Molecular Biology/Medicine
Juan C. Mendible
Latest Articles
THE PROMISES OF THE HUMAN GENOME PROJECT
More than 15 years ago the Human Genome Project (HGP) was started as an international effort to decode its billion of bases.
In 1999 wrote three articles about the basic Biochemistry facts of how the body uses the energy that we eat in under the form of carbohydrates, fats and proteins. I discussed why overeating leads to obesity and I also talked a little bit about diets.
In a press release of NewScientist.com, writer Shaoni Bhattacharya, talks about the results of a study published in the volume 24 of the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that suggests that handsome men have the best sperm.
Two years ago I wrote three articles about obesity. In them I described the basic biochemistry facts of fat use and storage. It was a very simplified view, since I described the functions of only three hormones (insulin, adrenaline and glucagon) involved in energy metabolism. There are a few more whose ...
WHERE ARE THE WONDER DRUGS OF BIOTECH?
In 2000 I wrote an article on Pharmacogenomics another science born out of the Human Genome Project. It tries to correlate an individual’s genetic make up to his or her response to drug treatment, in other words, personalized medicine.
In that article I also discussed how I thought that Pharma companies would ...
FUNTIONAL GENOMICS: GENOMES AT WORK
After the groundbreaking gene-splicing experiment of Paul Berg in 1972, Molecular Biology exploded. Soon everybody was cloning genes, the biological barriers between all kind of biological barriers were broken with transgenic experiments, the amounts of DNA bases sequenced per day went past the 10,000 in less than five years, and the ...
GENOMICS: The Science born out of the Human Genome Project
Today, almost three years after the first draft of the Human Genome Projecte was presented to the world we have a new science: Genomics, that studies how the genome function as whole. The comparison of the functioning of the rat, mice and human genomes, is starting to shed light on how ...
THE DANGER OF ANTIBIOTIC RESISTANT BACTERIA
The success of antibiotics has been so spectacular that some doctors said that soon infectious diseases would disappear and would be a thing of the past. However, almost 60 years after the discovery of penicillin we are under attack by new microbes and some of the old ones have become resistant ...
SMALLPOX: HOW DANGEROUS IS IT?
A unknown number of years ago, perhaps between 3,000 and 12,000, a poxvirus made the jump from its natural host to man. It is now known as smallpox. And it is considered the worst and most dangerous bioweapon in the world. Why is that so?
In this article I discuss a bioethical aspect of the experimentation with human embryos.