Tag: rare-diseases
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Scientific and Medical Writers are not FAILED Scientists
“Scientific and medical writers are just failed scientists”This toxic and yet common misconception is born from the misbelief that science is only done in a lab. Academia doesn’t even try to dispel the misconception, rarely discussing alternate careers. Even big professors, who haven’t seen a bench in ages, don a labcoat in photo ops. The…
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How I Conned Myself in the Pursuit of a PhD
I’m proud of my PhD in neuroscience, but, in hindsight, it conned me for 4 years. Or, maybe, did I con myself? No, I didn’t believe that once I had earned a doctorate, professorship would follow in two, three years. No, I wasn’t deceived into thinking that it would have opened all the doors. No,…
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To die because of your research. Or wondering if you will in a decade.
You may have read the harrowing story of Émilie Jaumain on my blog or elsewhere. It is a tragic and infamous case, many have covered it. But there is another deeply unsettling case that may have happened, another story of fatal infection by prions–fatal is a pleonasm, when prions enter the body the mortality is…
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To die because of your research. At 33 years old.
Émilie Jaumain died of a prion disease (variant Creutzfeldt-Jacobs disease, vCJD, the human equivalent of the “mad cow” disease) in 2019. She was most likely infected in May 2010 while working in a French laboratory studying transgenic mice overexpressing prions. The contamination must have occurred when she pricked her thumb, through two pairs of gloves,…
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Ten Questions about Rare Disease Day (Feb. 28)
1) Why February 28?Actually, Rare Disease Day takes place on February 29, in leap years—the rarest day of the calendar is a fitting choice to highlight the rarity of these diseases. In non-leap years, such as 2025, it occurs on February 28 instead. 2) Who picked this date?Rare Disease Day was established by EURORDIS, the…
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