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Illustration by Dan Page

Discovery

A Nobel Search

What does it take to win the world’s top prize in medicine? Inside Michael Houghton’s seven-year hunt for a mystery virus

By Bruce Grierson, ’86 BA(Spec)

Illustration by Dan Page
May 24, 2021 • 23 minute read

When Chiron Corp., a small biotech company in California, hired a young scientist named Michael Houghton in 1982, it was already clear he was an exceptional scientist.

Several top biotech companies had offered him senior scientist positions based on research he’d done since obtaining his PhD in 1977 from King’s College London, in England. When Chiron called, Houghton was researching human interferon genes at a U.K. research institute of the large U.S. pharmaceutical company, G.D. Searle & Co.

Soon after Houghton arrived at Chiron, he learned about a mystery unfolding in every country.

A dangerous new pathogen that attacked the liver was running amok in the global blood supply. Left untreated, it could cause cirrhosis, end‑stage liver disease and cancer. It wasn’t hepatitis A and it wasn’t hepatitis B. Whatever it was, it was brutal. Apart from turning a blood transfusion into a game of Russian roulette, it plagued the world’s most vulnerable and stigmatized people when they shared a needle — for it seemed to spread through contaminated blood. Roughly 150 million people worldwide were infected with it.

Houghton decided to switch fields and devote his lab at Chiron to finding the mystery virus.

“I thought, ‘Yeah, this will be a good purpose for my lab,’ ” Houghton recalls. And, as it turns out, for a good chunk of his life.

By now you probably know the man we’re talking about. In October, he won the Nobel Prize in medicine, sharing the honour with Americans Harvey Alter and Charles Rice. Houghton, a virologist in the Faculty of Medicine and Dentistry and director of the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute at the University of Alberta, is the first scientist based at a Canadian university to win a Nobel in medicine since Frederick Banting discovered insulin at the University of Toronto in 1923.

And that, you might assume, is the story in a nutshell: young researcher gets on the train and hops off 40 years later at the summit of human accomplishment, feted by the world as a hero.

But of course, the story isn’t that tidy. And the final chapter is still being written.

Michael Houghton Illustration by Adam Cruft

“You want to know what it takes to win a Nobel Prize? You do something that many people think is not possible,” says Lorne Tyrrell, virologist and founding director of the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology, which encompasses the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute that Houghton leads. Both work in the Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology in the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry.

Indeed, it’s necessary to not realize it’s impossible in order to be able to do it, as the Nobel-winning physicist J. Michael Kosterlitz once framed the task.

In video meetings with media following the Oct. 5 Nobel announcement, Houghton presented to the world an expression that was … complicated. A mixture of joy, relief and gratitude, for sure. But the face of the scientist, now 70, also hinted at the kind of determination you'd expect of someone who deals in the impossible.

In 1982, the disease Houghton decided to tackle was known only as NANBH — non-A, non-B hepatitis, as in not caused by hep A or B viruses. A mysterious blood-borne disease defined by what it wasn’t. This would become his quest: to chase a shadow.

Together with Qui-Lim Choo, whom he recruited in 1983 along with Amy Weiner, Kang-Sheng Wang and Maureen Powers, Houghton set to work. One of the things that had slowed progress on NANBH — let’s call it HCV, the hepatitis C virus, since we know now that’s what they were seeking — was the lack of suitable animal models. Other than humans, hep C is only known to infect chimpanzees.

Houghton visited the lab of Daniel Bradley of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an expert in the NANBH chimpanzee model. With Bradley’s collaboration, the Chiron team extracted nucleic acid (DNA and RNA) from infected chimps and patients and cloned them to create vast libraries containing millions of nucleic acid sequences. They began sifting through them for one that looked as if it didn’t belong — a task akin to finding a single typo in a dictionary.

These days, with modern techniques that vastly speed up the copying and sequencing of segments of the genome, virology is a different beast than it was then. Nothing in Houghton’s tool kit at the time was quite up to the scope of this endeavour. “The methods we were applying were not sensitive enough,” he says. If today’s technology had been available back then, Houghton says, “it probably would have taken seven weeks” to find the mystery virus and sequence it.

Instead, it took seven years.

It didn’t help that no one really knew what kind of pathogen they were looking for. Was the virus like hep B or yellow fever — or even a prion? Or maybe it was a retrovirus like HIV. Houghton’s strategy was to go wide, trying many different molecular approaches at once based on the scientists’ best guesses. It was like fishing with multiple rods over the side, each hook carrying different molecular bait. At one point, more than 20 different approaches were in play.

Their work was painstaking. And fruitless.

“After two or three years,” Houghton says, “we were still shooting blanks.”

The path to any Nobel Prize is paved with failed experiments, almost by definition. The breakthroughs that win a Nobel tend to be innovations wrought by failures that force you to rethink and try new approaches.

One day in 1985, three years into the research, Houghton went next door to the lab of George Kuo to discuss a new approach Houghton had been considering involving the generation of monoclonal antibodies against HCV. That key discussion convinced Houghton to try an immunoscreening approach to bacterial clone libraries. At about the same time, Bradley suggested the same idea.

So, the Chiron team put another fishing rod over the side, so to speak.

The tactic, never before tried to identify a new virus, would use antibodies — proteins in the blood that bind to foreign substances — to help detect the virus. The team would copy the DNA and RNA from chronic hep C carriers into DNA in bacteria and make libraries of many millions of bacterial colonies. Then they could screen the libraries using samples from patients with chronic hep C. 

