SoM Magnify

Rodger Liddle Has A Gut Feeling About the Origins of Parkinson's Disease

September 5, 2019

What is a gastroenterologist doing studying Parkinson’s Disease?

This is a question that Rodger Liddle , MD, a professor in the Department of Medicine in the School of Medicine, gets a lot. The answer involves a superhighway, a conversation with a Nobel Laureate, and a plastic foot.

Liddle usually begins the story with the foot.

In his office, carefully situated on a...Read Full Story

Illustration of whale between two beakers

How Do Whales Fight Off Cancer? Scholar in Duke’s Marine Medicine Program Breaks New Ground In This Fascinating Inquiry

Oxford University epidemiologist Richard Peto was puzzled by a paradox: If cancer is a function of individual cells going haywire, wouldn’t an organism with a lot more cells, say a whale, have a greater chance of getting cancer than a human or a mouse?

Weirdly enough, in some cases,...Read Full Story

Harvey Cohen Says Yes

Harvey Jay Cohen, MD, never planned to go into geriatrics. It wasn’t a word he heard in medical school in the 1960s. In fact, he hadn’t planned to go to medical school either. Once there, he certainly wasn’t planning to become a clinician--he just wanted to do research. Even after deciding to...Read Full Story

First Encounters with the Inner Brain

Standing in a brightly lit teaching lab in the Mary Duke Biddle Trent Semans Center for Health Education, Leonard White pops the lid off a bucket, reaches in with gloved hands, and carefully pulls out a three-pound human brain, roughly the size of a cantaloupe.

The Duke neurology...Read Full Story

Kendra Rumback and Gina Phillips stand outside clinic

Re-Imagining Rural Health Care

It’s a four-hour drive west across the state of North Carolina from Durham to Bakersville, a small town in Mitchell County.

Most of the drive is on Interstate 40, but the last hour is entirely different. It begins with a sharp turn onto N.C. Highway 226. From there, the country road...Read Full Story