On Tuesday, in a fifty-eight-second video posted on X, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., the Secretary of Health and Human Services, made a remarkable announcement: under his watch, he said, the Centers [...]

On Sunday, Joe Biden disclosed that he has an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to the bone, which means that it can be managed but not cured. The news roughly coincided with the [...]

In 1999, Peggy Bryant, a fifty-year-old oncology nurse in Boston, received a postcard asking whether she’d like to take part in a clinical trial aimed at preventing diabetes. Well, this is [...]

In 1999, Oliver Sacks, the eclectic neurologist who was dubbed the “poet laureate of medicine,” received a letter from a pianist, Anna H. “My (very unusual) problem, in one sentence, and in [...]

The United States, for much of its history, was less an engine of scientific progress than a beneficiary of it. Pasteur, Koch, Lister, Mendel, Curie, Fleming—the giants who midwifed modern [...]

On March 2, 2016, at around 9 A.M. local time, in Kazakhstan, Scott Kelly plunged through the Earth’s atmosphere in a Soyuz spacecraft travelling at seventeen thousand miles an hour. As expected, [...]

Until recently, Guillaume Raineri, a forty-two-year-old man with a bald head and a bushy goatee, worked as an hvac technician in Gonesse, a small town about ten miles north of Paris. The area [...]

In 2010, a private-equity firm called Cerberus Capital Management, which is named for the three-headed dog that is said to guard the underworld, bought six Catholic hospitals in Massachusetts and [...]

In 2018, two children in Samoa died after receiving measles vaccines, because the nurses who administered them had mistakenly mixed the vaccine powder with a muscle relaxant. Local vaccine [...]

A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump turned in one of his strangest performances in a campaign with no shortage of them—part of a series of oddities that may or may not constitute an October [...]