Whatever you might think you're going to get from the familiar setup of Jennette McCurdy's Half His Age (a lonely high-school girl in Anchorage begins an extremely questionable sexual relationship with her teacher), any presumptions are dispelled from the very first page. When Waldo, the teenage narrator of the novel, observes her boyfriend's 'slimy tongue that loop-de-loops over and over like a carnival ride, mechanical and passionless,' she's setting a tone: irreverent, graphic, bilious. McCurdy is much more interested in late capitalism than in Lolita. Waldo's world has long been poisoned by the microwavable meals her disinterested mother leaves out, the fast-fashion crop tops she orders that come with a cancer warning, the laptop she falls asleep clutching at 2 a.m., its unnatural heat 'searing my ovaries.' By the time she meets Mr. Korgy, her frowsy middle-aged creative-writing instructor, on page 11, she is already imprinted on the reader as a caustic force of anti-nature. And so she seduces Korgy'of course she does. Their relationship ensues through the slow erosion of boundaries, mostly instigated by her but sometimes by him. She masturbates using a bottle of tropical-fruit-flavored Tums while stalking his Instagram. He praises her writing and asks her to stay after class; he later invites her to dinner at his home with his wife. She sends him a thank-you email with her phone number. He calls her. And so on, until they're frantically humping in a janitorial closet, in her childhood bedroom, at hotels (after fancy dinners where people assume he's her father). Mr. Korgy'his first name is Theodore, but Waldo never uses it'is no scheming predator. His wife calls him 'Teddy' and tells emasculating anecdotes about him. He's soft and pitiable where Waldo is ferocious in her loneliness and adept at transforming herself into various alluring guises....

Joan Brugge has worked for nearly 50 years as a cancer scientist, studying the earliest signs that someone might become sick. Then the Trump administration canceled her lab's funding. The administration's attacks on medicine, culture, and education'which include verbal threats and funding cuts'are about more than just budgeting and bravado. Ruth Ben-Ghiat is a professor of history and Italian studies at New York University and the author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present. She argues that this effort is part of a larger autocratic project to maintain power. Joan Brugge: I was actually at a breast-cancer retreat. And during the coffee break, I looked at my emails to see, you know, if there's anything that I had to deal with. And I got this email from the university, and it was a real gut punch. My knees basically buckled, and I had to sit down. Brugge: I never imagined that it would be possible that funding for lifesaving research would be terminated for issues that were totally unrelated to the quality of the work or the progress that we had made in the work....

Researchers in Class of 1942 Professor of Chemistry Matthew D. Shoulders' lab have uncovered a sinister hidden mechanism that can allow cancer cells to survive (and, in some cases, thrive) even when hit with powerful drugs. The secret lies in a cellular 'safety net' that gives cancer the freedom to develop aggressive mutations. This fascinating intersection between molecular biology and evolutionary dynamics, published Jan. 22 on the cover of Molecular Cell, focuses on the most famous anti-cancer gene in the human body, TP53 (tumor protein 53, known as p53), and suggests that cancer cells don't just mutate by accident ' they create a specialized environment that makes dangerous mutations possible. Tasked with the job of stopping damaged cells from dividing, the p53 protein has been known for decades as the 'guardian of the genome' and is the most mutated gene in cancer. Some of the most perilous of these mutations are known as 'dominant-negative' variants. Not only do they stop working, but they actually prevent any healthy p53 in the cell from doing its job, essentially disarming the body's primary defense system....

MIT Professor Emeritus Richard O. Hynes PhD '71, a cancer biologist whose discoveries reshaped modern understandings of how cells interact with each other and their environment, passed away on Jan. 6. He was 81. Hynes is best known for his discovery of integrins, a family of cell-surface receptors essential to cell'cell and cell'matrix adhesion. He played a critical role in establishing the field of cell adhesion biology, and his continuing research revealed mechanisms central to embryonic development, tissue integrity, and diseases including cancer, fibrosis, thrombosis, and immune disorders. Hynes was the Daniel K. Ludwig Professor for Cancer Research, Emeritus, an emeritus professor of biology, and a member of the Koch Institute for Integrated Cancer Research at MIT and the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. During his more than 50 years on the faculty at MIT, he was deeply respected for his academic leadership at the Institute and internationally, as well as his intellectual rigor and contributions as an educator and mentor....