Category Archives: Health care

Coffee Break: Ancient Food Facts, Cancer Therapy, the Conscious Brain, and Biohacking with Biotech…Plus Thomas Jefferson

On this Independence Day in one country in North America a few notes on life outside current politics, scientific and otherwise. Part the First: The Archaeology of Food Is Fascinating.  Having read about Roman eating habits over the years I have wondered about two things, fish sauce and the dormouse.  Now we know which fish […]

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Trust in Science, Public Health, and Politics: Lessons from COVID-19

Shortly after COVID-19 was recognized as a worldwide catastrophe, my much better half asked me how long I thought this would this last.  Based on my then 45 years of biomedical research experience I replied, “Three years.”  I was wrong.  That was more than five years ago, when the refrigerated makeshift morgues were parked on […]

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Coffee Break: Funding Medical Education, A Human Ancestor, Tardigrades to the Rescue, Trashing the Earth, Plus MAHA and Measles

Part the First: Financing Professional Education in the United States.  College costs too much in the United States.  Professional School costs way to much.  Up until the present – who knows what will happen next as the broad attacks on American universities continue – graduate education at the PhD level in traditional disciplines in the […]

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Coffee Break: Healthcare and the State of Science, Plus Baseball and Abundance

Part the First. How Did the United States Get This Healthcare System?  I distinctly remember the first time this question occurred to me, because as the child of a union household a visit to the doctor or the Emergency Room (trees were made to fall out of) was never a problem.  I was twenty years […]

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Coffee Break: Working Class Life in 17th-Century Italy, Science in Decline, AI and Scientific Understanding, and Neanderthal Art

Part the First. Tales from the Crypt. Subtitled The lives of 17th century Milan’s working poor – their health, diet, and drug habits – emerge from thousands of bodies buried under a public hospital.  This article appeared in Science on 1 May 2025: In 1456, the Duke of Milan established a medical institution dedicated to […]

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MAHA Influencers, the Future of Public Health, and Longings for Immortality

The Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) Report has dropped!  The original document included phantom (hallucinated?) references, but those have been fixed apparently.  Or maybe not.  A graduate student who wrote a review with the same defects would get a flat “F”, but this does not seem to matter.  Could AI (Algorithmic Intelligence) have had anything […]

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Coffee Break: Advances in Limb Regeneration & Malaria, Plus Science & Politics and a World through the Lens of Tuberculosis

Part the First. Old Experimental Models in Biology Lead to New Knowledge.  Developmental Biology began as Embryology.  A few of us still kicking remember the transition and miss the holistic approach required to master the material.  Early embryological models included sea urchins and salamanders, tadpoles and the chicken.  Much useful research was done with these […]

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