1 . It all began with an experience one of us (Arinzeh) had more than two decades ago. In 1991, a summer research experience at the University of California at Berkeley demonstrated how engineering could improve the lives of patients. Instead of working in a more traditional area such as automobile design, Arinzeh spent the summer after her junior year of college working in a rehabilitation laboratory.

Engineers there were designing new prosthetic (修复的) devices for patients who had lost limbs, and new assistive devices to help paralyzed patients move. The engineers would then collaborate with clinicians at a rehabilitation center to test their developments. Before that summer she hadn’t connected traditional engineering principles with the opportunity to solve biomedical problems. But by the end of those short months, Arinzeh was hooked on the promise of using mechanical engineering to help people move better.

Tissue engineering, a budding field at that time, offered a chance to move beyond building prosthetics. Damage to musculoskeletal tissues, such as bone and cartilage, and nervous tissue, such as the spinal cord, can be debilitating and can severely limit a person’s quality of life. In addition, such tissues cannot fully regenerate after a severe injury or in response to disease. Tissue engineers aim to fully repair and regenerate that tissue so that it regains complete function, but at that time researchers still had a lot to learn about cells and their support structures to solve these problems.

The earliest successes were with skin, in which researchers used dermal cells to generate grafts, leading to the first commercial products in the late 1990s. Researchers imitate nature, using cells as building blocks and developing strategies to guide the cells to form the appropriate tissue. Because stem cells (干细胞) are precursor (前身) to almost all tissue types, such cells are a promising source of these critical building blocks. But cells don’t grow and differentiate on their own. The cell’s microenvironment can influence stem-cell function in critical ways. Engineered microenvironments, or scaffolds, can effectively promote stem cells and other cell types to form tissues. To construct such scaffolds, some important tools are what are called functional biomaterials. These materials respond to environmental changes such as PH, enzymatic activity, or mechanical load, and their composition can mimic or replicate components of native tissue.

One of us (Arinzeh) wanted to use functional biomaterials to create three-dimensional tissue-like structures where cells can grow, proliferate (增殖), and differentiate, ultimately forming and regenerating tissue. Our group’s work started with bone studies in the 1990s, eventually moving into cartilage and the spinal cord over the past decade. The overall goal is to produce structures that could someday help patients struggling with severe injuries and movement disorders to move freely. For bone repair, our group has studied composite scaffolds consisting of polymers and ceramics that provide both mechanical and chemical cues to repair bone. Piezoelectric materials, which respond to mechanical stimuli by generating electrical activity, are used to encourage the growth of nerve tissue as well as cartilage and bone. Glycosaminoglycans (GACs), a major component of native cartilage tissue, provide growth factors to promote tissue formation, and Arinzeh has designed biomimetic scaffolds that incorporate these molecules. After all these years, the promise that seemed so enticing in 1991 is becoming a practical reality, with huge implications for human health.

2 . Global Rise of TCM

Phan Thi Kim Chi’s connection with Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) began at an early age. Growing up in a small village in Vietnam, it was inconvenient for Phan to travel to hospitals in neighboring cities. Whenever she caught a cold or experienced a headache as a child, her family would seek the help of a local TCM practitioner.     1     According to Phan, even though TCM has long been commonly practiced and accepted in Vietnam, finding a good school to learn TCM in Vietnam is not easy.

As a foreign student, Phan finds the TCM basic theory course to be the most challenging one in the curriculum.     2     It requires years of learning and practice to truly understand the concepts of yin and yang, harmony between human and nature, and the five elements of wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. Sometimes she even translates the TCM vocabulary and scripts into Vietnamese so she can remember and comprehend them better.

    3     According to a report, the total number of international students studying TCM in China was 8, 187 last year, with the largest population of 6, 441 coming from Asian countries, followed by 832 from Africa and 432 from Europe. Also, many Chinese medical universities had projects that sent professors overseas to teach TCM.

The booming situation of TCM is not limited to schools and clinics. It has also become a lifestyle choice for many young people. There is a trend among young people to place more emphasis on health conditioning and preservation. However, experts remind that TCM emphasizes the importance of diagnosing and treating based on identifying syndromes (症状). It is impossible to offer a one-size- fits-all approach to all patients.     4    

3 . Google is my doctor

When illustrator Scott Adams lost his voice, his doctors were confused.     1     It turned out that Scott was suffering from spasmodic dysphonia-a neurological disorder affecting the muscles to voice. With the help of Google Alerts and advice from his doctors, Scott got in touch with an expert in the US and had special surgery on his throat to cure his problem. He is now a firm believer of using the Internet for self-diagnosis.