If the idea worked, the antibodies would sniff out and bind to the foreign stowaway, the hep C virus, in a rare one-in-a-million colony.

Over the next couple of years, Houghton and Choo sifted through the cloned DNA and RNA in 11 different bacterial libraries — millions upon millions of genetic sequences. They found nothing at all that might be the elusive quarry.

Nothing.

It has been said that people, like teeth, come in two types: incisors and grinders. And surely this applies to scientists, too. Incisors make an early impact with a provocative paper, enjoy early fame and then often fade from view.

Houghton is unquestionably a grinder. People who’ve worked with him say he is like a dog on a bone. “What distinguishes Mike compared to other researchers is that he zeroes in on a goal and goes after it, and he just never lets go,” says John Law, lead virologist in the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute and a research associate in the Department of Medical Microbiology & Immunology. “He’s not going to fall back on Plan B just because Plan A is hard.”

Back in 1987, after five years of trying and failing to find hep C at Chiron, Houghton was beginning to feel some pressure as the project leader responsible for the research. “The investors put pressure on management, and management put pressure on me.” Houghton knew he was close to being cut loose.

He didn’t particularly care. This was his mission: to fight the toll of disease on so many lives around the world.

“You can go ahead and fire me,” he remembers telling his boss. “I’ll just continue to work on this elsewhere.’ ”

The needle in a haystack

By the fall of 1987, Houghton and his team at Chiron had tried 30 to 40 different approaches and sifted through literally hundreds of millions of recombinant clones. 

Up to that point, Houghton and Choo had been screening the bacterial libraries with serum derived from the rare patients and chimps that had recovered from NANBH infection, assuming they would have the highest antibody levels. They decided instead to use serum from NANBH patients who had not recovered.

One day, while combing through a bacterial library — in a sample that contained a bit of contaminating “goo” that made it look so unpromising it was almost thrown out — Choo found something. It was “a very tiny little clone,” Houghton says. The wee-est fragment of a copy of … what? He and Choo scrutinized it over several months. It looked different from anything they’d seen, not derived from human or chimp genomes. Foreign.

Lorne Tyrrell Illustration by Adam Cruft

It was a single, small nucleic acid clone derived from a large molecule typical of RNA viruses. Houghton and Choo also showed that the RNA encoded a protein to which most NANBH patients had antibodies that were not present in uninfected control patients. Based on this, Kuo developed a method to test a large number of patients, which confirmed the presence of antibodies in NANBH patients and not in control patients. As Houghton and Choo found more and more related clones and determined their sequence, they saw very faint but significant similarities with known flaviviruses such as dengue and yellow fever. That was when they knew they had it.

Houghton disclosed the finding at a seminar at the University of California, San Francisco, in 1988. Some hepatitis experts were skeptical, even after seeing the data. But not Houghton, Choo and Kuo. “We knew we had it,” Houghton says. “I don’t take drugs to feel good, but I was on a high for two years afterwards.”

Two years. That’s how long it would take to use their precious little snippet to sequence the whole virus. And then to convince the world, with at least eight rounds of verification, that they had the real deal.

Deadly viruses can be quite beautiful. Hepatitis C turned out to be caused by an RNA virus very distantly related to tropical diseases like yellow fever or dengue. Under the microscope, it was small and round and enveloped with surface proteins — a bit like the now-familiar SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19 — the better to get its hooks into its host.

With a blueprint to work from, the team rushed to develop a test to screen blood for the newly identified contaminant. The team announced its blockbuster discoveries in Science in 1989: the isolation of the hepatitis C virus and a test that could successfully detect the virus in human blood.

Blood banks around the world finally had the gatekeeper they needed. Until then, the odds of getting hep C from transfused blood had been around the same as drawing a face card in a deck. With new screening tests that could detect tainted blood in advance, HCV was virtually eliminated from the Canadian blood supply by 1992.

Beyond making the blood supply safer, Houghton et al. published the genetic sequence for HCV, which allowed researchers to develop antiviral drugs to treat hep C. It looked as if the hard work was over.

It wasn’t.

John Law Illustration by Adam Cruft

The promise of making lives better

This is a story about hepatitis C. But it’s also a story about hep B — for it was Lorne Tyrrell’s work on hep B that, in a roundabout way, built the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology at the U of A. From Tyrrell’s research, pharmaceutical company Glaxo produced the antiviral drug lamivudine, the first oral treatment of chronic hepatitis B, and sank enough funds into the U of A to begin robust virology research and development. Hong Kong billionaire philanthropist Li Ka-shing decided to invest in the scientist whose work had improved, if not outright saved, millions of lives: one Lorne Tyrrell. It was the infusion of $25 million from the Li Ka Shing (Canada) Foundation that attracted $52.5 million from the Government of Alberta through Alberta Innovates. The funding allowed Tyrrell to vastly expand his budding virology institute and to found the Li Ka Shing Applied Virology Institute in 2013.

The new institute was tasked with transforming virology research into treatments, drugs and vaccines that would directly improve people’s lives. And Tyrrell had just the person in mind to lead it.

It began with a phone call in 2009. It was a call that was bound to happen sometime. Tyrrell, in his lab, had made his mark with hepatitis B. Houghton, in his lab, had identified the hep C and hep D viral genomes during his time at Chiron. Between them, they nearly covered the alphabet. It was about time they stopped circling each other like double-helix strands and met.

