Twenty years. That's how long two grad students, Sonia Vallabh and Eric Minikel, think they have before a deadly disease envelops Sonia's brain. The Massachusetts couple is now racing to find a cure.
Scientists now have a fairly noninvasive way to test for Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, a rare form of dementia. A similar test, they say, might offer earlier diagnoses of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's.
There's a plethora of projects to gather data about the brain, various kinds of cancer and every type of cell in the body. But researchers are struggling to keep up with the information explosion.
For decades, a rare disease crawled across Papua New Guinea. When scientists realized what was behind kuru, it caught everyone by surprise. But similar diseases can still be transmitted through food.
Corinne Lasmezas began her career studying a disease that destroys the brains of cattle. Now she's using what she learned to search for drugs that can stop human brain diseases.
