Making Sense of Medical Science (MSMS)

A medical scientist explains medical news for lay people

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Steve Clark, PhD is a retired university professor with a PhD in immunology and a past Special Fellow of the Leukemia Society of America. Clark has published dozens of papers based on his research and holds two drug patents. He taught medical and graduate students about cancer biology and genetics, and about research ethics. He also directed an NIH-funded PhD Graduate Program and chaired several executive-level faculty committees. Clark served on the University Chancellor’s Speaker’s Bureau. While retired, Clark has been blogging on the COVID pandemic, which is the subject of his next book.

Category: COVID-19

  • SpaceX AND BioX Do It Again!!

    Just a few days before the SpaceX catch, it was announced that BioX won the 2024 Nobel Prize for using a computer, or artificial intelligence, to decipher the structure of ALL known proteins, and for using similar technology to create whole new functional proteins. We are in a new brave world of science.

  • Still Digging Into Long COVID

    …some progress is being made; probably not fast enough if you are a long COVID sufferer, but medical science often moves at a glacial pace. Here, I describe some of our recent advances in learning about the problem.

  • NIH Launches First Trial Of Nasal COVID Vaccine

    Wouldn’t it be nice if a vaccine could be developed to nip the infection in the bud at the site of entry so it could not set up shop at all? That is an idea behind a mucosal vaccine that I described earlier. This summer, NIH launched the initial Phase 1 trial to begin testing…

  • Deadly Vaccine Disinformation

    The insidiousness and even silliness of anti-vaccine charlatans like RFK, Jr and the others is that while they claim to be saving peoples’ lives, they actually are causing deaths. The Kaiser Family Foundation found that in the nine months between June 2021 and March 2022, 234,000 deaths could have been prevented with COVID vaccinations that…

  • Tattoos and Vaccines: Muddled Thinking And A Good Idea

    The way that vaccinologists have taken notice of tattoo technology is intriguing. They have taken their knowledge of skin immunology and realized that a pop culture technique probably might contribute to the field. The irony is that many people who get tattooed are vax deniers. Their cognitive dissonance is disturbing. Vax deniers proclaim loudly disinformation…

  • Coronaviruses, Colds And COVID: And Cool Immunology

    ….if you were infected with CoV-2, you likely had a much milder cold, if you caught one at all. And vice versa! But the funny thing is that vaccination against COVID did not also protect you against a cold like an infection would.

  • Another Jab’ll Do Ya…

    What the boosters do is prevent you from getting serious disease that these new variants can visit on you! Realize that the vast majority of people across all age groups who were hospitalized with serious disease last fall did not get the updated booster for the current virus that was circulating.

  • Paxlovid: Just Follow The Settled Science

    Thus, the makers of the drug now have two studies with diametrically opposite results on the effects of Paxlovid on COVID patients. The first showed “eye popping” effects sufficient to get NIH to move all other drug investigations to a lower priority. The second showed that Paxlovid was no better than a placebo. Both results…

  • Parkinson’s Disease—An Unexpected Ravage of COVID?

    New research now raises a real concern that COVID patients might also be at increased risk for developing Parkinson’s disease.

  • The Intelligence of Artificial Intelligence And Blogging

    Have you tried dabbling with artificial intelligence? I specifically refer to the type referred to as chatbots that use powerful generative artificial intelligence that you can really chat with to generate ideas. It is like the computer, Hal, in the movie 2001 a Space Odyssey. Remember? Remember too that Hal malfunctioned big-time? I’ve been dabbling…