Mary started drinking regularly in the early nineties, when she was thirteen. Her father had recently married a Danish woman and moved the family to Denmark, which has one of the highest [...]
In season two of “The Pitt,” the Emmy-winning drama that returned to HBO Max on Thursday, a middle-aged man named Orlando Diaz wakes up in the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center. His wife and [...]
Not long ago, I cared for a middle-aged man I’ll call Jim, who was generally healthy but had recently started to feel sluggish. One of his friends told him to try a hormone supplement. After Jim [...]
In 2017, Matthew Williams, a thirtysomething software engineer with an athletic build and a bald head, went for a long bike ride in the hills of San Francisco. Afterward, at dinner with some [...]
In 1996, Leslie Gordon, a biologist and a pediatrics resident at a hospital in Rhode Island, gave birth to a son, Sam. For a few months, Sam seemed healthy. But Gordon and her husband, a [...]
When David Fajgenbaum was a twenty-five-year-old medical student, at the University of Pennsylvania, he started to feel so tired that he could barely stand. Fajgenbaum, a former college [...]
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 [...]
Ana Santos, a microbiologist at Rice University, grew up in Cantanhede, a small city in Portugal that is known as a biotechnology hub and a source of good wine. When she was a child, her [...]
In December, 2021, a few weeks after the Omicron variant emerged to spark a new, punishing phase of the covid-19 pandemic, Jim Lester’s birds got sick. Lester, who owns an exhibition farm in [...]
Some of my earliest memories are of summers with my grandparents, in New Delhi. I spent long, scorching months drinking lassi, playing cricket, and helping my grandparents find ripe mangoes at [...]
