Alzheimer’s and dementia are a heart-breaking reality for millions across the world. Find out what inventors and scientists on the cutting edge of medical research are doing to combat this neurological puzzle.
Antibiotics: behind the scenes, they enable much of modern medicine. We use them to cure infectious diseases, and to safely facilitate everything from surgery to chemotherapy to organ transplants. But we've stopped discovering new ones and we're at risk of losing them forever. How did we get into this situation? Gerry Wright shares what we can d...
Inventor, scientist, author, engineer -- over his broad career, Danny Hillis has turned his ever-searching brain on an array of subjects, with surprising results.
Sangeeta Bhatia is a cancer researcher, MIT professor and biotech entrepreneur who works to adapt technologies developed in the computer industry for medical innovation.
A doctor by training, Stefan Larsson of BCG researches how transparency of medical outcomes and costs could radically transform the healthcare industry.
Marie Skłodowska Curie's revolutionary research laid the groundwork for our understanding of physics and chemistry, blazing trails in oncology, technology, medicine, and nuclear physics, to name a few. But what did she actually do? Shohini Ghose expounds on some of Marie Skłodowska Curie's most revolutionary discoveries. [Directed by Anna Nowako...
Ben Goldacre unpicks dodgy scientific claims made by scaremongering journalists, dubious government reports, pharmaceutical corporations, PR companies and quacks.
When you're getting medical treatment, or taking part in medical testing, privacy is important; strict laws limit what researchers can see and know about you. But what if your medical data could be used -- anonymously -- by anyone seeking to test a hypothesis? John Wilbanks wonders if the desire to protect our privacy is slowing research, and if...
Danny Hills makes a case for the next frontier of cancer research: proteomics, the study of proteins in the body. As Hillis explains it, genomics shows us a list of the ingredients of the body -- while proteomics shows us what those ingredients produce. Understanding what's going on in your body at the protein level may lead to a new understandi...
Nina Tandon is CEO and co-founder of EpiBone. She studies ways to use electrical signals to grow artificial tissues for transplants and other therapies.
A professor of chemistry, nanoscience and chemical complexity, Lee Cronin and his research group investigate how chemistry can revolutionize modern technology and even create life.
Boghuma Kabisen Titanji set out to research HIV drug resistant viruses. In the process, Titanji met a woman who changed the way she thinks about research subjects.
Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation are the best-known methods for treating cancer. At TEDMED, Bill Doyle presents a new approach, called Tumor Treating Fields, which uses electric fields to interrupt cancer cell division. Still in its infancy -- and approved for only certain types of cancer -- the treatment comes with one big benefit: quality o...
There are currently hundreds of thousands of people on transplant lists, waiting for critical organs like kidneys, hearts and livers that could save their lives. Unfortunately, there aren't enough donor organs available to fill that demand. What if, instead of waiting, we could create new, customized organs from scratch? Taneka Jones explores bi...
Alyson McGregor studies women's health, especially as it relates to emergency care -- when time-sensitive, life-or-death decisions are made using drugs and treatments mainly tested on men.
What if we looked at Parkinson's as an neurological electrical problem? Brain researcher Eleftheria Pissadaki and her team study dopamine neurons, the neurons that selectively die during Parkinson's. They discovered that the bigger a neuron is, the more vulnerable it becomes because it simply requires more energy. This new insight is reframing t...
Using unexpected channels like the pulpit and the barber’s chair, Dr. Joseph Ravenell delivers basic health care information to an at-risk demographic -- African-American men.
Afflicting nearly 1 in 10 Americans, syphilis was ravaging the U.S. in the 1930s. Many doctors believed syphilis affected Black and white patients differently, and the Public Health Service launched an experiment to investigate, recruiting 600 Black men to take part. But the study was centered on a lie: the men wouldn't actually receive treatmen...