Research

Lizbeth Ibarra grew up next to an oil refinery, and every day she saw its impact on her community of Richmond in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her family and friends suffered from asthma and other respiratory illnesses. School days were sometimes cancelled...

It was DNA replication that first captured Isaac Witte’s scientific imagination as a high school student in Overland Park, Kansas. “It’s this orchestration of so many different proteins and molecules that come together to do this core element of life,” he...

Throughout the history of biology, numerous discoveries stemmed from observing living systems, but seeing the innerworkings of living organisms presents challenges. Xiaowei Zhuang, David B. Arnold Professor of Science, has spent her career developing...

For years, a protein inside our cells has quietly powered billions of dollars’ worth of cancer drugs. Now a team of researchers have discovered that this workhorse protein, called cereblon, in addition to its known functions, can also fine‑tune which...

Laboratories turned to a smart workaround when COVID‑19 testing kits became scarce in 2020. They mixed samples from several patients and ran a single test. If the test came back negative, everyone in it was cleared at once. If it was positive, follow-up...

Xiaowei Zhuang, David B. Arnold Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator, has been awarded the 2026 Ernest Solvay Prize by Syensqo “for pioneering the development of genome-scale imaging, which has...

Some wildfires are so intense, they create their own weather – thunderstorms driven by heat that hurtle smoke as high as 10 miles into the sky like giant chimneys. When these smoke plumes reach the thin, calm air of the upper troposphere and lower...

For years, a mysterious bacterial toxin lurking in the human gut was suspected of driving colorectal cancer. Now researchers in a pair of Harvard labs have caught the toxin in the act of damaging DNA and creating the very sorts of mutations long...

David Liu, the Thomas Dudley Cabot Professor of the Natural Sciences and a Howard Hughes Medical Institute Investigator will be a co-recipient of the Harvey Prize in Science and Technology in Chemistry for his translation of scientific discoveries into...

A team of researchers at the Broad Institute, led by gene-editing pioneer David Liu, has developed a new genome-editing strategy that could potentially lead to a one-time treatment for multiple unrelated genetic diseases. Gene-editing medicines are often...