NIH Record - National Institutes of Health
Wisps of green and blue (heart cells) speckled with multicolored dots representing covid

February 5, 2021

  • 7th Town Hall Announces Staff Vaccination Plan

    NIH director Dr. Francis Collins hosted the 7th virtual town hall on NIH’s coronavirus response. He was joined by NIH principal deputy director Dr. Lawrence Tabak, Office of Research Services Director Colleen McGowan and Clinical Center CEO Dr. James Gilman, to announce further details of the plan to vaccinate NIH staff.
  • Oxford Professor Explores Ethics of Contact Tracing

    Contact tracing notifies people of potential infectious exposure so they can take necessary precautions. Digital contact tracing can warn people fast, but using it comes with a personal tradeoff—the risk to privacy. Oxford's Dr. Michael Parker discusses the ethical merits and drawbacks of contact tracing during a pandemic.
  • Good Leaders Help People Through Tough Times, Wakeman Says

    The Covid-19 pandemic has disrupted our daily lives and slowed down the economy. More than 400,000 people have died in the U.S. alone and millions more have been infected. “These are tough times, but these are our times,” said Cy Wakeman, drama researcher at a recent virtual Deputy Director for Management Seminar Series talk.
  • Harvard’s Brown Rethinks General Anesthesia

    At the Stetten Lecture, Harvard’s Dr. Emery Brown focused on propofol, which induces loss of consciousness, and how its administration and effects can be tracked via electroencephalogram.
Wisps of green and blue (heart cells) speckled with multicolored dots representing covid

On the Cover

Researchers supported by NHLBI recently demonstrated that the virus that causes Covid-19 can directly infect heart cells and may contribute to Covid-related heart disease. The study could lead to new medications that directly target virus-infected heart cells. Shown are stem-cell derived human heart cells (green and blue) infected by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (red). February is American Heart Month.

Cedars-Sinai Medical Center

The NIH Record

The NIH Record, founded in 1949, is the biweekly newsletter for employees of the National Institutes of Health.

Published 25 times each year, it comes out on payday Fridays.

Assistant Editor: Eric Bock
Eric.Bock@nih.gov (link sends e-mail)

Staff Writer: Amber Snyder
Amber.Snyder@nih.gov (link sends e-mail)