Here are some samples of writing intended for a non-scientific audience. Some of these posts were written for a personal fundraising campaign; others were originally published on the blog of a non-profit's website. 

CF Time Warp

Flash back to 1993 ... I was one of a few high school seniors in the first-ever class of the Cotter Schools Academy of Math and Science in Winona. Human genetics was my particular fascination. Just four years before, scientists had made an unprecedented discovery: For the first time, a gene that causes a human disease had been discovered without the help of any prior clues to its whereabouts. Although we were just kids, we were also budding scientists. We couldn't help but get swept up in the buzz about the implications of this discovery. With the advent of gene therapy, this disease - cystic fibrosis (CF) - could now be cured. We were sure of it. Keep reading...

Ask a Doctor: Lupus in African Americans

Q: Why are African-American women three times more likely to get lupus than white women, and why do African-American women tend to develop lupus at a younger age and have more severe symptoms than white women? - Joleen, Sauk Rapids

A: We don’t fully know the answers to these questions yet, but researchers are working hard to discover them. They believe that the answers will go beyond race, and they hope they will reveal modifiable risk factors; that is, factors that patients and/or their caregivers could potentially take action to change. These could be keys to reducing such disparities. Keep reading ...

A new drug is approved. What's next?

We finally get to ask that question about lupus, after the FDA approved Benlysta, the first new drug approved for SLE in over 50 years, in March 2011. Patients and researchers alike are asking questions …  Who needs to take this drug?  How is it different from the medicines that doctors were already using?  How do we know it’s going to work? How do we know that it’s going to work better than those other medications? Keep reading...

Increased severity of lupus in African American women

Researchers who seek new biomarkers for human diseases may have many goals. In the field of lupus research, we would like to find biomarkers that could make the disease easier to diagnose, improve the management of disease activity, predict when a flare is likely to occur, and help physicians decide which medications to use (or avoid) in a particular patient.

Thanks to advances in genomic and proteomic technologies over the past 10 years, lupus researchers have been successful in identifying many candidate biomarkers in human SLE. Keep reading...