Tag: following decades
The Nine Breakthroughs of the Year
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The theme of my second-annual Breakthroughs of the Year is the long road of progress. My top breakthrough is Casgevy, a gene-editing treatment for sickle-cell anemia. In the 1980s and early 1990s, scientists in Spain and Japan found strange, repeating patterns in the DNA of certain bacteria. Researchers eventually linked these sequences to an immune defense system that
Will We Ever Find a Cure for Mental Illness?
Psychiatry, from its very inception, has been subject to raised eyebrows if not outright ridicule. Even before Freud came along with his batty theories about infantile sexuality and repressed wishes to kill one’s father, the discipline had struggled to define its methods and objectives. More than two centuries after it emerged as a profession devoted to the care—and hoped-for cure—of the mentally ill, psychiatry is still seen by many as half-baked, neither a science nor an art, pulled