The Good, Part the First: Basic Science Has the Answer, Once Again. T cells of the immune system are responsible for the establishment of self-tolerance and adaptive immune function. T cells come from the thymus, which is mammals basically disappears early in life in a process called involution. Understanding how the thymus might regenerate has […]
Read more...American Science, Shattered. So says is the title of Part 1 of a ten part series in STAT News. Since STAT articles are usually paywalled, I will summarize them here as they appear. Unlike most accounts of the current state of science in the United States, the authors of this article have found scientists who […]
Read more...Nicholas Buccola is a historian of the United States who will still be read 30-40-50 years from now. I regret that I will not be here to see where he takes us. In 2019 he published The Fire is Upon Us: James Baldwin, William F. Buckley Jr., and the Debate Over Race in America. This […]
Read more...Part the First: When Science Becomes a Matter of Belief Things Go Sideways. The current Secretary of Health and Human Services is getting his way. This is not a surprise. The President hired him to “go wild on health” and he is doing just that. Some have complained that as Secretary of HHS that RFKJr […]
Read more...Part the First: CDC Finally “Decides” that Vaccines Cause Autism. In news that will surprise absolute nobody, while pleasing some and causing despair in others, CDC says the mountains of data that show vaccines do NOT cause autism is not evidence-based: The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Wednesday publicly reversed its stance that […]
Read more...As the old baseball saying goes, sometimes “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard.” This became especially true since Curt Flood opened the floodgates to free agency more than fifty years ago when he refused to be treated as disposable property by the owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, one August A. Busch, Jr. […]
Read more...Part the First: Financial Stability and Climate Instability. Or, could a climate-related shock trigger a recession? This is a question that could be asked only by an economist, or two, as in Advancing research on financial stability and climate-related financial risk, an editorial last week in Science: Climate change–related natural disasters such as floods, fires, […]
Read more...Part the First: Wither Sport in This Modern World? The World Series ended last week with two games for the ages. These were the only MLB baseball games I watched all season, and as a baseball man of the old school, I picked well. Both games between the Los Angeles Dodgers and the Toronto Blue […]
Read more...Lisa Rosenbaum, MD, is a national correspondent for the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM). She has just published Is a Long-Simmering Crisis Boiling Over? U.S. Primary Care Today. The easy, and current, answer is “Yes.” But this is not necessarily the final answer. Dr. Rosenbaum begins with the description of the career arc of […]
Read more...Part the First: Where Have All the Grownups Gone? Corey Robin is always worth reading (the first edition of The Reactionary Mind is much better than the second), and lately he has been more active publicly, here asking about the grownups: For a long time now, I’ve thought that you’re never really a grownup until […]
Read more...Upon reading this collection of essays (the title of this post) from Wolfgang Streeck and then contemplating our current world, The Second Coming of William Butler Yeats comes to mind: Turning and turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconer; Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is loosed upon […]
Read more...Part the First: Casey Means MD Is Still Awaiting Her Closeup. We discussed the Surgeon General in waiting some time ago in a review of her book, Good Energy. Her confirmation hearing in the US Senate is apparently still in the works. Dr. David Gorski has an update at SBM, Surgeon General nominee Dr. Casey […]
Read more...Our so-called “food system” is a complete mess, one that must be set to rights if the people are to have a chance of thriving in the coming years, which are likely to be stressful because of other messes. This dire situation has been described in Food Fight: From Plunder and Profit to People and […]
Read more...Part the First: Politics and Science. It will be s surprise to no one that autism is somewhere nearby: Inside FDA, career staffers describe how political pressure is influencing their work. The inquiry came in August and struck scientists at the Food and Drug Administration as highly unusual. The leader of the center that regulates […]
Read more...This is Naked Capitalism fundraising week. 1425 donors have already invested in our efforts to combat corruption and predatory conduct, particularly in the financial realm. Please join us and participate via our donation page, which shows how to give via check, credit card, debit card, PayPal, Clover, or Wise. Read about why we’re doing this fundraiser, what […]
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