The Time of Your Life The French romantic poet Charles Baudelaire famously had a clock on his desk with a somber warning on the dial: It is later than you think. Well, is it? Aging can be defined by sequential or progressive changes in an organism that lead to an…

Lampposts and Genomics It is nighttime and a man is on his knees looking for his keys under a lamppost. A passerby stops and asks him if he thinks that’s where he lost them. The man on his knees answers: No but that’s the only place where the light is. …

Some Random Thoughts “Two men send their servants to bring water at the same time and cause them to meet. Unaware of the plan, the servants view the meeting as random.” With this story dating to 400 B.C., Democritus explained his vision of a deterministic world. In his telling, randomness…

On Human Breastmilk & Personalized Nutrition Human breastmilk is a living, dynamic fluid that supports the optimal nutrition of infants. It has an incredibly wide range of nutrients, immune factors, hormones, and metabolites. While many of these components are stable during lactation, some vary significantly in response to maternal diet…

ICYMI 2021 Edition Another year ends and instead of writing about the many challenges in front of the world at the moment which we thought did not carry a very positive message for the festive season, we decided to look back on the subjects we covered in the opening section…

Surprise Billing: A Personal Story Accounts of absurd or tragic interactions with the American healthcare system are common. A growing sub-genre of these stories involves surprise billing — many such overwhelming experiences have been recounted from trips to the ER to the result of routine medical testing. …

Nucleate: Empowering Biotech Founders We sat down with Michael Retchin, a graduate student in New York and the co-founder of the Nucleate program. Digitalis is an early partner of Nucleate, dedicating time and resources to the program and its students. Digitalis: Michael, tell us a bit about you and your…

Notes on the Privacy and Security of Electronic Health Information In 2015, the insurance company Anthem announced that they had been hacked and as many as 78.8 million former and current policyholders had personal information stolen. This information included names, addresses, dates of birth, social security numbers, and more. This…

Evolution and Public Health What does it take for a virus to create new variants and to evolve into a more deadly foe? If we were to model the probability of a virus gaining a function — e.g., escaping a vaccine, increasing its virulence, or being more harmful to children…