Houghton was driving through San Francisco one sunny lunchtime when he got a call from Tyrrell. Houghton was then at a different small biotech outfit, where he was working on herpes viruses. Tyrrell floated the news that a new institute within the Li Ka Shing Institute of Virology would focus on translating lab discoveries into practical and commercial applications. It needed someone to run it. Tyrrell wanted an outstanding virologist to apply for a grant from the new federal Canada Excellence Research Chair program, which would guarantee funding for seven years.

“Do you know anyone who might be interested?” he asked Houghton.

It was a nervy overture. If there is such a thing as a rock star in the world of virology, Houghton was it. He had won the prestigious Albert Lasker award in 2000. In 2003, his team had developed a SARS vaccine to address the major health threat of that year. (The SARS virus disappeared quite quickly, but had the vaccine been commercially manufactured and stockpiled, Houghton believes it could have changed the course of another SARS virus outbreak: COVID-19.)

On the phone with Tyrrell, Houghton fished for a couple of names of folks who might be interested. “But you know,” he said finally, “I might be.”

It was exactly what Tyrrell had wanted to hear. 

Research that cures disease and improves people’s lives — this is what drives Houghton and turned his eyes toward Edmonton.

Canada typically lags behind the United States in this type of “bench to bedside” research, and Houghton was thrilled to see the U of A cranking up that commercial energy. It was one of the things that made him take the job.

After arriving on campus, he wasted no time in hiring a vaccine team that included a dozen scientists and technicians, many of them Canadian, with Tyrrell as a close collaborator. The goal was to work across disciplines to turn basic research into a safe human vaccine to prevent hep C.

Spirits were high. But the vaccine team would soon run into major challenges — owing partly to the sneaky nature of the hep C virus.

“The virus is difficult in a few senses,” says Law, the lead virologist on the vaccine team. Each strain has a wildly different genetic signature. “It’s almost like a person who keeps dressing up differently to get into a bar he was kicked out of,” says Law. “He keeps putting on different clothes to get past the bouncer multiple times.”

Vaccines trick the body’s immune system into building a defence against a phantom scourge it thinks it’s encountering. The hep C vaccine being developed at the U of A is made from a cultured human cell tracing back to a single donor. It isn’t a weakened copy of the whole virus but rather a little piece of the outer protein shell. And that shell is super-delicate. Like a soufflé. 

“It comes apart easily,” says Law. “Also, the cells don’t like to make this protein. Other vaccines, it’s almost like making a piece of copper. It’s easy. But now we’re making a piece of gold. And we need to give it to everybody. So, we need to have an efficient way to go to the gold mine and extract enough to give it to everybody. And keep the costs down.”

Despite the challenges, something happened in 2013 that lifted everyone’s spirits.

Law and his team were experimenting with a new technique. Many were skeptical it would work, but after many trials, they got a promising result. The technique seemed to neutralize or prevent infection for multiple different strains of the virus. They had solved, as Law explained it, the “getting-past-the-bouncer” problem.

“I remember the day we sent [Houghton] the data,” Law says. “It was right at the time he had to give a report to the funding agency.” At a media conference, Houghton coolly presented the news. The U of A had made, for the first time, a hep C vaccine that appeared to work against most known strains of the virus. 

It was a game-changing development — a development that led to a promising hep C vaccine that Houghton’s team hopes to take to human trials this year or next.

“We’ve got a lot of partners lined up around the world — the United States, Germany, Italy and maybe Australia — to test it in the clinic as soon as we’ve made it. And I think it has a good chance of working,” says Houghton.

The ultimate goal: eradication

Houghton is sometimes asked why we need a hepatitis C vaccine at all. After all, thanks to his original hep C discovery, drugs now exist that can quickly cure most patients with few side-effects. His best argument goes like this: Any treatment, no matter how effective, is still just playing whack-a-mole with the disease. Despite advances in treatment, hepatitis C has infected an estimated 170 million people worldwide, while 71 million live with chronic infection that can lead to liver disease and cancer. Ultimately, a vaccine is the only way to eradicate it from the planet.

And quite apart from the cost in human suffering, there’s the financial hit. Tyrrell likes to say that if you accidentally drop your hep C pill down the sink, you’d better have the nearest plumber on speed dial. A full course of treatment costs around $60,000. An effective HCV vaccine would save Canada’s health-care budget close to $1 billion in antiviral drug costs over 10 years, Houghton estimates. “If you figure out how much it’s going to cost to treat those people with drugs, versus how much to vaccinate, then it’s night and day. It’s at least an order of magnitude cheaper to vaccinate.”

Illustration by Dan Page

Every year since 2012, Tyrrell had been nominating Houghton for the Nobel Prize. And every year Tyrrell had called the university’s president and dean of the Faculty of Medicine & Dentistry to say they should keep an ear out.

He knew in his bones that Houghton was deserving. “To win a Nobel Prize, you’re making a discovery that is transformative,” he says. The hep C discovery has saved or transformed millions of lives, if you count the curative drugs developed from it and the blood screening that prevents the disease in the first place. An annual international conference around hepatitis C has been running for 27 years — a whole discipline that wouldn’t exist without the work of Houghton’s team.

Then last Oct. 5, at two minutes to 4 a.m., Tyrrell woke up as he does every year to check his phone for Nobel news. Nothing. He waited a few minutes. Nothing. And then … the kind of news that chalks a high‑water mark onto a whole life.

