By Ariel Fernandez As a former professor in the Bioengineering Department at Rice University I was a colleague of Michael W. Deem, the Ph. D. mentor of He Jiankui. During a recent interview by Science Transparency, I became acquainted with a defense of He Jiankui by Prof. George Church, a leading figure from Harvard and […]
The genetic editing of human embryos through a molecular biology manipulation known as CRISPR surely sent shock waves across the globe. Many felt that He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who carried out the experiments had opened Pandora’s box. Yet, as people had now some time to ponder over the events, the scientific establishment has […]
The picture shows the cover page of a doctoral dissertation, with Professors Ariel Fernandez and Michael W. Deem in the bioengineering thesis committee at Rice University. There was no genetic editing of human embryos at the time, just theory, bioinformatics, computational bioengineering and speculation. Michael W. Deem was also the doctoral advisor of He […]
Linus Pauling, the most gifted physical chemist that ever lived, once said that the realization of the relevance of the hydrogen bond, a relatively weak molecular force, gave birth to Structural Biology. He also said that there was more to it, a sort of meta-analysis of structural biology that was still missing. This he conveyed to Oktay […]
We love science, we also know that getting and keeping our scientific work published in a good venue can be an arduous task. This is true now more than ever due to a lack of leadership in the scientific establishment and to the advent in 2010 of a new player in the game: the angry […]
The immune checkpoint blocker pembrolizumab (Keytruda, Merck) has proven most successful to treat solid tumors harboring a DNA mismatch repair (MMR) deficiency. This striking result recently reported by Luis Diaz Jr., Bert Vogelstein and their collaborators was anticipated a couple of years before by Dr. Vogelstein, a towering figure in oncological research. Ariel Fernandez […]
A new book by Ridgway Scott and Ariel Fernandez is coming out. Its title “A Mathematical Approach to Protein Biophysics” (Springer, 2017) feels unusual at first. Why do we need a mathematical approach to understand proteins? Perhaps we need to be reminded that the major problems in molecular biophysics, such as the protein folding problem, […]
