Part the First: Ultra-Processed Foods and Addiction. Big Ag and Big Food may finally have a problem with their big moneymaking products. We have discussed UPFs here several times before. They fill the center aisles of grocery stores in much of the Anglophone world. This article in Scientific American adds to wave of information coming […]
Read more...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, […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...Part the First: Climate, “What, Me Worry?” Once again Alfred E. Neuman comes to mind as “policy-based science” remains the order of the day in the Current Administration as Trump Administration Plans to Break Up Premier Weather and Climate Research Center. The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research […]
Read more...Marion Nestle has been the essential guide to our “food system” (one trillion dollars a year) in the United States for a long time. Her work is relevant in other such as the United Kingdom that lack a robust food culture, for the most part because it was killed by the food system, not because […]
Read more...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 […]
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