Houghton was in California. His phone rang at 3:10 a.m. local time. The Nobel committee didn’t have his phone number, so it was his friend, Tyrrell, who woke him up.

“Congratulations, Mike,” he said. “You just won the Nobel Prize.”

There was silence. Ice ages came and went. It was one of the greatest moments in the history of the University of Alberta.

Except.

What if Houghton — the man Tyrrell had hired partly for the kind of stubborn decisiveness that made him an awesome research scientist and a refuser of prizes on principle — refused the Nobel?

After all, he had refused the Gairdner in 2013, Canada’s most prestigious award in science, when he learned that it would go to him alone. To his mind, his former colleagues were an inseparable part of the hep C discovery. Choo was his wingman, working 100-hour weeks at the bench for years on end. And Kuo, well, he was the one who had convinced Houghton to try the approach that ultimately worked.

His frustration was not just about recognition. It was, and continues to be, that the world seems not to acknowledge the way science works, he says. Scientific discovery is not some kind of transoceanic row by a solo sailor. There is no single “aha” moment by the genius in charge. Innumerable small wins along the way advance the technology in ways the world never sees.

“I don’t think I’m being unduly ethical,” he says now. “I’m just being honest. When you’ve worked with people for a long time and you know that they’ve made key contributions, it’s just basic honesty.”

Which is why Houghton, after agonizing, told Tyrrell in 2013 he wouldn’t accept the Gairdner (or the $100,000 that goes with it), a gesture that was unprecedented in the award’s 54-year history.

Anticipating the same dilemma this time, Tyrrell had video-called Houghton the previous Friday for a temperature check. Just as he feared, his colleague was deeply conflicted. “Michael, we can’t go through this again,” Tyrrell said. “Please. Look straight at me and tell me, ‘I will accept the Nobel Prize if it’s awarded to me.’ ”

Houghton said he would.

It’s customary for Nobel acceptance speeches to be a little bit lighthearted. When U of A grad Richard Taylor, ’50 BSc, ’52 MSc, ’91 DSc (Honorary), won the 1990 Nobel in physics for his work at Stanford, he said: “We were asked to be witty. But after a great deal of reflection I have decided that quarks are just not funny. … Perhaps next year the Royal Academy will award the physics prize to someone in condensed matter physics or general relativity. Those are hilarious subjects.”

Houghton’s speech wasn’t like that. Instead, via Zoom from his home in San Francisco, he laid a sober bread-crumb trail of his path to the hep C discovery, recognizing by name everyone who contributed along the way. Receiving a special hat tip were Choo, Kuo and Bradley.

It was Houghton’s way of cutting the Gordian knot. He was upset at how major science awards tend to prop one scientist up in the shop window. But he was honoured. 

“It would be too presumptuous to turn down a Nobel,” he says. He owed it to the U of A, to Tyrrell and to his colleagues not to refuse it. “And also, by accepting the Nobel,” he says, “I’ve been able to get the message out loud and clear: ‘This was a team effort.’ ”

After the announcement, the journal Nature reached out to Kuo and Choo for comment. Both took the high road. Kuo admitted he was disappointed to have been left out but was pleased to have had a hand in the accomplishment. And to have been able to model for his children “how important it is to work hard on something that you feel passionately about.” Choo broke down and cried — not with bitterness but with joy. “It’s my baby; I’m so very proud,” he told Nature. “How can I not be proud?”

The magnanimity breaks your heart. But by Houghton’s lights, gracefulness in the face of discourtesy should never have been asked of these two men.

“As knowledge and technology grow exponentially around the world and with an increasing need for multidisciplinary collaborations to address complex questions and problems, there is a case to be made for award committees adjusting to this changing paradigm,” he wrote in an op-ed in Nature in 2013 after refusing the Gairdner.

“What matters is that you are successful with a group of people. I firmly believe the ethical way forward is for all institutions to be more inclusive,” he adds today.

That is science’s bottom line. You’re always building on previous work. No one is freestyling. It takes a team to win a Nobel Prize.

A quirky fact on the way out the door here: Winning the Nobel Prize buys you almost two more years of life. The number comes from a 2007 study based on the lives of 528 Nobel recipients and nominees from 1901 to 1950. No one has been able to explain the phenomenon, though some have speculated that the spike in status may somehow boost the immune system. Perhaps the body knows it has earned a victory lap.

Or maybe the type of person who wins a Nobel is too dedicated to give up those two extra years in the lab.

The famed Merck virologist Maurice Hilleman, who developed eight of the 14 vaccinations that kids get today, carried in his pocket a list of childhood viral diseases that had yet to be conquered. This was his to-do list. When he knocked one off (rubella: check) he would literally cross it off and move on to the next.

Houghton has something of that same mindset. Shouldn’t it just be a normal thing to want to fix the world? And to believe that you can?

“If you really think about it, it’s almost a disgrace that we know so little about so many major diseases,” he says. “Alzheimer’s, Lou Gehrig’s disease, inflammatory bowel disease, multiple sclerosis. We are capable of curing those diseases. Why haven’t we? Because there’s not enough funding? Yes. But also, there’s not enough cultural momentum to focus on disease. And that sounds ridiculous, doesn’t it?”

Houghton has his own to-do list, and it is Hilleman-like. The applied virology institute is collaborating with a wide international network to research, among other things, a Group A streptococcus vaccine, novel therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease and cancer immunotherapy.

