Ricki Lewis

Posts are appearing on my Facebook feed warning against the dangers of eating tilapia. So I decided to do a little research.

My dad was a seafood wholesaler at the Fulton Fish market, and as a kid I’d encountered all manner of fish, at the dinner table and from working one summer at his stall. I knew about porgies, red snapper, flounder, and crabs galore, and that gefilte fish was a mixture of carp, whitefish, and pike. My dad even dealt in turtles and he’d send the occasional mystery species uptown to the American Museum of Natural History for identification.

But I was flummoxed when great bags of shrink-wrapped tilapia fillets began appearing in the supermarket a few years ago.

What the heck is tilapia? Read More 

Is a film based on a video game with fleeting mentions of a biotech buzzword compelling sci-fi? No. But I liked Rampage anyway.

The use of CRISPR to edit genes is perhaps the only novel plot point in this latest monster movie. An evil head of a biotech company subverts a scientist’s work to fashion a bioweapon that revs up the growth hormone gene, and more, in three unfortunate animals. Cue Godzilla, King Kong, and the beast in Lake Placid. Read More 

“DCIS isn’t really cancer. You have nothing to worry about,” said my oncologist confidently.

“Then why am I having a mastectomy in four days?” I blurted.

“DCIS doesn’t spread. So it isn’t cancer.”

“But the “c” stands for carcinoma, a cancer of epithelial tissue. How is that not cancer?” I asked.

“DCIS. Can’t. Spread.”

Case closed. But I knew what he meant. Ductal carcinoma in situ isn’t cancer, some say, because “in situ” means “in place,” and invading healthy tissue is one of the nine characteristics of cancer I’ve listed for years in my textbooks. Eight out of nine was enough to convince me that Hannibal had to go.

Why name my DCIS? Read More 

Having parents who are first cousins doubles the risk of inheriting a single-gene condition, from 2.5 percent to about 5 percent. But it’s harder to quantify risk for psychiatric illnesses because they typically arise from interactions among genes and environmental factors. But now a study from Northern Ireland published in JAMA Psychiatry shows that offspring of cousin-cousin parents are at higher risk for common mood disorders.

The study found that children from these unions face a three-fold increase in the likelihood of taking antidepressants and a two-fold increase in taking antipsychotics. For purposes of the study, taking an antidepressant or antianxiety drug was a stand-in for having a mood disorder and taking an antipsychotic represented conditions with a psychotic component, such as schizophrenia. Read More 

In the world of genome sequencing, donkeys haven’t received nearly as much attention as horses. But now a report on a new-and-improved genome sequence of Willy, a donkey (Equus asinus) jack born at the Copenhagen Zoo in 1997, appears in the new issue of Science Advances, from Gabriel Renaud, of the Centre for GeoGenetics, Natural History Museum of Denmark. (A female is a jenny or jennet.) The new view provides clues to how donkeys may have branched from horses along the tree of evolution. Read More 

"One pill makes you larger, and one pill makes you small," sang Grace Slick in Jefferson Airplane’s classic White Rabbit, conjuring images of Alice in Wonderland in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel. But Alice also nibbled a mushroom to grow taller or smaller, following the advice of a hookah-smoking caterpillar perched atop the fungus.

Alice might have munched one of the 200 species of mushroom that produce psilocybin, a hallucinogen. A recent article in Evolution Letters, from Jason Slot, an assistant professor of fungal evolutionary genomics at The Ohio State University and co-workers, reports the sequencing of the genomes of three species of psychedelic mushrooms: Psilocybe cyanescens, Gymnopilus dilepis, and Panaeolus cyanescens. Read More 

Zebrafish, roundworms, fruit flies, mice, rats, rabbits, dogs, cats, pigs, and monkeys provide steppingstones to clinical trials to evaluate new treatments for people. The value of animal studies continues, even after a new drug shows promise or is approved.

A recent study on a gene therapy given to monkeys and pigs, similar to one that has already had spectacular results in children, may warn of possible dangers of escalating doses – or not.  Read More