Heidi Ledford

Seattle

Science Reporter at Nature

Science reporter @nature mostly covering biomedicine. Views my own. She/her. PhD.

Articles

World first: ultra-powerful CRISPR treatment trialled in a person

2 weeks ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

The CRISPR family’s most versatile member has made its medical debut: a cutting-edge gene-editing technique known as prime editing has been used to treat a person for the first time. The recipient is a teenager with a rare immune disorder. Researchers designed the treatment to correct some of the mutations that cause chronic granulomatous disease, a dangerous condition that disables a variety of immune cells, including those called neutrophils.
In World First, Baby Receives Personalized CRISPR Gene-Editing Treatment

3 weeks ago | scientificamerican.com | Heidi Ledford

A baby boy with a devastating genetic disease is thriving after becoming the first known person to receive a bespoke, CRISPR therapy-for-one, designed to correct his specific disease-causing mutation. Little KJ Muldoon, now nearly ten months old, is doing well after receiving three doses of a gene-editing treatment to mend a mutation that impaired his body’s ability to process protein, his parents told reporters this week.
World’s first personalized CRISPR therapy given to baby with genetic disease

3 weeks ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

A baby boy with a devastating genetic disease is thriving after becoming the first known person to receive a bespoke, CRISPR therapy-for-one, designed to correct his specific disease-causing mutation1. Little KJ Muldoon, now nearly ten months old, is doing well after receiving three doses of a gene-editing treatment to mend a mutation that had impaired his body’s ability to process protein, his parents told reporters this week.
How skunk cabbages and other smelly plants brew their foul odour

1 month ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

With a nickname like ‘skunk cabbage’, the infamously stinky flowers of Symplocarpus renifolius are unlikely to grace a bridal bouquet. But for the beetles and flies that pollinate the plant, the noxious perfume of rotting meat is an irresistible draw. Now, a sweeping study of smelly plants has revealed how skunk cabbage and several other plants concoct their malodorous aromas.
Will US science survive Trump 2.0?

1 month ago | nature.com | Jeff Tollefson |Dan Garisto |Heidi Ledford

In just the first three months of his second term, US President Donald Trump has destabilized eight decades of government support for science. His administration has fired thousands of government scientists, bringing large swathes of the country’s research to a standstill and halting many clinical trials.
How to fix a gut microbime ravaged by antibiotics

1 month ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

A diet rich in fibre and low in fat can replenish populations of gut microbes ravaged by antibiotics, according to a study1 in mice. The analysis, published on 30 April in Nature, found that good nutrition is more powerful than transplanting faeces — and the microbes it contains — from a healthy gut into a disrupted one. In addition, failure to correct an unhealthy diet rendered such transplants useless for helping the gut to recover from antibiotics.
Exclusive: the most-cited papers of the twenty-first century

1 month ago | nature.com | Helen Pearson |Heidi Ledford

The first quarter of the twenty-first century has produced some huge scientific breakthroughs, ranging from the first mRNA vaccines and CRISPR-based gene-editing techniques to the discovery of the Higgs boson and the first measurements of gravitational waves. But you won’t find any of these advances described in the top-cited papers published since 2000. That is one of the findings of an analysis by Nature’s news team of the 25 most-cited papers published in the twenty-first century.
154 million lives and counting: 5 charts reveal the power of vaccines

2 months ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

A second unvaccinated child in Texas has died from measles, amplifying fears that the outbreak there could be wider than reported. The death, announced on 6 April, also harkens back to a pre-vaccine past that many Americans have forgotten, when hundreds of children died each year of measles. Generations ago, a child swimming in a community pool could become paralysed by polio.
Long COVID activists fought Trump team’s research cuts and won ― for now

2 months ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford |Max Kozlov

Long COVID advocates and researchers in the United States have done the extraordinary. After a bruising battle, they managed to revive some of the research grants cancelled by the administration of President Donald Trump ― a rare victory for science as Trump’s team slashes funding and fires federal scientific staff. The crisis began in late March, when the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) terminated the funding for dozens of long-COVID projects.
These US labs risk imminent closure after Trump cuts

2 months ago | nature.com | Heidi Ledford

Even when the first four of his five federal grants were cancelled in February, Jeremy Springman still had hope. The social-science research that he co-leads at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia had enough funding from a large US Department of Defense project to tide him over for two more years. He checked in with his defence-department programme officer, who reassured him that the remaining grant would be safe.