Barbara Zeughauser had lost so many relatives to cancer: Her mother, her uncle, her grandmother, her second cousin. She thought that ghost in the family line might come after her, too. So in 2009, Zeughauser took a test offered by Myriad Genetics. It analyzed her DNA for mutations in the BRCA1 and BRCA2 genes that can make cancer more likely than not, raising the lifetime risk of breastcancer in women to between 55 and 85 percent, and to between 10 and 70 percent for ovariancancer.
Zeughauser was lucky and unlucky. She got a clear, unambiguous, and accurate answer from the test: She had a bad mutation. But she’d found it before she got cancer. She decided to have her ovaries removed and later had a double mastectomy, reducing her risk to almost average.
Her cousin Ken Deutsch wasn’t so lucky. In 2014, he was hit with bladder cancer. He also went...
For two years, a panel of scientific experts, clinicians, and patient advocates had been hammering out ways to increase community engagement in National Institutes of Health-funded science. When they presented their road map to the NIH Director Jay Bhattacharya last...
President Trump and health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. have characterized the rise in autism diagnoses in recent years as an epidemic requiring emergency intervention.
By Abby McCloskey, The Dallas Morning News | 10.10.2025
Aggregated News
We Texans like to do things our way — leave some hide on the fence rather than stay corralled, as goes a line in Wallace O. Chariton’s Texas dictionary This Dog’ll Hunt. Lately, I’ve been wondering what this ethos...
Paula Amato & Shoukhrat Mitalipov
[OHSU News/Christine Torres Hicks]
On September 30th, a team of 21 scientists from Oregon Health & Science University (OHSU) published a significant paper in Nature Communications, with a scientifically accurate but, to many, somewhat abstruse headline:
Induction of experimental cell division to generate cells with reduced chromosome ploidy
The lead authors were Shoukhrat Mitalipov, recently described here as “a push-the-envelope biologist,” and his long-term colleague Paula Amato. (Recall that in July the pair had co-published with...
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