Oh, great. Another measles outbreak in the U.S. It was just earlier this winter that there were 187 cases in New York. How many has it been since Jan. 1? Hmmm…79 cases across 10 states. Compared to last year’s total of 372 cases in the U.S., it looks like 2019 may be a record year. I should have gotten the vaccine when I was a kid, but it wasn’t what my parents wanted. Now that I can legally make my own medical decisions, do they even have a measles vaccine for adults? It’s curious how one of the oldest diseases

  This fall, we lost a member of our Advanced Biotechnologies’ family.  Dr. Sukhendra Choudhury was one of our most dedicated scientists from 1998 until 2016. His expertise in viral growths, tissue culture, electron microscopy, quality control testing, infectivity studies, and veterinary sciences made him a critical part of the growth of our company. Dr. Choudhury was well known throughout the company for teaching people by asking them lots of questions, letting them find the answers and think through the process.  For many years he served as a mentor and educator to most of the scientists that passed through our

If you have ever read Mary Shelley’s 1818 novel, Frankenstein, or seen any of the movies based on it (including such gems as Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein), you at least know that the book is about a scientist, Dr. Frankenstein, a well-educated idealist who created life.  Only in this case, it regrettably took the form of a horrible monster. Of course, Frankenstein was just science fiction, and the scientific knowledge came from what was known in the early 1800s, a relative stone age compared to where we are today.  And yet, even with all our advancements, we are not

Legionnaires’ disease is on the rise. The CDC reported over 6,100 cases of Legionnaires’ disease, a severe and often lethal form of pneumonia, in 20161. Its less potent cousin, Pontiac Fever, also affects many people each year. It is widely suspected, however, that both of these diseases are underdiagnosed. Some even speculate that there could be more than 100,000 cases occurring in the US alone. There is a general public perception that Legionnaires’ disease is rare. In fact, I suspect that if you stopped passersby on the street, the vast majority couldn’t even tell you what it is. This could

Don’t fix it. Ironically, SDS-PAGE (sodium dodecyl sulfate–polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis) has been around longer than the phrase.1 It’s hard to imagine a scientific process that has been relatively unchanged in more than fifty years; a process that predates the pocket calculator and man’s first steps on the moon. Nevertheless, this protein analysis procedure has been used for nearly five decades as a quick, cost-effective assay. Since SDS-PAGE is covered in great detail in many other places, we’ll just share the short version with you. In brief, it is a process by which proteins are separated by their molecular weight for

It’s October, 1793 in the capital city of Philadelphia. The stars equal the stripes on the flag of the fledgling United States and George Washington is at the onset of his second term. Almost ten percent of the city’s residents are dead or dying and a third of the population has fled. Thomas Jefferson writes to James Madison that everyone who could escape the city was doing so.1 An invisible and unknown scourge has plagued the city and the surrounding countryside. Early theories by Benjamin Rush, a local physician who penned his name on the Declaration of Independence, supposed the

When one hears the name “Bill Gates” the first thought is most often that of a technology pioneer and philanthropist. Unarguably one of the most generous persons of this generation, his primary charity, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, has been spearheading HIV/AIDS research and prevention since the early 2000s. Gates pledged in 20161 to further infuse his African economic project with an additional $5 billion. Though not the only charity involved in this fight, it’s hard to ignore the impact the foundation has had. As you would expect, the correlation between global activism to prevent, treat and research HIV/AIDS

During this year’s Clinical Virology Symposium (CVS), our own Thomas Parks presented a poster entitled “Quantification of HPV in Caski and HeLa cell lines by a chip-based digital PCR”.  His poster was very well received with good discussion points by the CVS audience in Savannah, Georgia.  Session II of the program included the informative topic: ‘Molecular Tests for Diagnosis of Human Papillomaviruses Infections’, and HPV was the subject of many posters. Tom’s poster is attached for your reference. Posters were viewed in the combined Exhibit & Poster Hall and numerous enough to have presentations span three evenings. The receptions were