“We learn from failures, so we should take the opportunity this disaster has provided to improve the way we extract oil via offshore drilling. With such a massive release, there will be substantial harm to the ecosystem. The acute effects are terrible and very visual. “But once the source has been stopped, most of the […]

A young lab assistant attended an autopsy at the Johns Hopkins Hospital morgue on October 4, 1951. The assistant was Mary Kubicek. The autopsy was of a woman who had died at 31 from the metastasized cervical cancer that had so ravaged her there was scarcely an organ in her body not riddled with malignancies. […]

As he parks next to a large white farmhouse that would fit comfortably into a 19th-century still life, Richard Kelley smiles at a rust-colored retriever, an old friend that stirs from an early spring sunbath to greet him. Kelley knows this old place well. He’s been dropping by regularly to check on Joshua since the boy was little more than a month old, when his grandmother noticed that his body quavered slightly but uncontrollably.

Standing in the apiary on the grounds of the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Bee Research Laboratory in Beltsville, Maryland, Wayne Esaias, A&S ’67, digs through the canvas shoulder bag leaning against his leg in search of the cable he uses to download data. It’s dusk as he runs the cord from his laptop—precariously perched on […]

Kids with sickle cell disease (SCD) grow up facing a future of potential organ damage, vision problems, infections, and stroke. But perhaps the most agonizing part of living with the disease is dealing with the “crises”—unpredictable attacks of intense pain that take over little bodies, often sending them to a hospital for narcotics to curb […]