CRISPR Has Made Its Way Into Popular Culture. How Accurate Is The Portrayal Of The Gene-Editing Technique?
"Rampage" is the latest movie to feature CRISPR as a plot device. Stat takes a look at what it gets right and wrong. In other public health news: exercise, OB-GYNs, heart valves and memory loss.
We here at STAT cover CRISPR a lot. But it鈥檚 not every day we get to cover Dwayne 鈥淭he Rock鈥 Johnson. The Rock and the genome-editing technology meet in a new movie, 鈥淩ampage,鈥 coming out Friday. Through a freak accident, a gorilla, a wolf, and a crocodile ingest some CRISPR complexes. The animals 鈥 whose genomes become edited to make them stronger, bigger, faster, and more aggressive 鈥 soon wreak havoc on the city of Chicago. (Thielking and Joseph, 4/12)
If you give a mouse a running wheel, it will run. But it may not burn many additional calories, because it will also start to move differently when it is not on the wheel, according to an interesting new study of the behaviors and metabolisms of exercising mice. The study, published in Diabetes, involved animals, but it could have cautionary implications for people who start exercising in the hopes of losing weight. (Raynolds, 4/11)
As she leaves a 12-hour-day on the labor and delivery shift, Dr. Katie Merriam turns off her pager."I don't know what I'd do without it, you know? It's another limb. I always know where it is," she says and laughs. The third-year resident in obstetrics and gynecology at the Carolinas Medical Center hospital in Charlotte, N.C., works in a medical specialty dominated by women, treating women. Merriam says she feels a special connection to her patients. (Olgin, 4/12)
When Sadie Rutenberg was born, she had a gaping hole between the聽two聽sides of her heart, and her heart valves were聽malformed聽and leaking. In her first few months of life, she had already undergone two open-heart surgeries; but the damage was too extensive to repair, and the blond-haired, blue-eyed infant was failing to thrive.聽Her parents said there was no choice 鈥 they would have to take a risk, or their child might not survive. (Bever, 4/11)
Kaiser Health News:
What We Know And Don鈥檛 Know About Memory Loss After Surgery
Two years ago, Dr. Daniel Cole鈥檚 85-year-old father had heart bypass surgery. He hasn鈥檛 been quite the same since. 鈥淗e forgets things and will ask you the same thing several times,鈥 said Cole, a professor of clinical anesthesiology at UCLA and a past president of the American Society of Anesthesiologists. 鈥淗e never got back to his cognitive baseline,鈥 Cole continued, noting that his father was sharp as a tack before the operation. 鈥淗e鈥檚 more like 80 percent.鈥 (Graham, 4/12)