“I’ve always felt that contributing to disease solutions is well worth all the failures, all the frustration, all the funding issues, and all the politics,” Houghton says.

“Millions of people are dying and suffering from so many diseases around the world. Working for 40 years on HCV, and several years on other diseases, is the least that I can do.”

Go Deeper

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4 Things You Should Know About AI
false
Tech
Researchers Create ‘Smart’ Bionic Limbs
Tech
The advance of AI: should we be worried?
false
Money
5 Tips From a First-Time Home Buyer
false
Did You Know
Why You Remember the Things You Do
false
Did You Know
Forget 6 Degrees of Separation
false
Tech
How Handheld Devices Can Cause a Pain in the Neck
false
Profile
Welcome to Stump Kitchen
Illustration of a man looking at an opening in a bookshelf that is shaped like a grad cap by Eva Vasquez
Just for fun
Home Sweet Second Home
Continuing Education
A Shoulder Check On Attitude
Living
Whatsoever Things are True: A place of pride
Alumni Awards
For being a pillar of Little Italy
Alumni Awards
For a Life of Compassionate Service
Alumni Awards
For advocating for women in STEM fields
false
Profile
Community Minded
false
Feature
Exposing Five Myths About Indigenous Peoples
false
Feature
Question Period: Spencer Sekyer, ’91 BPE, ’92 BEd
false
Feature
Moving Forward With the Calls to Action
Feature
The Power of Creative Expression
false
News
Alumni in the News
false
Health
Your Phone Can Improve Your Mental Health
false
Discovery
Remote Electricity
Commentary
'We Need to Work Together. That's How it was Meant to Be.'
false
Just For Fun
Why Mountains Matter
false
At Work
Always Choose Adventure
false
Environment
Aged Ice
News
Campus News
false
News
Campus News
false
Profile
Redefining Ability
Just For Fun
U of A Goes Hollywood
false
Health
Igniting the Body's Immune System Against Cancer
false
Society
A Voice for Young People
Did You Know
Uncovering Campus Treasures
Discovery
News Briefs
false
Discovery
Composing to the Sounds of Space
false
Discovery
Did Hawking say 'no black holes'? Well, not technically
false
Money
Crowdfunding Gives Student Projects a Head Start
false
Feature
Take your kids to a gallery
false
Profile
Where Arts Meets Anatomy
false
Did You Know
Growing Hope in India
false
Society
U of A Comes a Long Way to Show Its Pride
false
Living
Helping People Find Their Voice
false
Did You Know
PAW Project Begins
false
Environment
Cool Literature
false
Discovery
A Mass-ive Discovery
false
News
Sports Savvy
false
Just For Fun
Dodge Ball Redux
false
Just For Fun
Happy 60th Birthday Rutherford
false
Profile
Polar Attraction
false
Notes
Campus Connections
Notes
Press'd Sandwiches
Notes
An Alumni "Operation" in Ecuador
Notes
Top 40 Under 40
false
Tech
The Wayback Machine
false
Discovery
Mussel Man
false
Feature
Hall of Famers
false
Health
Magical Moments
false
Tech
Thinking Big
false
Tech
Sweet Tweet
Portrait photo of Cathy Allen on main campus
Profile
11 Questions With Your New Alumni Association President
Multi ethnic couple reading books at a sidewalk cafe
Alumni Recommend
Welcome to Your 2025 Summer Reading List
 photo of Taylor McPherson and Katie Mulkay
Living
It Really Was Amazing
 low-angle photo of a medical chart and blood vials
Health
Five Lessons From Startup Founders Trying to Fix Health Care’s Prevention Problem
colour photo of Linda Ogilvie, dark green background
2024 Distinguished Alumni Award
A Rising Tide Lifts All Nurses
Colourful portrait illustration of Abbas Mehdi
Profile
Mover, Shaker, Protein Maker
Illustration of two men playing golf, one is a large Falstaffian character, the other is wearing a cloak and hat, resembling Sherlock Holmes
Continuing Education
Book, Meet Cover
Illustration of a woman curled up dreaming
Thesis
The Brain’s Pain
Photo of a businesswoman standing at a flip chart leading a meeting
Alumni Impact 2024
Four Ways for Women — or Anyone — to Take the Lead
false
Trails
Why Don’t Sheep Shrink When They Get Wet?
false
Alumni Impact 2024
Helping Young People Find Their Voices
false
Living
How to Face Failure
 a man doing paperwork in front of his laptop
Did You Know
Five Tips to Prepare for the Inevitable
Colourful illustration of woman’s side profile with hair flowing behind her
Feature
The Power of AI Is In Our Hands. What Do We Need to Know?
false
Health
Hope in Motion
a photo of Bruce Ritchie
2023 Distinguished Alumni Award
A Champion for People With Rare Blood Disorders
.
Thesis
For Want of a Nail
Two female businesswomen working at a desk
At Work
Who Wants To Be an Entrepreneur?
Girl with her ear up to a large metal sculpture
Living
How to Appreciate Sculpture
John Acorn holding and inspecting a rock in a creek bed
Just for Fun
Take a Walk on the Wild Side
false
Did You Know
Six Facts About Pollinators You Won't Bee-lieve
false
Profile
Legendary Links
false
Did You Know
Five Tips for Learning and Teaching Mandarin
Illustration of farmland with crops, animals, and farmers.
