World Parkinson’s Day (April 11th) aims to raise awareness of Parkinson’s disease and the desperate need for effective new treatments. However, many people may not be aware of how animals suffer in labs, used for research into Parkinson’s disease, when the answers we need may lie with patient-centred research and not animal testing. For people, … Read more
What do self-driving cars, solar airplanes and renewable energy have in common with the human heart? At first thought, not a great deal, yet a recent scientific endeavour called the Living Heart Project has brought together experts in engineering, aeronautics and energy to produce a sophisticated new model of the human heart for use in … Read more
In March of 1882, Robert Koch used tissue from infected guinea pigs to show that the lung disease tuberculosis (TB) is caused by the organism Mycobacterium tuberculosis. At that time, TB (or ‘consumption’, as it was then known) was a constant presence in the population, infecting between 70 to 90 percent of people in urban … Read more