monkey's uncle

I have now been asked a perfectly reasonable question that arises from our recent paper on chimpanzee “AIDS” several times (see previous entry). The question is, should we reinvigorate biomedical testing of SIV infection in chimpanzees as a model for HIV?  The simple answer is no. There are several compelling reasons for this.
First, there are the ethical [...]

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Following our recent Nature paper, there has been a flurry of press, some of which I reference in a previous post.  There is a very nice article that gives the back-story of SIV research at Gombe at MinnPost.com. Put this together with Carl Zimmer’s post and you get a good sense for how research unfolds [...]

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A long-anticipated paper (by me anyway!) has finally been published in this week’s issue of Nature.  In this paper, we show that wild chimpanzees living in the Gombe National Park in western Tanzania on the shores of Lake Tanganyika appear to die from AIDS-like illness when infected with the Simian Immunodeficiency Virus (SIV).  Many African [...]

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Well, it’s happened again.  My work has been written up in Science but I am not mentioned.  I’m actually not that concerned this time — we’re going to submit the paper for publication soon. I’ve been telling myself (and other people) that this thing we’ve ben working on (all the while being very cryptic about what [...]

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A recent paper in PNAS documents the alcohol consumption patterns of pentailed treeshrews (Ptilocercus lowii) in Southeast Asian rainforests. These treeshrews consume fermented nectar on a daily basis from the flower buds of the bertam palm (Eugeissona tristis). The alcohol content of the fermented nectar averages 0.6% but gets as high as 3.8%. A [...]

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It’s always nice to have one’s work written up in Science.  It would be even nicer to be named as a co-author in the write-up.  I suppose being the stats guy in a multi-author collaboration is kind of like being the drummer in a rock band…

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There is a troubling outbreak of yellow fever currently affecting a number of South American countries, including Brazil and Paraguay.  Yellow fever is a multi-host infection that can be transmitted between monkeys and humans.  It is almost always fatal for species in the genera Alouatta and Ateles (howler and spider monkeys respectively).  The Wildlife Conservation [...]

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