Environment
Pesky Pests and Other Threats
false
Tiny
Little Wonders
false
Relationships
Four Tips to Nurture a Relationship
false
Tiny
Time Machines
false
Distinguished Alumni Award
This Man Makes Medical Treatment Better For Us All
Common Vampire Bat
Continuing Education
Bloodthirsty Behaviour
false
Feature
Rural Frontiers
false
Did You Know
City Dwellers
false
Thesis
Engineering Student Groups Make Their Own Chances
false
Tech
Five Things I've Learned About Using AI for Social Good
false
Feature
The Impossible Made Possible
false
At Work
Goodwill Abounds
false
Health
Health Gets More Precise
false
Continuing Education
Think Like a Designer
false
Thesis
Where I Stop and You Start
false
Continuing Education
In the Minds of Mavericks
false
At Work
Five Things I’ve Learned About Working in the Non-Profit Sector
false
Profile
Five Things I’ve Learned About Working Together
false
Just For Fun
The Buzz About Bugs
false
Society
How To Be a Better Treaty Person
false
Health
It’s Got to Be Fun
false
Thesis
When the Master Makes Mistakes
false
Society
The Future of Food Delivers
false
Did You Know
Geared Up for Green-and-Gold
false
DIY
How to Be Wikipedia Wise
false
Society
Leadership in Times of Change
false
Technology
Better With Blockchain
false
Health
Whose Health Is in Harm’s Way?
false
Society
A Reading List for Fresh Perspectives
false
Alumni Awards
Karen Barnes Bolstered Education In the North
false
Alumni Awards
Howard Leeson Played a Key Role in Crafting Our Constitution
false
News
Restructuring Will Make UAlberta More Nimble, Efficient, Says President
false
Just For Fun
Wind Down the Year With Beer
false
Society
Three Paths
false
New Trail Classic
Do Not Bend or Mutilate — This Is a Human Being
false
Walking Together
Let’s Walk the Talk to End Racism
false
Discovery
An Inside Look at COVID-19 Research
false
Feature
The Future of Pandemics is Proactive
false
Living
'With This Hope We Can Do Beautiful Things'
false
Feature
Hope is an Overused Word, But the Real Thing Can be Powerful
false
At Home
A Common Quest
false
Living
Lawyers Get Creative As People Update Wills
false
Health
How to Neutralize Negative COVID-19 Thoughts
false
Living
Tips for Welcoming Refugees to Canada
false
At Home
Quarantine Bookshelf
false
Living
Six Things I’ve Learned About Embracing Discomfort
false
Thesis
Atypical Learning and Remarkable Results
false
DIY
Tuck Shop Cinnamon Bun Recipe
false
At Home
5 Books to Inspire Kids and Their Parents
false
Feature
A Justice for All
false
Thesis
Duplicate Studies
false
Thesis
Fair Play
false
Health
How I Learned to Ask for Help
false
Thesis
The Space Overhead
false
Tech
Inner Space
false
Energy
Indigenous Workers Tell Their Stories
false
Energy
People-Friendly Energy Projects
false
Energy
Powered Up
false
Energy
New Ways to Generate and Store Power
false
Did You Know
Meet Your New Alumni President
false
DIY
Build Your Own Robot From Junk at Home
false
Just For Fun
A Taste of Nostalgia
false
Health
How to Clean Your (Truly Gross, Germy) Phone
false
Money
How to Be Creative and Make Money
false
DIY
How to Make Your Words Last
false
DIY
How to Draw a Barn (on Fire)
false
Did You Know
How to Speak in Public With Aplomb
false
Tech
How Dylan Brenneis Built a Robot From Junk at Home
false
Living
Choose and Care for Your Perfect Christmas Tree
false
Health
Smoking Pot Behind Lister Is Legal
false
Thesis
How Long Until We Eat the Zoo?
false
Thesis
Have Your Burger and Eat It, Too
false
Alumni Awards
‘I think back with horror’
false
Trails
Tilting
false
Feature
Dementia Sets Lives Adrift. Research Is Finding a Better Way Forward
false
Health
The Elusive Cure
false
Thesis
Why You Feel Like Your Friends Are Having More Fun on Social Media
false
Thesis
Where Does Consciousness Live?
false
Living
Tips on How to Stink Less
false
Continuing Education
Five Things I’ve Learned About Perseverance
false
Continuing Education
Grant Me the Serenity to Accept My Inner Volcano
false
Tech
These Are Not Your Average Rabbits
These are not your average rabbits
false
At Work
How to Launch a Career During COVID-19
false
Profile
7 Things You Should Know About Billy-Ray Belcourt
false
Did You Know
What Do You Do When There’s No Reliable Internet?
false
Continuing Education
Check Your Blind Spots
false
Tech
They Saw What on YouTube?
false
Just For Fun
Flashback
Just For Fun
Fashion Sense
false
Discovery
Five Objects That Changed Our Lives
Alumni Awards
For giving Canadians insight into urgent global stories
false
Profile
For Fighting for LGBTQ Rights
Alumni Awards
For Bringing News and Entertainment to Canadian TV viewers
false
Feature
A Call to Bear Witness
false
Feature
Indigenous on Campus
false
Feature
Behind the Bodice
false
Feature
Reading Toward Reconciliation and More
News
Campus News
false
Did You Know
The Gateway's New Identity
false
Living
Put on Your Cape and Pants; It's Time to Go Out
false
Discovery
Research in the News
false
Continuing Education
Findings in the Field
false
Did You Know
