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SUNDAY SCIENCE: WHY CONSCIOUSNESS IS THE HARDEST PROBLEM IN SCIENCE
 
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Allison Parshall, edited by Seth Fletcher
January 20, 2026
Scientific American
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_ Will brain science deliver answers about consciousness or hit
another wall? _

, DTAN Studio

 

This article includes a companion guide to competing theories of
consciousness. Check out that graphic here.
[[link removed]]

Until half a billion years ago, life on Earth was slow. The seas were
home to single-celled microbes and largely stationary soft-bodied
creatures. But at the dawn of the Cambrian era, some 540 million years
ago, everything exploded. Bodies diversified in all directions, and
many organisms developed appendages that let them move quickly around
their environment. These ecosystems became competitive places full of
predators and prey. And our branch of the tree of life evolved an
incredible structure to navigate it all: the brain.

 
We don’t know whether this was the moment when consciousness first
arose on Earth. But it might have been when living creatures began to
really need something like it to combine a barrage of sensory
information into one unified experience that could guide their
actions. It’s because of this ability to _experience_ that,
eventually, we began to feel pain and pleasure. Eventually, we became
guided not just by base needs but by curiosity, emotions and
introspection. Over time we became aware of ourselves.

This last step is what we have to thank for most of art, science and
philosophy—and the millennia-long quest to understand consciousness
itself. This state of awareness of ourselves and our environment comes
with many mysteries. Why does being awake and alive, being _yourself_,
feel like anything at all, and where does this singular sense of
awareness come from in the brain? These questions may have objective
answers, but because they are about private, subjective experiences
that can’t be directly measured, they exist at the very boundaries
of what the scientific method can reveal.

 
Still, in the past 30 years neuroscientists scouring the brain for the
so-called neural correlates of consciousness have learned a lot. Their
search has revealed constellations of brain networks whose connections
help to explain what happens when we lose consciousness. We now have
troves of data and working theories, some with mind-bending
implications. We have tools to help us detect consciousness in people
with brain injuries. But we still don’t have easy
answers—researchers can’t even agree on what consciousness is,_
_let alone how best to reveal its secrets. The past few years have
seen accusations of pseudoscience, results that challenge leading
theories, and the uneasy feeling of a field at a crossroads.

Yet the stakes for understanding consciousness have never been higher.
We’ve built talking machines able to imitate consciousness so well
that we can’t always tell the difference. Sometimes these
artificial-intelligence models claim outright to be sentient. Faced
with an existential unknown, the public is turning to the field of
consciousness science for answers. “The tension, you know, it’s
palpable,” says Marcello Massimini, a neurophysiologist at the
University of Milan. “We’re going to be looking back at this
period.”

Consciousness is all you really know. It’s the voice you hear in
your head, your emotions, your awareness of the world and your body
all rolled into one unified experience. “Everything comes down to
it, everything,” says cognitive neuroscientist Athena Demertzi of
the University of Liège in Belgium. “It’s the translation of the
world that we have.” Philosophers and scientists alike struggle to
define consciousness without appealing back to what it _feels_ like to
experience—what philosophers call “definition by pointing.” But
they’re pointing to a real phenomenon. It’s your consciousness
that goes wonky when you take hallucinogens, even as your body and
environment stay the same. When you go under general anesthesia, it
appears to go out like a light. When you dream, some strange form of
consciousness persists, even if it’s disconnected from the outside
world.

Some scientists have used these different states of consciousness to
chop up conscious experience into at least three pieces: wakefulness,
internal awareness and connectedness. In a “normal” state of
consciousness, you have all three. You’re awake with your eyes open,
a state that is sustained by signals from your brain stem. You’re
internally aware, forming thoughts and mental imagery. And you’re
connected to the outside world, with your brain receiving and
processing information from the five senses.

How the brain gives rise to these strange experiences is a question
that has haunted neuroscience for as long as the field has existed.
Massimini was driven wild by the mystery in medical school, when he
held a brain in his hands for the first time. “This is an object
with boundaries, with a given weight, a little bit like tofu. It’s
not particularly elegant,” he says, but “inside this object that
you can hold in your hand, there is a universe.” Many philosophical
traditions have dealt with this apparent disconnect by saying the
mind—or the soul—is not made of the same physical stuff as our
bodies, a position called dualism. Science has instead flourished by
assuming the opposite and siding with a theory called materialism,
which presumes that everything we observe somehow arises from physical
matter, including consciousness.

 
Perhaps knowing they weren’t up to the job of explaining how this
happens, neuroscientists shied away from the enigmas of consciousness
until the 1990s. “You had to be retired or religious or a
philosopher to be able to talk about it,” says neuroscientist
Christof Koch, a member of the _Scientific American_ board of advisers
and chief scientist at the Tiny Blue Dot Foundation, a research
nonprofit focusing on perception science. In 1990 Koch and Nobel
laureate Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of DNA, directly challenged
this taboo. They published a paper that laid out an ambitious plan to
study the neurobiology of consciousness and launched the field as we
know it today.

Their plan came at a good time. That same year neuroscientists
invented a new way to observe the working brain called functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Using brain scanners, they track
changes in blood flow to reveal which brain regions are active at a
given time, producing colorful images of the brain in action. Koch,
who studied vision, thought that by measuring people’s brain
responses as they looked at special optical illusions, scientists
could figure out which parts of the brain are activated when something
is consciously perceived. Some of the illusions used can be perceived
in one of two ways; one example is Rubin’s vase, which can be seen
either as a vase or as two faces in profile. The image never changes,
so the brain is always receiving the same information, but people’s
conscious experience of it can easily switch back and forth. Another
visual test, called binocular rivalry, has a similar effect: each eye
is shown a different image, and people perceive either one or the
other but never a mix of the two. If neuroscientists could scan
people’s brains as their conscious perception switched, they could
find parts of the brain that were associated with that change: the
neural correlates of consciousness.

 
Koch bet big, literally. In 1998, at a consciousness-science
conference in Germany, he bet philosopher David Chalmers a case of
wine that researchers would discover a “clear” pattern of brain
activation underlying consciousness within 25 years
[[link removed]].
Chalmers took the bet, thinking 25 years “might be a bit
optimistic,” he says.

It was extremely optimistic. These early neural-correlate studies of
vision, which dominated the field in the 1990s, suggested places that
may be less correlated with visual awareness: the regions where input
from our eyes first enters the brain. These low-level
sensory-processing areas contain a lot of information
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that our conscious selves aren’t privy to. These areas appear to
continue receiving sensory information when we’re under anesthesia
as well. As that information travels “up” the wrinkly outer layer
of the brain, called the cortex, it enters areas that pick out and
process higher-level details—such as the faces in an image—and
conscious awareness builds.

So consciousness seems to happen in some region outside these early
visual-processing areas—but there is no consensus on where.

Today there are dozens of competing theories of how the brain
generates consciousness. They have different starting points,
different goals and even different definitions of consciousness. The
most popular is global neuronal workspace theory (GNWT), which
envisions consciousness as a kind of stage. When something enters your
conscious awareness—an itch, say, or the buzz of your
refrigerator—it’s thrust onto the stage and spotlighted in a
process called ignition. Things on the stage, or in the “global
workspace,” get broadcast to the rest of the brain, where they’re
able to guide action, direct attention, and more.

Higher-order theories conceive of consciousness as a high-level
representation of what is going on in other parts of the brain. For
you to be conscious of a refrigerator’s buzzing, your brain cannot
just represent the buzz by activating its auditory parts (which are
located near the temples). The buzz must also have a corresponding
“meta-representation” in the frontal parts of the brain that are
responsible for higher-order thinking—such as the thought “I am
hearing the refrigerator buzzing.”

 
Reentry and predictive processing theories (PPTs), on the other hand,
propose that consciousness emerges from our brain’s balancing of two
processes: perception and prediction. If you have ever seen something
that wasn’t there simply because you expected to see it, you know
how much our brain’s predictions can govern what we actually
perceive. Neuroscientist Anil Seth of the University of Sussex in
England, who favors PPTs, describes conscious perception as a
“controlled hallucination,” with the brain’s best guess of
what’s going on around you mapping onto what you consciously
perceive.

THERE'S A CHASM BETWEEN OUR EVERYDAY EXPERIENCES AND WHAT SCIENCE CAN
EXPLAIN.

Then there’s integrated information theory (IIT), a mathematical and
philosophical theory that stands out from the rest because it
doesn’t start with the brain. Instead it starts with consciousness
itself and the observations we can make about its properties, then
asks what kind of system could allow something with these properties
to exist. IIT takes consciousness to be differentiated—there are a
lot of things you could be experiencing right now but aren’t, making
your consciousness rich in information. And it is also unified, or
integrated—all your diverse experiences are bundled into one single
stream of consciousness. Mathematically, these two features together
make the system very complex. And from this complexity comes
consciousness.

 
Most eye-catching of all, IIT implies that consciousness could be
present outside of living systems, a kind of panpsychism. This idea,
plus the theory’s relative lack of grounding in the brain and
coverage in the media, would make IIT a flashpan of controversy. But
first it would inspire one of the most important insights we have into
how consciousness works.

In the early 2000s, while studying in the U.S., Massimini began
performing experiments with a device for probing the brain that did
two things at once: deliver painless magnetic pulses to the brain and
detect brain waves, both from outside the scalp, techniques called
transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) and electroencephalography
(EEG), respectively. Once back in Italy, he managed to secure a grant
to buy a TMS-EEG machine for his university despite a “desperate”
research-funding situation in the country.

A few years later he and a colleague “did something crazy,” he
says. They loaded the machine into a truck and drove more than nine
hours to Liège. “We didn’t say anything to anybody. This is a
machine belonging to the university after all.” But the opportunity
was too good to pass up. A neurologist in Liège named Steven Laureys
had founded the Coma Science Group for treating and learning from
patients with disorders of consciousness, and Massimini believed his
new device could be used to measure someone’s level of consciousness
from their brain activity.

 
Researchers had tried to measure the difference between conscious and
unconscious brains with other brain-imaging techniques before, without
much success. But adding TMS let scientists stimulate the outer layers
of the cortex, causing neurons in a specific area to fire. Then EEG
measured brain waves to reveal how that stimulation spread. “It’s
like knocking on the brain directly,” Massimini says, “to probe
the internal structure.”

You can also think of TMS like dropping a rock in a pond. In a
conscious brain (whether awake or dreaming), the disturbance ripples
outward as neurons cause neighbors in their networks to fire. But
unlike waves in water, each of those ripples of neuron activity begets
more ripples, spreading in a complex and far-reaching way throughout
the brain’s networks. In dreamless sleep, this doesn’t happen,
Massimini had previously found
[[link removed]]. TMS
stimulates the brain, and the neurons fire, but the wave of activity
isn’t picked up by neighboring neurons. If there are ripples, they
don’t spread far. The complexity seen during wakefulness is gone.

 
In Liège, Massimini and his colleagues tested the technique on people
with various disorders of consciousness—patients who were in
vegetative states, or were in minimally conscious states, or were
outwardly unresponsive but internally aware. They found that people
whose brains exhibited a more complex response were more likely to be
conscious. This relation could be represented as a single number,
called the perturbational complexity index, or PCI.

PCI is a very crude measure of consciousness, but it can estimate
someone’s place on the spectrum of consciousness
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quite reliably. And it suggests that complexity is an important part
of a conscious brain. In an awake or dreaming brain, diverse networks
of neurons are in constant back-and-forth communication with one
another. In this way, conscious brain activity is both differentiated
(or rich in information) and integrated (forming one unified
whole)—principles that Massimini borrowed from IIT, the theory that
doesn’t begin with the brain. These interactions build up
complexity, or what IIT theorists call a “cause-effect structure,”
so that when you stimulate one part of a conscious brain, other parts
respond.

 
But during dreamless sleep or when someone is under anesthesia, all
that communication goes away. “Everything collapses,” Massimini
says. “The cathedral falls apart.” Slow brain waves travel across
the cortex as neurons cycle rhythmically between two electric states
[[link removed]].
In the “silent periods” between the waves, neurons enter what’s
called a down state
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in which they can’t respond to electric signals from their
neighbors. This state is why there’s silence when you stimulate an
unconscious brain with TMS: “No feedback, no unity, no
complexity,” he says.

Of course, this loss of complexity during sleep and anesthesia is
transient; disorders of consciousness can be permanent. “Why can I
reverse sleep in a few seconds, and I can reverse anesthesia in the
course of minutes, but I might not ever be able to reverse this
pathological state?” asks George Mashour, an anesthesiologist and
neuroscientist studying consciousness at the University of Michigan
Medical School. Massimini hopes that we can eventually learn how to
jump-start consciousness—rebuild the cathedral—for people who are
in vegetative or minimally conscious states.

“IT FEELS LIKE THERE’S BEEN A HARD-WON LEGITIMACY TO THE STUDY OF
CONSCIOUSNESS OVER THE PAST 30 YEARS.” —ANIL SETH, _UNIVERSITY OF
SUSSEX_

Yet understanding brain-network complexity does not solve the mystery
of consciousness. These findings can help explain how a brain can
reach the state of consciousness but not what happens once it’s
gotten there, Mashour points out. Changes in someone’s PCI value
can’t explain, for example, why The Dress looks blue and black one
moment and white and gold the next. It can’t explain how a toothache
feels different from a headache, how someone without functioning
circulation can have a near-death experience
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or how the psychedelic drug 5-MeO-DMT makes time seem to stop and
obliterates your sense of self.

 
There’s a chasm between our everyday experiences and what science
can explain. “No one really has a theory that closes the explanatory
gap,” says Tim Bayne, a philosopher at Monash University in
Melbourne. “But that’s a problem on us, not the brain.”

At a June 2023 conference in New York City, Koch gave Chalmers his
case of wine and conceded that he had lost their bet
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“It’s clear that things are not clear,” Chalmers said.

That weekend the evidence looked particularly murky. The results of a
massive research project pitting IIT against GNWT had recently been
shared. The project, led by a group called the Cogitate Consortium,
involved three different measuring techniques used in eight different
institutions around the world. Researchers developed predictions from
each theory about what should happen in the brain when an image is
consciously perceived versus when it’s not. Testing those
predictions could challenge or even falsify either theory.

 
Both theories came away bruised. IIT holds that consciousness arises
mostly from sustained activity in the back of the brain. This “hot
zone” sits at the intersection of many sensory networks of neurons.
GNWT, in contrast, predicts that a stimulus (such as an image) rises
to the level of consciousness only when there is an “ignition” to
the workspace in frontal parts of the brain such as the prefrontal
cortex, which is known for planning and decision-making. GNWT also
predicts that this ignition signal will appear as two discrete spikes
of activity—one when an image is first presented and one when it’s
removed—whereas IIT predicts sustained activity as long as a person
is looking at an image.

The results were extremely mixed
[[link removed]]. Although there
was sustained activity in the back of the brain associated with
conscious perception, networks in the region weren’t synchronized in
the way that IIT predicts. And although there was a signal in the
prefrontal cortex when images were first presented, there was not a
second signal when they were removed, contrary to GNWT’s
predictions.

Then, a few months later, the field erupted. An open letter
[[link removed]] calling IIT pseudoscience
was published online in September 2023, signed by 124 researchers in
or adjacent to the field. The argument focused less on the theory than
on its coverage in the media, which the letter’s authors saw as
credulous. The authors also took issue with the panpsychist
implications of IIT, highlighting descriptions of it as unscientific
and “magicalist.” “These bold claims threaten to delegitimize
the scientific study of consciousness,” many of the authors wrote in
a follow-up article
[[link removed]].

 
The prospect that the field could lose its legitimacy hung over the
fight. One side feared IIT’s reputation would drag consciousness
science even further toward the fringes, and the other worried that
publicly tarring one theory with a “pseudoscience” label would
lead to the downfall of the entire field. “My greatest fear is that
we get another ‘consciousness winter’ wherein just talking about
consciousness is considered pseudoscientific bunk,” wrote Erik Hoel,
a consciousness researcher at Tufts University who has published
extensively on IIT’s limitations, in a post defending the theory
[[link removed]].

The debate, which took place largely in online posts and in the media,
was finally hashed out
[[link removed]] in the pages of
_Nature Neuroscience_ last March. Since then, the scientists involved
have seemed to be trying to put the ugly chapter behind them. But now
there is a sense that the field has arrived at an “uneasy stasis,”
Seth and his colleagues wrote
[[link removed]] recently in the journal
_Frontiers in Science_.

“It feels like there’s been a hard-won legitimacy to the study of
consciousness over the past 30 years,” Seth says. And there are
important results to show for it. We now know that large parts of the
brain—for example, the cerebellum, a structure near the brain stem
that contains a majority of the brain’s neurons—is apparently not
involved in consciousness. We’ve learned about specific brain
regions that are associated with specific pieces of conscious
experience, such as our sense of self. We’re also getting hints that
ancient structures deep in our brain, such as the thalamus, may be
more involved than neuroscientists had previously thought.

COMPARING CONSCIOUSNESS AMONG SPECIES COULD REVEAL WHY IT EXISTS IN
THE FIRST PLACE.

But underneath it all lurk countless unknowns. “There’s still
disagreement about how to define [consciousness], whether it exists or
not, whether a science of consciousness is really possible or not,
whether we’ll be able to say anything about consciousness in unusual
situations like [artificial intelligence],” Seth says. It stands in
contrast, perhaps unfairly, to other scientific journeys of discovery,
such as the mapping of our genetic code in the Human Genome Project or
of the cosmos with the help of the James Webb Space Telescope, he
adds.

 
“It’s a wonderful moment but also kind of sobering,” Bayne says.
Building bigger and bigger particle colliders is a pretty good tactic
for revealing the stuff of the subatomic world. But for revealing the
stuff of consciousness, there’s no sure bet. “If Bill Gates gave
me $100 billion tomorrow and said, ‘Okay, find out about
consciousness,’” he says, “I wouldn’t know what to do with
that money.”

Artificial intelligence may soon force our hand. In 2022, when a
Google engineer publicly claimed the AI model called LaMDA he had been
developing appeared to be conscious, Google countered that there was
“no evidence that LaMDA was sentient (and lots of evidence against
it).” This struck Chalmers as odd
[[link removed]]:
What evidence could the company have been talking about? “No one can
say for sure they’ve demonstrated these systems are not
conscious,” he says. “We don’t have that kind of proof.”

 
As these machines get better at imitating human dialogue—sometimes
even claiming outright to be conscious—ethicists, AI companies and
the concerned public are increasingly looking to consciousness
research for answers. “Suddenly those philosophical questions have
become very practical questions,” Chalmers says.

These questions are bigger and older than AI. Where does consciousness
exist in the world around us, and how can we prove it? Scientists and
philosophers are increasingly studying animals, human fetuses, brain
organoids and AI to figure out what common principles could underlie
consciousness.

Researchers have often studied consciousness by focusing exclusively
on humans, because the only consciousness we can ever truly be sure
exists is our own. For everyone else, we must rely on behavioral cues
and trust they are not a “philosophical zombie,” with all the
outward signs of consciousness but without any of the internal
experience. We extend this assumption to fellow humans every day.
Sometime in the 20th century, though, scientists stopped doing so for
animals. “When I started my graduate studies in the 1990s,
‘chimpanzees aren’t conscious’ was the default position for a
lot of philosophers,” says Kristin Andrews, a philosopher studying
animal minds at the City University of New York Graduate Center.

Yet we find consciousness only where we presume to look for it. It’s
a spotlight effect, Andrews explains, and since then, our spotlight
has slowly widened. First, in the 1990s, consciousness scientists
broadened it to do research on lab monkeys that couldn’t be done on
humans. By the time a group of scientists signed the Cambridge
Declaration on Consciousness, in 2012, there was more acceptance of
the idea that all mammals and some birds are probably sentient.

 
Now the frontier rests with fish, crustaceans and insects. Studies
suggest that fish can recognize themselves in a mirror, bumblebees can
play and crabs can weigh decisions based on conflicting priorities.
The 2024 New York Declaration on Animal Consciousness, which Andrews
co-authored, states that there is at least a “realistic
possibility” of consciousness in all vertebrates and some
invertebrates, such as insects, certain mollusks and crustaceans.
“We can’t just assume that all these animals are not conscious,”
says Chalmers, who signed the declaration.

Comparing consciousness among species could reveal why it exists in
the first place. “People have focused a lot on where consciousness
is in the brain and perhaps less so on what it’s _for_,”_ _Seth
says. He theorizes that consciousness is intrinsically linked to life.
Living beings can do only one thing at a time, and to choose what to
do, they must bring a lot of relevant information together into one
stream.

