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Published On May 3, 2009
CLINICAL RESEARCH
A Dance of Musical Color
Artists with a certain neurological condition put all their senses to work.
A dance of musical color is what Wassily Kandinsky aimed to portray in Three Riders in Red, Blue and Black (1911), a woodcut inspired by the artist’s neurological condition—synesthesia—in which stimuli trigger perception by the “wrong” sense, allowing the perceiver to “see” sounds or “taste” words. Now an Oxford University study has linked the condition to four regions of the genome, including two chromosomes that are associated with autism and dyslexia. The study also shows a strong hereditary component, confirming anecdotal evidence described by Vladimir Nabokov (a synesthete, as were his mother and son) in his 1951 memoir.
Dispatches

One Thing Leads to the Next Robert Lefkowitz is best known for revealing the mechanism behind hundreds of drugs in use today. But he thinks of himself as a storyteller first and has a new book out to make his case.

Podcast: The Research Year That Was Medical research labs have faced a difficult stretch of closed buildings and competing priorities. Yet they have also produced milestone discoveries—and not only on COVID-19.

The Shape of Us Two milestone discoveries in protein modeling promise to change the fundamentals of drug discovery.

Universal Flu Vaccines Move Forward In the shadow of coronavirus vaccine development, another vaccine was making solid progress.

New Hope for Controlling HIV By studying elite controllers—people who are able to arrest the progress of HIV without medication—researchers have found a promising new path.

Progress on a Different Plague A novel use of bacteria could blunt the spread of dengue and other mosquito-borne diseases.

A Better Cholera Vaccine? Puzzling through the cholera antibody response may help slow a disease that affects millions of people every year.

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