Richard “Rick” Slayman, who made history at age 62 as the first person to receive a kidney from a genetically modified pig, has died about two months after the procedure. Massachusetts General Hospital, where Mr. Slayman had the operation, said in a statement on Saturday that its transplant team was…
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Can Parrots Converse? Polly Says That’s the Wrong Question.
Half a century ago, one of the hottest questions in science was whether humans could teach animals to talk. Scientists tried using sign language to converse with apes and trained parrots to deploy growing English vocabularies. The work quickly attracted media attention — and controversy. The research lacked rigor, critics…
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Biden Administration to Pay Dairy Farmers for Bird Flu Protective Measures
The Biden administration said on Friday that it would compensate dairy farmers for cooperating with its efforts to limit the spread of the bird flu virus, part of a series of expansive measures aimed at containing an outbreak. The payment system amounted to one of the most forceful actions taken…
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Nancy Neveloff Dubler, Mediator for Life’s Final Moments, Dies at 82
Nancy Neveloff Dubler, a medical ethicist who pioneered using mediation at hospital bedsides to navigate the complex dynamics among headstrong doctors, anguished family members and patients in their last days, died on April 14 at her home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. She was 82. The cause was…
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The Ages When You Feel Most Lonely and How to Reconnect
When Surgeon General Vivek Murthy went on a nationwide college tour last fall, he started to hear the same kind of question time and again: How are we supposed to connect with one another when nobody talks anymore? In an age when participation in community organizations, clubs and religious groups…
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Herbert Pardes, Who Steered the Growth of a Giant Hospital, Dies at 89
Dr. Herbert Pardes, a psychiatrist and a former director of the National Institute of Mental Health who brought order to the merger of two major medical centers that became New York-Presbyterian Hospital and ran it for 11 years, died on April 30 at his home in Manhattan. He was 89.…
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How Poor Tracking of Bird Flu Leaves Dairy Workers at Risk
Even as it has become increasingly clear that the bird flu outbreak on the nation’s dairy farms began months earlier — and is probably much more widespread — than previously thought, federal authorities have emphasized that the virus poses little risk to humans. Yet there is a group of people…
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Environmental Changes Are Fueling Human, Animal and Plant Diseases, Study Finds
Several large-scale, human-driven changes to the planet — including climate change, the loss of biodiversity and the spread of invasive species — are making infectious diseases more dangerous to people, animals and plants, according to a new study. Scientists have documented these effects before in more targeted studies that have…
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Milton Diamond, Sexologist and Advocate for Intersex Babies, Dies at 90
Academic conferences are usually staid affairs, but the 1973 International Symposium on Gender Identity, held in Dubrovnik, Yugoslavia, was an exception. Everything was peaceful until a psychologist named John Money stood and yelled, “Mickey Diamond, I hate your guts!” Milton Diamond, a sexologist who had gone by Mickey since childhood,…
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RFK Jr. Says Doctors Found a Dead Worm in His Brain
In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward…