Dr Michelle Bootcov

Michelle Bootcov is a historian of medical science and technology. She has undergraduate and postgraduate training in both molecular biology and history. In her first PhD she discovered an immune protein called MIC-1 (now also known as GDF-15). This cytokine plays a role in regulating appetite and metabolism, is a biomarker for the progression of some medical conditions (heart failure, kidney disease, and various cancers), and has a role in pregnancy nausea and vomiting.

In her recent history PhD, Michelle described the difficulties in viral diagnostics before the 1960s, and explored how developments in hepatitis B knowledge helped to transform viral diagnosis, underwrote the development of a viral diagnostics industry and how the blood-borne hepatitis B virus, served as a precursor to HIV/AIDS in the management of donor blood in transfusion services. Her research on hepatitis progressed as the COVID-19 pandemic advanced, and surprisingly, she found that both the rapid antigen tests (RATS) and the PCR sequencing of viral variants that became common public knowledge during COVID-19, had historical antecedents in hepatitis B research of the 1960s to 1990s.