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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...Part the First: Gene Editing as a Cure for Genetic Disease. The recent politics of American science has been depressing in the extreme, and last week I promised to cover recent good things in basic and clinical science. I can’t think of anything better than a baby has been treated successfully for a rare, lethal […]
Read more...One of the more remarkable things I have ever seen has been the demonization of the middle component of the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology in the past four years. The Central Dogma was formulated in late-1950s by Francis Crick, co-discoverer of the double helix structure of DNA with James D. Watson: DNA makes RNA […]
Read more...Part the First: Retrospective Notes on a Pandemic. BMJ, formerly known as the British Medical Journal, has recently published two interesting pieces on COVID-19. The first is an analysis by Anthony Costello, who was previously Director of Maternal, Child, and Adolescent Health at the World Heath Organization: UK decision not to suppress covid raises questions […]
Read more...Part the First. A Few Words in Response to the Excellent Commentariat of Naked Capitalism. No one knows better than I that funding of science in the United States is hit or miss. My overall average flirts with the Mendoza Line, which is not so bad. For most I do not miss the grant treadmill/lottery, […]
Read more...I was listening to the journalist Ryan Grim of Drop Site News last week as he talked briefly about his wife’s ongoing cancer treatment. His short gloss was directly on point, and it motivated me to dig deep in my archives on the history of research on breast cancer and how one never knows what […]
Read more...Part the First. Convergence and Consensus in Science, or and how to interpret scientific results in context. From Holden Thorp, the Editor-in-Chief of Science: Kathleen Hall Jamieson believes that scientists need to talk…about convergent evidence. “Unlike declarations that a consensus exists, a claim that convergent evidence exists honors science’s norms of critique and correction by […]
Read more...As someone who has spent most of his working life as a scientific worker and later as an academic scientist, graduate supervisor, teacher, grant reviewer, and administrator, the current devastation being visited upon my colleagues and their institutions is sickening. I have never thought my work was more useful or more important than anyone else’s. […]
Read more...A few weeks ago, I repeated the drive of seventy miles along the north-south path of Hurricane Helene that I made two weeks after the storm . In the few wealthier sectors along this highway, downed trees have been removed and sawn for lumber (at a large loss) or chipped. I have heard hardwood and […]
Read more...Dietary supplements are a large part of the alternative medicine universe, with annual sales of more than $70B in the United states and much more than that in the rest of the world. I have followed the supplement business since tryptophan, a canonical amino acid marketed as a sleep aid, caused an outbreak of eosinophilia-myalgia […]
Read more...Why Christopher Lasch, who died over 30 years ago, is the historian of our times…or perhaps our first psychohistorian?
Read more...Can medical science recover from the Powell memo and Project 2025 via slow science?
Read more...Covid and cancer are not going away soon, but if Dr. Oz has his way, Medicare might.
Read more...