The author spoke with Steven Schlozman, HMS assistant professor of psychiatry at Massachusetts General Hospital, about President Obama’s new initiative to map the human brain.
Sequestration, the automatic, across-the-board spending reductions triggered last month after U.S. lawmakers failed to agree on a debt strategy, has cast a shadow of uncertainty over public funding for medical research. Joan Brugge, chair of the Department of Cell Biology, is quoted.
Veterans in a study said the ability to view notes, lab results and other documents helped them communicate better with their doctors and led to better health. An HMS study is cited.
Nicholas Tilney, who was the Francis D. Moore Professor of Surgery at Harvard Medical School, died on March 13. He was 77 and had been treated for prostate cancer for many years.
Telepathic control of another person’s body is a small step closer. By linking the technologies of two brain/computer interfaces, human volunteers were able to trigger movement in a rat’s tail using their minds. Seung-Schik Yoo, HMS associate professor of radiology at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, was one of the researchers.
Pfizer, the world’s biggest drugmaker, will pay closely held Bind Therapeutics Inc. as much as $200 million per potential drug to develop medicines using its nanotechnology platform. Bind’s technology comes from the laboratories of Robert Langer of MIT and HMS senior lecturer on surgery at Boston Children’s Hospital, and Omid Farokhzad, HMS associate professor of anaesthesia at Brigham and Women’s Hospital.
A microfluidic device that captures circulating tumor cells could give doctors a noninvasive way to diagnose and track cancers. Mehmet Toner, the Helen Andrus Benedict Professor of Surgery at Massachusetts General Hospital, is one of the lead researchers.
