[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2012/06/Hotel-Room-Germs.mp3[/podcast] Ah, vacation time! Relaxing by the beach or in the mountains, retiring at night to a filthy hotel room, crawling with germs… Wait, what? Okay, that might be a slight overstatement of the hygienic challenges of hotel rooms, but the fact remains that hotel rooms are, ultimately, public spaces, inhabited by hundreds of different …
Tag: disease
The Holy Grail of hemophilia treatment
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads//2011/12/Hemophilia-Gene-Therapy.mp3[/podcast] Over more than two decades of science writing, I’ve seen a lot of my past writings rendered obsolete by scientific progress. Case in point: the release last week of a research report on exciting new progress in gene therapy for hemophiliacs. Back in 2001, I wrote a book on hemophilia for the Enslow Publishers …
The Black Death
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2011/09/The-Black-Death.mp3[/podcast]
Confessions of a cyberchondriac
A few years ago I wrote several children’s books for the Diseases and People series put out by Enslow Publishers. It’s amazing when you’re writing about disease how easy it is to convince yourself you’ve got the symptoms of whatever you’re writing about. The first book was Meningitis. Stiff neck? You bet. Of course, I …
A treatment for Ebola?
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2010/06/A-Treatment-for-Ebola.mp3[/podcast] A few years ago I wrote several books for Enslow Publishers in New Jersey for a series called Diseases and People. I covered meningitis, arthritis, hemophilia…and Ebola. My most recent book for Enslow, Disease-Hunting Scientist, also talks about Ebola, and some of the scientists who travel to the sites of outbreaks to help with …
Disease-Hunting Scientists: Jonathan Epstein and the search for SARS
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/upLoads//2009/05/jonathan-epstein-and-sars.mp3[/podcast] My next book, due out this summer from Enslow Publishers, is entitled Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases. Each of its chapters focuses on one particular scientist whose work is related to hunting disease. The chapters are much longer than these science columns, but I thought in honour of the book’s release, I’d try …
An instantaneous, universal, programmable vaccine?
[podcast]https://edwardwillett.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/03/a-universal-instant-vaccine.mp3[/podcast] Efforts to immunize people against disease go back to at least 600 B.C., when the Chinese attempted to immunize people against smallpox by putting smallpox material in their nostrils (the permitting of which, I would think, would require a great deal of faith in your doctor). Modern immunization began in 1796 when a British …
Title page of my next children’s non-fiction book
Just got the PDF of the rough layout of what will probably* be my next-published children’s non-fiction book, Disease-Hunting Scientist: Careers Hunting Deadly Diseases–that’s the title page at left. It’s part of a series from Enslow Publishers called Wild Science Careers. It’s been interesting to work on, since I got to interview several scientists who …
Why is winter the flu season?
Scientists may have finally figured out why there’s a “flu season,” why flu is so much more prevalent during the cold months: Dr. Zimmerberg and his colleagues found that at temperatures slightly above freezing, the virus’s lipid covering solidified into a gel. As temperatures approach 60 degrees Fahrenheit, the covering gradually thaws, eventually melting to …
What’s it like in Level 4?
Download the audio version.Get my science column weekly as a podcast. *** It’s a staple of movies and TV shows: the Level 4 lab, where scientists in “space suits” race against the clock to find a cure for a mysterious ailment. But what’s it like to work in a Level 4 laboratory in real life? …
Here’s hoping it works!
A universal ‘flu vaccine is in the first stage of human tests: This vaccine is intended to provide protection against all ‘A’ strains of the virus that causes human influenza, including pandemic strains.***At the moment, Phase I clinical trials on humans are underway – that is, the candidate vaccine is being administered to a small …
"Bones" McCoy, call your office:
Your hand-held miniaturized rapid-acting virus detector is ready. And it doesn’t look a thing like a salt shaker.