Microbial Manipulation For an introduction, read this Berkeley Science Review. And: How Pernicious Parasites Turn Victims into Zombies. And Carl Zimmer’s article in the New York Times Science section. The human gut microbiota has been described as a “forgotten organ” that is essential to human health and happiness. Evidence suggests […]
The prevalence of allergic diseases has dramatically increased in recent decades, and these diseases currently affect one in five people in the US. Allergic and autoimmune diseases also reduce quality of life and they are expensive, costing approximately $15 billion annually. The massive increase in allergy has occurred along with […]
Jeff Leach has given himself a fecal microbiome transplant from a Hadza hunter-gatherer. Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. Read Leach’s description here. Read John Hawk’s reaction (negative) here.
What is the Paleo diet? Should we eat like our stone age ancestors? How did our ancestors eat, exactly? How far back should we go to identify humans’ healthiest diet? Can modern hunter-gatherers be a stand-in for our ancestral hominins in terms of diet? 1) Quickly skim this recent piece […]
John Hawks posted a great discussion of the aquatic ape hypothesis. Read his post here.
Sweet ‘N Low contains saccharin, an ingredient that was the subject of a recent study in the Journal Nature: “Artificial sweeteners induce glucose intolerance by altering the gut microbiota.” Click below to read the article, which describes changes in microbiota that are responsible for the adverse effects of saccharin and […]
Each group will present their assigned article on 9/23/14 The name of the game of these presentations is to present the major ideas of the article and to provide a critique. Each student will need to make part of the presentation individually. Each group must decide whether they think the […]
What does personalized medicine mean in the era of inexpensive gene sequencing? What can we make of our own personal genetic variation? We will explore these ideas in next Tuesday’s class, with Katina Krasnec’s guest lecture. Here is the essay question for next week: Do you think personalized medicine and […]
In this weeks class, we introduced the idea of normal in medicine. What is normal? Can the concept of adaptation help guide what to do with an “abnormal finding”? We confront these questions all the time in the hospital. Now it is your turn to weigh in. Lets start with […]
Next week we will cover recent human evolution. Certain populations have adaptations to high altitude hypoxia and to certain foods. We will discuss the evolutionary biology of high altitude peoples of the Andes, Himalayas, and Ethiopian Plateau. For discussion: How might gene-environment mismatch account for acute mountain sickness in Europeans? […]
EvolutionMedicine 