: RNA

  • Gain of function

    Jayant RadhakrishnanDarien, Illinois, United States “It is no good to try to stop knowledge from going forward. Ignorance is never better than knowledge.”– Enrico Fermi (1901–1954) “Gain of Function” (GoF) burst into the general lexicon in 2021 during two shouting matches in the US Senate between the Junior Senator from Kentucky and the Director of…

  • COVID-19: clinico-immunologic snapshot of a coronavirus

    S.E.S. MedinaBenbrook, Texas, United States A tiny mote of moisture, buoyed by silk-soft wind currents, is kicked and coaxed along a random path in space. The droplet carries a microscopic stowaway; a translucent, spherical, protein-encased, fatty bubble filled with the ostensibly lifeless essence of COVID-19, the virus known as SARS-CoV-2. Anonymous among the swirling detritus…

  • Histone acetylation a half century later: the modest birth of epigenetics

    Beatriz GT Pogo In 1964 I joined the laboratory of Cell Biology of Vincent G. Allfrey and Alfred E. Mirsky at the Rockefeller University as a post-doctoral fellow supported by a Damon Runyon International Fellowship. Early that year Rosemary Faulkner had finished her Ph.D. thesis under Dr. Vincent Allfrey on histone acetylation in isolated thymus…