Margaret Coughlin is a Senior Vice President and the Chief Marketing and Communications Officer at Boston Children’s Hospital. Here at the TEDMED conference, it’s all about horizontal or lateral thinking – coming at problems from new directions, without regard to conventional boundaries. I like the thoughts of Edward DeBono (not a TEDMED speaker), who coined [...]
Melinda Tang, MEng, is a software developer for the Innovation Acceleration Program at Boston Children’s Hospital. When children return home from the hospital after surgery, parents can be overwhelmed by the written information and instructions for follow-up. At the MIT Media Lab’s Health and Wellness Hackathon earlier this year, the focus was on empowering patients to take an [...]
Some children with autism are "bloomers" and are able to move to the high-functioning category. They're also more likely to have mothers who are white and educated. A child with autism is more likely to do well if his mother is white and educated. This is the message of a study just released in the [...]
Although a century has passed since the “unsinkable” steamship Titanic collided with an iceberg in the north Atlantic during its maiden voyage, children and adults alike remain fascinated with the disaster that shocked the world and claimed hundreds of lives. From picture book cats to time-traveling teens, novels in verse to graphic novels, there is [...]
Measuring the total amount of DNA damage within a tumor’s cells could help doctors predict its vulnerability to drugs like cisplatin. (Haukeland universitetssjukehus/Flickr) Drugs like cisplatin that break DNA are some of the strongest weapons we have against breast, ovarian and other cancers. The problem, common to every form of chemotherapy, is that cisplatin doesn’t [...]
In his essay, “We, the Web Kids,” Polish poet and pundit Piotr Czerski writes: “We don’t use the Internet…we live on the Internet and along it…communicating with one another in a way that comes naturally to us, more intense and more efficient than ever before in the history of mankind.” As Czerski emphasizes, we want [...]
David Williams wants to turn cells from Fanconi anemia (FA) patients into stem-like iPS cells. To do that, though, he needs to get the patients' cells to reboot properly. (_rockinfree/Flickr) About a decade ago, David Williams, MD, set out to solve a problem. The chief of Dana-Farber/Children’s Hospital Cancer Center’s hematology/oncology division wanted to treat [...]
Manipulating the enzymes that turn genes on and off could help make the process of reprogramming cells into iPS cells a lot more efficient and safer. There are several ways to reprogram skin cells into induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells – cells that behave like embryonic stem cells, and which could help better understand the [...]
Introduction March is Music In Our Schools Month. Sponsored by the National Association for Music Education, MIOSM supports music education advocacy to encourage well-funded school music programs nationwide. Year-round, however, music plays a significant role in the lives of many children and teenagers – both in school and out. The resources in this blog include [...]
In a four-way collaboration, skin cells from patients with autism will be used to make pluripotent stem cells. These will be made into neurons — for study of what goes awry at the cellular level in autism, and for testing of drugs. (Miserlou/Wikimedia Commons) In recent years, creative new partnerships have demonstrated big pharma’s recognition [...]