A few years ago, the average person had no idea what the microbiome was, but now it is bantered about on quasi-medical talk shows, social media, and blogs almost as though it were the savior of human health: change your microbiome, change your world!... Read more
September/October 2016

The Precise–and Wild–Genomics Revolution
Genomics has been applied to studying diseases spanning from depression to diabetes to high cholesterol. As Dr. Joel Diamond, chief medical officer for Genomics and Precision Medicine at Allscripts, says, “In the area of cardiology, we know that there are syndromes that cause heart arrhythmias or heart abnormali... Read more

Controlling Seizures Through Chemogenetics
Electricity is the currency of our nervous systems. Thinking and planning, walking and talking, eating and sleeping—all our mental and physical activities are driven by electrical signals moving through the brain. This electrical traffic ebbs and flows in consistent patterns across different brain regions, carry... Read more

More Than Just Monkey Business
The science of the microbiome is arguably one of the hottest topics in medicine.... Read more

What Can Big Data Tell Us About Health?
"It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data,” said Sherlock Holmes creator and author Arthur Conan Doyle in 1887. In this era of big data, and especially the crush of medical information becoming avai... Read more

What Lies Within
In 1991, a group of Italian researchers announced that they had isolated a new antibiotic from a chemical soup brewed with a soil-dwelling bacteria called Planobispora rosea. The drug was a type of thiopeptide, effe... Read more

Knowing What You Eat
Food allergies and sensitivities have always been a public health problem but are becoming more prevalent worldwide. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration reports that millions of Americans have allergic reactions t... Read more

The Case for Big Data
Why do people start smoking in the first place? That is one of the many complex, interdisciplinary questions behind the Kavli HUMAN Project, a massive data-collection endeavor with the goal of learning how everythin... Read more

Omics Tech, Gut-on-a-Chip, and Bacterial Engineering
It was six years ago that fecal transplantation first received prominent media attention and the public began to fully appreciate that the bacteria and other microbes in their bodies could have a real impact on heal... Read more

Wearables and the Internet of Things for Health
In our recent book Health-e Everything: Wearables and the Internet of Things for Health, we capture in an interactive e-book format some global thought-leader perspectives as well as early examples of case studies a... Read more
Editorial Blogs
Prevention Is Better Than Cure
Modern medicine is overwhelmingly reactive rather than proactive. Get sick, seek medical help. How expensive that model ...
Consilience of Conscience
Review of Lab Girl, a 2016 memoir of Hope Jagren, and Wireless Medical Systems and Algorithms: Design and Applications, providing discourses on the current state of the art in several areas of wireless medical system development and related algorithm developments.... Read more
Lamarck, Darwin, Wallace, and Ameghino
The universe is the most fundamental wonder: we, as humans, face it every day, contemplate it in endless amazement, question it in our search for answers. And long ago, at a particular moment in a tiny piece of that great wonder, a second wonder, perhaps deeper in reach, emerged: life. Then, slowly, life evolved to contain within it a third wonder, possibly greater in some respects than the universe itself: the human mind.... Read more