Category Archives: Fall 2018

Our Fall 2018 issue is now available online! Articles are posted individually as blog posts (the articles are linked below), a PDF version is currently displayed on our Archives page, and print issues will be available around Harvard’s campus starting today. We hope you enjoy browsing through this issue as much as we enjoyed putting it together! A big thankContinue reading “Fall 2018: How Far is Too Far?”

The 1960s was the birthplace of many tumultuous events, of which the Vietnam War, civil rights movement, and Kennedy assassination were a few. A more obscure, somewhat smaller event, however, was the making of the sci-fi movie Fantastic Voyage. Born from the political upheaval of the Cold War, the movie was a fantastic popularization ofContinue reading “A Fantastic Voyage Through a Nano-Sized Universe”

An Introduction Artificial Intelligence (AI) is still a nascent technology with astronomical promises. Nevertheless, AI seems to have kicked up a storm of debates, with people passionately arguing in favor of and against AI. The fear of losing one’s identity, way of life, or livelihood seems to be motivators of resistance (1,2). From tractors to cellContinue reading “AI: Building Trust or Threatening a Cataclysm?”

Dubbed the “three-parent baby” by the media, a paper published in Reproductive Biomedicine Online in April 2017 details the live birth of a child through experimental spindle transfer, a procedure which involves the use of mitochondrial DNA from a donor.1 Aside from garnering much publicity, the study has raised important questions in the scientific communityContinue reading “Emerging Mitochondrial Therapies and Their Ethicality”

It is 2018, only six years after the discovery of CRISPR-Cas9, and genome engineering has become a rapidly evolving, incredibly exciting field. In order to understand why CRISPR-Cas9 is considered a revolutionary technology, it is important to look at the history of genome editing. The field of genetics was originally pioneered by Austrian scientist GregorContinue reading “CRISPR: How Far is too Far?”

Introduction Robots have pervaded popular culture since the dawn of the technological revolution; for nearly a century, authors, filmmakers, artists, and conspiracy theorists have prophesied that robots will someday break free from mankind’s control and wreak apocalyptic havoc. The popular TV show Black Mirror tells stories of futuristic tech run amok, from powerful and dangerousContinue reading “Asimov and AI: Investigating the Potential of Robotic Consciousness”

Scientific history has proven that often the greatest medical breakthroughs go against society’s conventional criterion at that time. Today, society is faced with a pivotal, yet controversial, development in medicine: the body-to-head transplantation (BTH). Some believe that transplanting a head and a brain could perhaps be the final frontier in organ transplantation (1); while others areContinue reading “Body-to-Head Transplants: The Future of Medicine or a Modern-day Frankenstein Fantasy?”

When most of us think of the idea of the “big bang”, a massive explosion emerging from nothingness comes to mind. While much of the physics community agrees that such a description is relatively accurate for the start of the universe as we know it, much of the context around the Big Bang remains unknown,Continue reading “Was It a Bounce or a Bang?”

Currently in the United States, 70.2% of the American population is either obese or overweight (1). Obesity is defined as having a BMI of 30+, while being overweight signals a BMI of 25+ (2).  This may not be a surprise to many, but we have to examine this statistic closely to understand the harmful health impacts itContinue reading “Americans Must Fix Their Health Habits Now—or Face the Consequences Tomorrow”

“Death has been dissected, cut to bits by a series of little steps, which finally makes it impossible to know which step was the real death, the one in which consciousness was lost, or the one in which breathing stopped.” – Philippe Aries, 1975 On June 22 of 2018, a 17-year-old girl named Jahi McMathContinue reading “Disagreeing on Brain Death”

Driverless cars are one of the hottest topics in media reporting on science today. The idea that a person may be able to tell a car where to go without having to operate it is alluring, and these vehicles have the potential to increase the efficiency and safety of travel. Scientists have many promising ideasContinue reading “(Baby You Can’t) Drive My Car: The Ethical Implications of Driverless Cars”