Category Archives: Science and the scientific method

Coffee Break: Vaccine “Side Effects,” Outdated Theory of Disease, “Life” on Mars, and More on Liberalism

Part the First: Unintended Side Effects of Vaccines.  From Science-Based Medicine this week: Unintended Side Effects HPV and Shingles Vaccines—Reason for Concern.  This headline is genius in its indirection: Emerging trends in the peer-reviewed scientific literature show new evidence of unintended effects of two popular vaccines—the Human Papilloma Virus (HPV) and shingles vaccines. Surprising findings […]

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Coffee Break: CDC and Acceleration of the Doom Loop

Part the First and Only on this Friday Afternoon: One More Revolution of the Accelerating Doom Loop of Science. The following is an update to our previous discussion earlier this week.  As everyone should know by now, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has fired the Director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. […]

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Is American Science Stuck in a Doom Loop?

The American scientific community is in a difficult place.  I started my first job in an academic research laboratory (funded by the Energy Research and Development Administration and the National Science Foundation) in 1975, which somehow was fifty years ago when I was the youngest person in the laboratory instead of the oldest.  I have […]

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Coffee Break: Beware the Jargon, Chocolate(!), Arsenic Life Final Update, Death Becomes Us, and the Scopes Trial,

Part the First: Beware Scientific Jargon.  But everyone here already knows that.  Nevertheless, this is a perpetual challenge for every scientist and other scholar who wants to be understood by our fellow citizens without “dumbing it down.”  Scientific jargon can be ‘satisfying’ — but misleading.  Jargon works especially well for those of my tribe who […]

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Coffee Break: Biotech vs. Science, NIH Under New Management, More on Malaria, Dreams of De-Extinction, and an Aside on the State of America

Part the First: Is This How to Do Science? San Diego, with the University of California-San Diego and the Scripps Research Institute leading the way, has been a Biotech/Little Pharma hotspot since the beginning, a strong third behind Boston and the Bay Area. Ups and downs are common, but in the current climate it is […]

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Coffee Break: COVID-19 and Cancer, NIH Weaponized Against the People, Consciousness, AI and the Internet, and Famine

Part the First: How Do You Awaken Sleeping Cancer Cells.  Short answer: Inflammation.  Speaking from experience, anyone who have ever been treated successfully for cancer never fully relaxes after his or her tumor or condition is resolved.  Formerly metastatic cells can remain dormant for a long time.  Recent research has shown how they are reawakened. […]

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Funding the Fundamentals of Biomedical Science: The National Institutes of Health in 2025 and Beyond

In the United States, the aim of the Current Administration is to support something called “gold-standard science.”  Their clear implication is that American scientists have been publishing something less than the gold standard – perhaps silver or bronze, or maybe even brass, when gold is the standard of the day (here and here).  We have […]

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