June 16, 2023 — At the Boston Course in Obesity Medicine, Sadaf Farooqi received the George L. Blackburn Foundation Award and delivered a masterclass of digging deeply into genetics to fully understand obesity. Simultaneously, she co-authored striking new observations about one dimension of this in the New England Journal of Medicine. All in a day’s work for someone intent […]
October 18, 2022 — Yesterday was the first of three days exploring the best scientific thinking in the world on the causes of obesity. From the start, it was plain that obesity presents a puzzle. Physiology, genes, and signals regulate the storage of energy in adipose tissue and thus obesity. But one thing was clear after 12 scientists through […]
August 27, 2022 — Doppelgängers are having a moment. These are people who look alike, despite being nominally unrelated. Canadian artist François Brunelle is commanding attention all over the world for his I’M NOT A LOOK-ALIKE! photography project, which he started in 1999. At the same time, a study this week in Cell Reports tells us that looks, genes, […]
July 6, 2021 — Cambridge Professor Sadaf Farooqi calls it a tour de force of genetics. Researchers from Regeneron and nine international research centers sequenced genetic exomes in 645,626 persons. With this painstaking research, they’ve found genetic sequences that protect some people from obesity. These sequences hard wire a person for leanness. In a world that prizes a lean […]
May 25, 2021 — Obesity comes largely from an inheritance of susceptibility. But this fact is a challenge for many people to accept. Instead, they insist on explaining obesity and health as the result of choices and merit. Good choices beget good health. Bioethics professor Lisa Parker suggests that we give up some of these myths of merit and […]
February 27, 2020 — We are swimming in a sea of implicit weight bias. At its most basic, the bias is this: obesity is a behavioral problem. When we tell people, no, it’s a problem of physiology, most often they can’t accept it. Tell them it’s highly heritable and they often spit back at us. “Genes are not destiny!” […]
