2 posts and columns on disease

Voices

Volunteering Computers for Science

in News on October 20, 2009 at 5:00 am PT

The next cure for a major disease is as likely to be discovered on a computer as on a laboratory bench–and scientists are enlisting ordinary citizens to volunteer to help crunch the data. Advances in computer science have enabled medical researchers to test how proteins fold, genes interact and pandemics spread in complex digital simulations of natural environments.

Voices

Jobs's Transplant Highlights Differing Wait Times

in News on June 19, 2009 at 9:01 pm PT

Apple Inc. CEO Steve Jobs’s decision to travel to Tennessee for a liver highlights the significant disparities in transplant waiting times across the country–the source of a longstanding controversy over the fairest way to distribute scarce organs.