Adams is one of an increasing number of people who have started using the Internet to get health advice. The advantages are numerous, starting of course with the obvious convenience of getting a diagnosis from the comfort of your own home.     2     But the Internet can provide a vast number of specialized experts, and Googling can help you tap in to that.

Diagnosing minor medical problems from information on the Internet can also have an impact on society’s medical costs. You can compare insect bites with Internet pictures, ask what type they are and whether they are dangerous without wasting your busy doctor’s precious time.

However, it must be said that diagnosis is tricky, and comparing your rash(疹子) with an online photo may lead you down the wrong path.     3     Doctors also take into account your medical history, state of mind, etc. So no computerized symptoms checklist can equal a complete professional assessment.

In conclusion, the Internet is a good starting point in diagnosing your health problems, but you should always consult your doctor before acting on anything you find there.     4    .

6 . Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman, who together identified a slight chemical change to messenger RNA,were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine this year.

Dr. Karikó, the 13th woman to win the prize, had come to the United States from Hungary two decades earlier when her research program there ran out of money. She was preoccupied by mRNA, which provides instructions to cells to make proteins. Defying the decades old belief that mRNA was clinically unusable, she hold the view that it would stimulate medical innovations.

She and Dr. Weissman had their first chance meeting over a copy machine at the University of Pennsylvania in 1998. At the time, Dr. Weissman was desperate for new approaches to a vaccine (疫苗) against HLV, which bad long proved impossible to defend against. A physician who had tried and failed for years to develop a treatment for AIDS, he wondered if he and Dr. Karikó could team up to make an HIV. vaccine.

For years, they were at a loss. Mice vaccinated with mRNA became inactive. Countless experiments failed. They wandered down one dead end after another, But eventually, the scientists discovered that cells protect their own mRNA with a specific chemical modification (修饰). So they tried making the same change to mRNA manufactured in the lab before vaccinating it into cells It worked.

At first, other scientists were largely uninterested in taking up that new approach to vaccination. But two biotech companies soon took notice: Moderna, in the United States, and BioNTech, in Germany. Then the coronavirus emerged. Almost instantly, Drs. Karikó and Weissman’s work came together with several factors of different research to put vaccine makers ahead of the game in developing shot.

Brian Ferguson, an immunologist at the University of Cambridge, said. “The work of Katalin Karikó and Drew Weissman in the years prior to 2020 prevented tens of millions of deaths and helped the world recover from the worst pandemic in a century. They richly deserve this recognition.”

8 . False medical news can lead to patients’ experiencing greater side effects through the “nocebo effect (反安慰剂效果)”. Sometimes patients benefit from an intervention simply because they believe they will- -that’s the placebo effect. The nocebo effect is the opposite: Patients can experience negative effects just because they expect them. This is very true of statins. In blinded trials, patients who get statins are no more likely to report feeling muscle aches than patients who get a placebo. Yet, in clinical practice, according to one study, almost a fifth of patients taking statins report side effects, leading many to discontinue the drugs.

What else is on the fake news hit list? As always, vaccines. False concerns that the vaccine for the virus called human papilloma virus causes seizures (癫痫) and other side effects reduced coverage rates in Japan from 10 percent to less than 1 percent in recent years.

Cancer is another big target for pushers of medical misinformation — many of whom are making money off alternative therapies. “Though most people think cancer tumors are bad, they’re actually the way your body attempts to contain the harmful cells,” one fake news story reads. It suggests that surgery increases the risk of spreading harmful cells.

Silicon Valley needs to own this problem. When human health is at risk, perhaps search engines, social media platforms and websites should be held responsible for promoting or hosting fake information. The scientific community needs to do its part to educate the public about key concepts in research, such as the difference between observational studies and higher quality randomized trials.

Finally, journalists can do a better job of spreading accurate information. News sites are more likely to cover catchy observational studies than randomized controlled trials, perhaps because the latter are less likely to produce surprising results. Such coverage can overstate benefits, claiming for example, that statins could cure cancer; it can unduly emphasize potential risks, such as suggesting a misleading connection with dementia, a serious mental disorder.