Dark Cosmic Mysteries Illuminated
false
Environment
Alumni Among Wildfire Heroes
false
News
Research in the News
false
Discovery
'Welding' Neurons Opens Door to Repairing Nerves
false
Discovery
Paleontologists Discover Complete Baby Dino Skeleton
false
News
Alumni in the News
Did You Know
New Student Residence and Indigenous Gathering Place Coming to North Campus
false
Did You Know
Lecture Hall to Legislature
false
Health
When Food is Your Enemy
Discovery
Research Briefs
false
Environment
Our Man on Mars
false
Discovery
Who's the Boss of Evolution?
false
News
Kim Campbell Heads New College
Did You Know
From the Collections
false
Profile
Learning to Lead
false
Environment
Five Questions About Frankenstorms
false
Discovery
Blue Sky Green Moss
false
Profile
The Road to a Rhodes
News
Campus News
false
Health
A Mighty Heart
false
Did You Know
Medal of Freedom
false
Sweating the Small Stuff
false
Environment
Taking The Initiative
false
Discovery
Cell Mates
false
Did You Know
It Is Brain Surgery
false
In Memoriam
Remembering Robert Kroetch
Notes
Powerful Women
Notes
Royal Society of Canada Honours
Notes
Meet Your Reunion Organizer
false
Health
Treating the King Georges of Edmonton... and Calgary
false
Discovery
Weird Science
false
Feature
Whatsoever Things Are True
false
Feature
U of A's Newest Building
false
Continuing Education
Rhodes Worthy
false
Did You Know
Uphill Racer
false
Profile
PhD Prize Money
Illustration of pills and capsules scattered on a coloured background, forming the shape of a brain
Health
Understanding Addiction: Five Fundamental Facts
Illustration of a person flying a kite in the wind, the shape of the string attached to the kite is a profile of a human face
Thesis
I Can Do Whatever I Want
Aerial photo of a combine harvester in a rapeseed field
Feature
Rubik’s Food
Photo of the Rideau Canal in Ottawa on a nice, summer day, Canada Geese on the water in the foreground, buildings and blue sky in the background
Living
Happy Cities
 colour photo of Robert Philp, dark green background
2024 Distinguished Alumni Award
A Lawyer for the People
Photo of Colin Baril at an alumni art tour event
Profile
Five Things I’ve Learned About Making Connections Count
Illustration of people on different paths
Profile
Six Things I’ve Learned About Careers
One yellow piggy bank in a group of purple piggy banks
Money
Five Things I Learned About Managing My Money
Taylor McPherson and Katie Mulkay
Profile
Five Things We Learned Competing in The Amazing Race Canada
false
Continuing Education
Winning Actually Isn’t Everything
false
Alumni Impact 2024
Playing With Food, Seriously
Grads Matt and Jalene Anderson-Baron sitting at a table and looking at a laptop
Alumni Impact 2024
Thinking Tiny to Go Big
Glowing orb with emanating binary code and light.
Did You Know
What’s Up With Quantum Science?
An illustrated silhouette of a human head surrounded by stylized electronic waves
Discovery
AI Research in Action
a photo of Deena Hinshaw
2023 Distinguished Alumni Award
Calm in the Eye of the Pandemic Storm
a photo of Gordon Wilkes
2023 Distinguished Alumni Award
He Helped Give Patients Confidence to Face the World
Colourful grid of different coloured bananas
Did You Know
Does ChatGPT Really Understand Us?
hildren telling scary stories in a tent at night
Just for Fun
How to Tell a Terrifying Tale
Mature male adult with headphones on, taking a hearing test in a soundproof booth
Health
Breaking the Silence on Hearing Loss
Lazina Mckenzie at a November Project workout
Health
How to Become a Morning Exercise Person in Any Season
false
Profile
Nine Questions With Your New Alumni Association President
People rock climbing
Thesis
Reading, Riding and Arithmetic
false
Feature
Why You Should Care About Small Molecule Drugs
Corridor of people with a man at the center
Tiny
What Is the Smallest Small?
Helping child to read
How-to
How to Help a Child Read Better
false
Tiny
Teeny Words Expose Societal Changes
Couple walking outside
Health
One Small Step
false
Distinguished Alumni Award
Scientist-Entrepreneur Creates Drug Molecules That Can Change Lives
false
Profile
Five Things I’ve Learned About Preserving Indigenous Languages
false
Thesis
It Lies in the Making
false
Continuing Education
A Matter of Meat
false
At Work
How to Manage Imposter Syndrome
false
Thesis
Linger In the In-Between
false
Society
‘We Can Hear the Fighting From Afar’’
false
Society
Pitch Perfect
false
Society
5 Things I've Learned About Black History on the Prairies
false
Living
Let It Snow
false
Discovery
What Has a Nobel Prize Ever Done For You?
false
Relationships
Friends Forever
false
Thesis
Route of Memory
false
In Memoriam
To My Unknown Friend
false
Living
How to Be Media Literate
false
At Home
What Is the Pandemic Doing to My Young Child?
false
Continuing Education
Don't Be Boring!
false
Environment
The Future of Farming is Smarter
false
Discovery
A Nobel Search
false
Environment
How to Fashion a Sustainable Future
false
Living
See Spot Cope
false
New Trail 100
