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The Pursuit of Happiness
Nearly all of us buy into what UC Riverside psychology professor Sonja Lyubomirsky calls the myths of happiness — beliefs that certain adult achievements (marriage, kids, jobs, wealth) will make us forever happy and that certain adult failures or adversities (health problems, divorce, having little money) will make us forever unhappy. In this presentation for […]
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Health Reform at the Crossroads
Democrats and Republicans have been working to create laws that reform the American health care system for decades. The Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, also known as ObamaCare, is the first successful major overhaul of health care since Medicare in 1965. The Act affirms “the core principle that everybody should have some basic security […]
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Telomeres: Tiny Keys to the Fountain of Youth?
Our time is limited. The clock is ticking. If we’re fortunate enough to escape disease, accidents, or war intact, then at some point our bodies eventually turn against us. What causes our bodies to age? Why don’t we simply live on (until that proverbial anvil lands atop our unsuspecting heads)? Turns out, telomeres are one […]
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Precision Medicine – Making the Personal Possible
Keith Yamamoto, the Vice Chancellor of Research at UCSF says, “The promise of precision medicine is enormous. It’s a very aspirational, revolutionary change in the way that research and health care relate to patients and citizens.” In precision medicine, data of all types — molecular, clinical, population-based — would be continuously amassed from consenting patients […]
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Turning Cancer into a Chronic, but Controllable, Disease
Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, founder of NantWorks, describes his vision for turning cancer into a chronic but controllable disease by using advanced rapid gene sequencing, supercomputing and other methods of analysis to transcend the genome to the proteome. This approach has the potential to redefine how cancer is diagnosed and to develop therapies precisely tailored to […]
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Nutrition Labels: How Sweet It Is
Lately, the subject of added sugar in our diets has been in the news. Most recently the FDA announced the first makeover of the nutrition label since it appeared twenty years ago. One of the big changes is the requirement to note how much added sugar is in a product. The new labeling now indicates […]