Even if that is right, it doesn’t mean carbon-based life is the only
arena where consciousness can happen. “Just as we can build things
that fly without flapping their wings, maybe there are other ways of
being conscious that don’t require being alive,” Seth says. “We
should really take that possibility seriously.”

 
The AI large language models (LLMs) that underpin chatbots such as
ChatGPT and Claude can certainly imitate consciousness well, although
today they are most likely the zombies that Chalmers and other
philosophers once imagined. Even most AI enthusiasts will tell you
that all an LLM does is predict which word comes next in a sentence;
it doesn’t “know” anything. But—to be strictly philosophical
about it—can we really _prove_ LLMs aren’t_ _conscious if we
haven’t yet agreed on how consciousness works?

Some researchers think theories rooted in the human brain, such as
GNWT, could still provide clues
[[link removed](25)00286-4].
If the brain is like a biological computer—a dominant assumption of
cognitive neuroscience—then maybe researchers can compare how LLMs
process information and test for indicators of consciousness. GNWT,
which was itself inspired by an early type of AI model, says
information is consciously experienced once it’s broadcast across
the entire system. Does an LLM do something similar?

Not everyone buys the brain-computer circuitry analogy. Brains do a
lot more than run algorithms that process information, Seth says. They
have electric fields, and they interact with chemical signals. They
are made of thousands of types of living cells that consume energy.
“It’s a massive assumption that none of these things matter,” he
says. “And that assumption has gone largely unexamined because of
the power of the metaphor that the brain is a computer.”

 
IIT proponents such as Massimini and Koch also think the underlying
physical “stuff” of a system matters—and that mere simulations,
including LLMs, can’t yield consciousness. “It’s like [how]
simulating a storm will not get you wet,” Massimini says, “or
simulating a black hole will not bend space and time.”

In consciousness science, everything comes back to the measurement
problem. You can try to find markers of different states of
consciousness—for instance, by scanning a person’s brain while
they are awake versus in slow-wave sleep, which is typically dreamless
and therefore unconscious. This experimental setup assumes the subject
is in fact not dreaming. But that assumption could be wrong: sometimes
people do report dreams when woken from slow-wave sleep. Were they
wrong? Do you trust them? How can you confirm that your assumptions
about consciousness are correct when your only ground truth is someone
else’s word—which is not really a ground truth at all?

 
When we are faced with this seemingly intractable problem, it’s
tempting to reach for an escape valve: Maybe none of it is real. Maybe
consciousness is so illusory because it is an illusion, a beautiful
cathedral that exists only in our heads. This skeptical position was
often put forward by the late philosopher Daniel Dennett
[[link removed]],
and it’s a legitimate question. But it doesn’t allow us to opt out
of treating brain injuries, understanding drugs such as anesthetics
and psychedelics, and grappling with our treatment of animals and the
intelligent machines we’re birthing. Consciousness is real to us,
and therefore it is real in every way that counts.

All of science rests on inferences about things we cannot see. We
can’t see a black hole, Koch points out, but we can spend decades
building up theories and creating instruments that let us infer their
existence. Consciousness may be a more challenging case, but
researchers don’t plan to stop trying. With the right tools, “the
sense of mystery about how material processes could give rise to
conscious experiences would start to go away,” Seth says.

“I don’t know what will happen afterward—if it will still be
impressive or not,” University of Liège’s Demertzi says. “But,
you know, sometimes nature is so beautiful that even when it’s
analyzed, you’re in awe.”

ALLISON PARSHALL
[[link removed]] is
associate editor for mind and brain at _Scientific American_ and she
writes the weekly online Science Quizzes
[[link removed]]. As a
multimedia journalist, she contributes to _Scientific American_'s
podcast _Science Quickly_. Parshall's work has also appeared in
_Quanta Magazine_ and Inverse. She graduated from New York
University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute with a master's
degree in science, health and environmental reporting. She has a
bachelor's degree in psychology from Georgetown University.

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SOME IMMUNE SYSTEMS DEFEAT CANCER. COULD THAT BECOME A DRUG?
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KOLATANEW YORK TIMESResearchers found an antibody that seems to play a
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