Category Archives: Health care

Coffee Break: The President Fixes Health Care While Unfixing the Air We Breathe, Among Other Things

Part the First: The President Fixes Healthcare. Oh, joy!  A very long time ago I told myself that, surely, by the time I was eligible for Medicare the United States would have fixed our healthcare system so that job lock and other assorted problems would have vanished.  Silly me.  I have been eligible for Medicare […]

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Coffee Break: Pluto’s Republic, Dietary Guidelines, Vaccine Nonsense, Ancient Poison Arrows, and Renaissance DNA

Part the First: We Live in Pluto’s Republic.  With apologies to the shade of Walt Disney, this was bound to happen eventually.  From Corey Robin, who notes that at Texas A&M a philosophy professor must dispense with Plato in his course because the content will be in violation of this edict: “No system academic course […]

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A Few Notes on Progress in Gene Therapy

Gene therapy has been a goal of medicine since the first “inborn errors of metabolism” were identified by Sir Archibald Garrod in the early twentieth century.  This was before anyone had a good idea of what a gene was, but the principles of Mendelian genetics were used by Garrod, with the assistance of William Bateson, […]

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Coffee Break: Boxing Day Miscellany

Part the First: No, This Is Not Another Bell Labs.  Bell Labs was justifiably renowned as the place to do high level physics and engineering.  It also supported Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson in their research that identified the background cosmic microwave radiation that is the remnant of the Big Bang.  But Bell Labs worked […]

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