How 30 Years of Heart Surgeries Taught My Dad How to Live

How 30 Years of Heart Surgeries Taught My Dad How to Live

A mid-1970s photo of the author's father, and him holding a grandchild in 2012.

(Courtesy Karen Taylor)


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Karen Taylor
Karen Taylor is a Program Director for Selfhelp Community Services, one of New York City's largest senior-serving organizations. She lives and works in Queens, New York, with her wife, Laura Antoniou.
How sharing, hearing, and remembering positive stories can help shape our brains for the better

Across cultures and through millennia, human beings have always told stories. Whether it’s a group of boy scouts around a campfire sharing ghost stories or the paleolithic Cro-Magnons etching pictures of bison on cave walls, researchers believe that storytelling has been universal to human beings since the development of language.

But storytelling was more than just a way for our ancestors to pass the time. Researchers believe that storytelling served an important evolutionary purpose, helping humans learn empathy, share important information (such as where predators were or what berries were safe to eat), as well as strengthen social bonds. Quite literally, storytelling has made it possible for the human race to survive.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.

A new type of cancer therapy is shrinking deadly brain tumors with just one treatment

MRI scans after a new kind of immunotherapy for brain cancer show remarkable progress in one patient just days after the first treatment.

Mass General Hospital

Few cancers are deadlier than glioblastomas—aggressive and lethal tumors that originate in the brain or spinal cord. Five years after diagnosis, less than five percent of glioblastoma patients are still alive—and more often, glioblastoma patients live just 14 months on average after receiving a diagnosis.

But an ongoing clinical trial at Mass General Cancer Center is giving new hope to glioblastoma patients and their families. The trial, called INCIPIENT, is meant to evaluate the effects of a special type of immune cell, called CAR-T cells, on patients with recurrent glioblastoma.

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Sarah Watts

Sarah Watts is a health and science writer based in Chicago.