Consider a mighty ship that was only made of wood. Let’s call it… Sea Señor 😁. Let’s say Sea Señor is used by sailors for generations, passed down from one great sea captain to another. Just like any object, over time, the ship experiences wear and tear, namely rot. So, to keep it in working condition, rotting wood planks are replaced by metal parts one by one. Now let us consider the day that the very last piece of wood in the entire ship is replaced with a metal part. Right after this moment, is this ship still the same…

The attempt to take control of the COVID-19 pandemic has quite clearly been an utter failure. Apart from the successful development of vaccines in a record low time, there were significant issues with detection of the virus, governmental actions to bring the virus under control, and public acceptance of social distancing, mask, and lockdown policies, as well as problems with vaccine distribution in many places even now.

As Sam Harriss and Rob Reid discuss in the episode (embedded below) on the Making Sense podcast, the fast growth of the synthetic biology significantly increases risks of engineered viruses causing future pandemics.

As we’ve discussed in the past two articles, though the immune system is extremely versatile and powerful, in some individuals, cancer cells are able to develop mechanisms to avoid or even directly block the immune system, allowing them to form life-threatening tumors.

Now, one way to overcome these mechanisms is with the help of drugs like the immune checkpoint inhibitors we focused on in the previous article. But, another class of immunotherapy are adoptive cellular therapies (ACT), which, on a fundamental level, isolate and extract T-cells, expand their populations outside of the body, and then inject them back into the…

I I had to choose something to designate as the one constant reason behind all the actions almost every person takes throughout their life, it would be the pursuit of happiness. We as humans care so much about things like money, social status, romantic and familial relationships, and friendships only because we falsely think that those will lead us to achieving true happiness in our lives.

But, this is where a great mystery of life lies. Even when some people have amassed large amounts of money, have high social status, have a strong romantic relationship, and tons of friends, many…

Note: This is just part 2 of my article series on cancer immunotherapy and covers the basics of what might be the earliest breakthrough in immunotherapies: immune checkpoint blockade therapy. It will require a basic understanding of the cellular mechanisms in the immune system.
If you don’t have prior exposure or understanding of how the immune system works, check out part 1 in the series where I go over the basics of the human immune system, and then come back to continue reading this article!

As obvious as it may seem today, the concept that the immune system was capable…

Note: This is just part 1 of my article series on cancer immunotherapy and covers basic immunology concepts that you might need to know to better understand the remaining articles on specific methodologies for cancer immunology.
This article does assume that you have some understanding of topics like transcription, translation, mitosis and meiosis, the chromosomal theory of inheritance, and cell biology. If you aren’t familiar with these, I’ve linked some resources for different topics throughout the article as they come up, so feel free to read those, understand the topic, and then come back to continue reading the article!

Let’s Start From The Top

You…

Everyone knows that as a person gets older, their health slowly gets worse and worse. From a young age, we’ve seen grandparents and other “old” people suffer from different diseases, frailty, poor eyesight, and a host of other problems.

But what some people might not realize is that it’s not as simple as a linear function where everyone in the world has the same health deterioration at the same age. …

Humanity has come a long way since we first evolved from our ape ancestors. It started slow (extremely slow), with figuring out how to light a fire and make tools using stones, but quickly picked up to the point where, about 200,000 years later, we can manipulate life at the smallest orders of molecules, launch people into space, and even manipulate atoms to meet our desires.