Last summer I worked on writing an e-book entitle Essentials of Cell Biology for Nature Education, in collaboration with Clare O'Connor, a biology professor at Boston College.

I think cell biology is an acquired taste, personally. I was never particularly interested in it when I was a graduate student or a researcher. But later, when I started my writing career, I often covered cell biology topics and research trends for The Scientist. I was intrigued -- I mean, cells have to take out their own garbage! Soon I was reading Lewis Thomas and I knew I was smitten.

I learned lots of fun facts while working on the e-book. For those of you who know this workflow: DNA to RNA to protein, did you know that it happens thousands of times each second in every cell? Cell biology blows me away.

For February -- American Heart Month -- I reviewed the latest American Heart Association (AHA) guidelines for heart health for the Los Angeles Times. The AHA has boiled their advice down to seven things: some are straight numbers (blood pressure, cholesterol, and glucose) and some are behaviors (not smoking, diet, and exercise) and one is a little bit of both (maintain a healthy weight).

Easy to understand, seemingly easy to do, and yet surveys say that only 1% of Americans actually hit all seven criteria.

Last year I wrote about two brothers who are developing a better epi-pen -- one that's smaller and easier to carry, has a retractable needle, and has clearer label instructions. Eric and Evan Edwards both have life-threatening allergies and they started work on their device when they were still in college. Now they have a patent on their invention in partnership with Virginia Commonwealth University, where Eric is on leave from the medical school. The story can be found here in the Spring 2010 Dean's Discovery Report.

A new study says less is more in breast cancer treatment. I wrote about this counterintuitive finding for the Los Angeles Times. In women with small tumors and signs of lymph node invasion, it turns out that surgically removing cancer-containing lymph nodes from under the arm makes no difference in a woman's survival. Breast cancer experts say this shift in strategy has been a long time coming.

Why wouldn't cutting out cancer help? It's because by the time cancer shows up in lymph nodes, it's proof of escape from the initial tumor site, and many routes are open to spreading cancer cells including the blood and the lymph. "You can't cure metastatic disease with a scalpel," says UCLA's John Glaspy.

In March, I wrote about prostate cancer for the Los Angeles Times, after radio talk show host Don Imus announced he had the disease. Two large studies found that screening for the cancer has had a negligible effect on how many men die from the disease. Rather, more men are getting tests and treatments that may expose them to more harm than the disease itself. One big problem is doctors' inability to determine which prostate cancers will morph into killers and which will remain harmless. One doctor I talked to put it this way, "Prostate cancer is like the cat family. You have house cats and you have tigers."

I wrote several stories for the spring 2009 issue of the Dean's Discovery Report, a biannual newsletter that features faculty researchers and new facilities and centers at the medical school campus of Virginia Commonwealth University.

In the April issue of Nature Biotechnology (subscription only), I reported on a new medicine approved for the treatment of gout -- Uloric (febuxostat) -- the first in 40 years. Three more new drugs are moving through clinical trials and drug-makers are hopeful about their approval by the FDA. The new drugs offer more choices to the limited options doctors have had for decades. And gout, yet another disease of our overconsumptive sedentary lifestyle, is on the rise.

(Image by 19th century caricaturist James Gillray.)

I wrote a couple more scientist profiles for the scientific journal Nature. Neuroscientist Leopoldo Petreanu published a paper describing a new technique for mapping neuronal connections in the brain (story by subscription). And Luke Harmon did a laboratory experiment modeling how different fish species can influence pond ecosystems (story by subscription). Both stories carry an element of surprise and seredipity, as is so often the case in science. In Petreanu's case, early experiments were useless because all the neurons were lighting up -- until he figured out a way to isolate only functional connections between neurons. In Harmon's case, early experiments clearly showed the effects of different fishes -- but a pattern of effects only emerged when researchers measured the physical properties of the water, such as light penetration and dissolved organic matter.