A federal appeals court today heard arguments that the U.S. patent office made legal mistakes when reviewing its ruling on CRISPR, the genome editor. ISTOCKPHOTO/NO_LIMIT_PICTURES
Here’s a double-negative brain twister with potentially huge financial ramifications and a Nobel Prize resting on the answer: For an invention to be “nonobvious”—and therefore…
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Sacramento County Sheriff's Department deputies leave the California home of Joseph James DeAngelo, who last week was arrested on suspicion in a string of violent crimes in the 1970s and 1980s. He was identified using a public database of people's DNA. RICH PEDRONCELLI/AP PHOTO
Yaniv Erlich, a geneticist at Columbia University, was far from surprised at last week’s news that police may have found a serial murderer and rapist,…
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Many new U.S. leprosy cases likely are somehow transmitted from armadillos to humans. GREG MCCORMICK
Leprosy, a much feared and stigmatized scourge in history, affects a tiny number of Americans, but Congress’s decision to make a modest cut to its…
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U.S. Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein at a press conference this morning that announced the indictment of nine Iranians who allegedly stole data from researchers around the world. YURI GRIPAS/REUTERS
Nine Iranians working on behalf of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps hacked the computers of 7998 professors at 320 universities around the world over the…
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Robert Redfield INSTITUTE OF HUMAN VIROLOGY AT THE UNIVERSITY OF MARYLAND SCHOOL OF MEDICINE
Robert Redfield, an HIV/AIDS researcher and clinician who has weathered his share of controversies over a long career, will soon become the next director of…
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New studies in rhesus macaques, the main animal model used to study the AIDS virus, are showing the way forward for both a vaccine and a cure. BRENNAN LINSLEY/AP PHOTO
BOSTON—Despite enormous efforts over more than 30 years, HIV/AIDS researchers have yet to develop either a vaccine or cure for the disease. But they have…
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Cynthia, a sex worker who lives near Nairobi, is one of the 13,000 people in Kenya who recently started using pre-exposure prophylaxis. JUOZAS CERNIUS/JHPIEGO
BOSTON—There’s no question that a simple regimen of a single daily pill can slash HIV infections in people at risk. But although millions of people…
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Tuberculosis piggybacks on HIV and many people, like this woman in South Africa, wind up hospitalized with life-threatening cases of the curable lung disease. JON COHEN/SCIENCE
BOSTON—Some people naturally handle HIV infection better than others, but only two clear genetic explanations have ever been found. Now, a new study reported here…
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The genome editor CRISPR cuts DNA with help from a guide RNA (green and red) and a Cas9 enzyme (outline) that latches onto a three-base sequence (yellow). KC ROEYER/UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY
You wouldn’t know it from the excitement generated by the revolutionary genome editing method known as CRISPR, but as practiced now, it is far from…
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