Why de-extinction is a seductive idea we should resist There is a photograph taken in 1933 of the last known thylacine, more commonly known as the Tasmanian tiger, pacing its concrete enclosure at Hobart Zoo. It circles. It circles again. Three years later it was dead, and with it went an entire lineage of a marsupial predator, four million years in the making. When people look at that photograph, maybe they share articles, feel briefly concerned, but eventually move on. That

In a typical neurology clinic, Dr. Reshma Narula often saw young women with a specific, terrifying problem: sudden, excruciating "thunderclap" headaches that signaled their brain's blood vessels were dangerously constricting. Separately, in a nearby cardiology unit, Dr. Samit Shah treated women experiencing chest pain so severe it mimicked a heart attack, caused by inexplicable spasms in the arteries feeding the heart. For years, these conditions—Reversible Cerebral Vasoconst

Advances in regenerative medicine and neuroscience have opened the door to revolutionary methods for generating human brain cells. One such approach, direct cell reprogramming, also known as transdifferentiation, bypasses the pluripotent intermediate state and converts mature somatic cells—such as skin cells—directly into another mature cell type, such as neurons or brain stem cells. This method offers a promising platform for studying the human brain, modeling neurological d

Antimicrobial resistance (AMR), also known as drug resistance occurs when bacteria, viruses, fungi and parasites no longer respond to antimicrobial medicines. It refers to the ability of microbes to withstand the effects of drugs that previously managed to kill them, or inhibit their growth. For example: bacteria that were once vulnerable to antibiotics might evolve to become resistant. One case of this would be multidrug-resistance tuberculosis (TB), which entails resistance