Lawnmowers and Rabbits: A Tale of Progress
false
New Trail 100
Then and Now: Discoveries That Keep on Giving
Photo of Michael Houghton
Health
In Conversation: Michael Houghton
false
New Trail 100
Mystery on Campus
false
Alumni Awards
Stanley Read Brought Compassion to Families Living with HIV/AIDS
false
At Work
How To Network
false
Thesis
Wrong Way, Again
false
At Work
Rethink Your Next Job Interview
false
Discovery
COVID-19-Fighting Tools
false
Environment
Renewable Energy Myths, Busted
false
Profile
Coming Home
false
Just For Fun
A Great Catch
false
Feature
The Virus of Social Unrest
false
Commentary
Reflections on Flight PS752
false
Money
The Dos and Don’ts of Investing After a Market Crash
false
Alumni Recommend
Feed Your Inner, Isolated Art Lover
false
At Work
Business As Unusual
false
At Work
When the Lectern Is in the Living Room
false
At Home
Tips to Help School Your Kids at Home
false
How-to
Support Your Kids During the COVID-19 Pandemic
false
In Memoriam
‘He Was One of a Kind’
false
Thesis
When Your Thoughts Run Away With You
false
Feature
Cinnamon Buns: A Love Story
false
Did You Know
What Baseball Fights Tell Us About Ourselves
false
Commentary
Opining the Opinions
false
Thesis
Seen One, Seen ’Em All
false
Thesis
More Than the Sum of Your Parts
false
Thesis
Whole Medicines
false
Environment
Tips to Free You From Plastic
false
Just For Fun
Are You a Sucker for Pseudoscience?
false
Energy
From Research to Reality
false
Energy
Lost in Transmission
Energy
Decontaminate Water With Chicken Feathers
false
Energy
Reworking the Flywheel for Better Energy Storage
false
Just for Fun
How to Start a Podcast
false
Health
New Food Labels Will Help You Choose
false
Just For Fun
How to Find a Great Podcast
false
Just For Fun
How to Skate Like Connor McDavid
false
Did You Know
How to Feed Your Inner Genealogist
false
Just For Fun
How to Make a Paper Airplane to Challenge Your Assumptions
false
Did You Know
How to Take Part in a Round Dance
false
Living
How to See Like an Artist
false
Relationships
How to Avoid Death by Small Talk
false
Health
Sugar Highs Are Not a Real Thing
false
Continuing Education
That Time I Enrolled in a Community
false
Thesis
Good News for Picky Eaters
Alumni Awards
For being a coach and a leader
false
Thesis
Deserts and Swamps
false
Just For Fun
Registration Woes
false
Environment
Not a Drop Wasted
false
At Home
How to Hang Art Like a Boss
false
Thesis
Your Tech, Your Self
false
Thesis
When Medicine Is Designed Just for You
false
Trails
In Lister Town
false
Feature
The Advance of AI: Should We Be Worried?
false
Tech
Have You Heard the One About the Robot Comedian?
Tech
Unexpected insights from an AI rock star
false
Trails
Modern Campus Life
false
Tech
Fighting Fire With Data
false
Health
Keeping Gym-Class Dropouts in the Game
false
Living
7 Things You Should Know to Rock Your Look
false
Profile
A Sport Psychologist Was Among the Supporters and Athletes Hurrying Hard in Pyeongchang
false
Health
Clearing the Smoke on Cannabis
false
Feature
Seen/Unseen
Feature
Words and Images
Alumni Awards
For finding new ways to succeed in sports
Alumni Awards
For being a powerful voice for change
Alumni Awards
For Being a Model of Leadership
Alumni Awards
For devoting his life to serving the public
false
Feature
How We Can Work Together
false
Feature
A Hard Walk
false
Feature
Facing the Painful Truth
false
Feature
More From the TRC
false
Commentary
Fake News and Surviving a Post-truth World
false
Society
A Cultural Space in a Natural Place
false
Did You Know
Salt Could Save Lives
false
Health
Research Rises From the Ashes
false
Did You Know
The Power of his Song
false
Health
A Healthier Future for Women and Children Is Closer Than Ever
Did You Know
For the Public Good
false
Tech
Changing the Game: Why Teaching AI to Play is More Than Fun and Games
Discovery
Research in the News
false
News
News Briefs
false
Living
Beyond the Books in Italy
false
Did You Know
Milk in Tea Can Reduce Teeth Stains
false
News
Campus News
false
News
Alumni in the News
false
News
David Turpin Named Next U of A President
News
University Plans Land Trust
News
News Briefs
false
Just For Fun
Hiding and Seeking Fun
Discovery
Research in the News
false
Did You Know
Alumna in Judge's Seat at Olympics
false
Just For Fun
Superlative U
false
Just For Fun
Raise a Glass for the Bears and Pandas
false
Society
The Accidental Protestor
false
Health
New Horizons in Health Care
false
Did You Know
The Alumni Effect
false
Profile
The New Kid on Campus
false
Health
Mastering Health Sciences Education
false
Discovery
Research VP Wins Top Prize
false
Discovery
Water Bearers
false
Relationships
Team Building
Continuing Education
High School Reunion
Society
Biotechnology Meets Art
false
Living
One Village at a Time
Notes
Alumni in Australia
false
News
Ultra-Sonic Performance
false
Discovery
Hot Tip
false
Feature
Easy Rider Endowment
false
Health
Master Mind
false
Discovery
Cell Mates
false
Did You Know
Mission to Mars
false
Discovery
You Do the Math