Author Archives: KLG

Coffee Break: Healthcare and the State of Science, Plus Baseball and Abundance

Part the First. How Did the United States Get This Healthcare System?  I distinctly remember the first time this question occurred to me, because as the child of a union household a visit to the doctor or the Emergency Room (trees were made to fall out of) was never a problem.  I was twenty years […]

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The Ancients: What Can They Teach Us About Our World and How to Live in It?

I recently added a new volume to my Shelf of Little Books, some of which are not so little but all of which repay re-reading that helps me understand our world a little better with each successive encounter.  The newest resident of the shelf was published earlier this year by Princeton University Press: Following Nature’s […]

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Coffee Break: The Future and Follies of Science and AI as Automation, for Better or Worse

Part the First: Who Will Supplant the United States in Scientific Research?  Before going any further in answer to The Rev Kev’s suggestion from last week, it is important to note that while the US currently remains the acknowledged leader in scientific research, this is a matter of quantity as much as quality.  Other countries […]

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Coffee Break: Working Class Life in 17th-Century Italy, Science in Decline, AI and Scientific Understanding, and Neanderthal Art

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 […]

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MAHA Influencers, the Future of Public Health, and Longings for Immortality

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 […]

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Coffee Break: Advances in Limb Regeneration & Malaria, Plus Science & Politics and a World through the Lens of Tuberculosis

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 […]

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Coffee Break: Notes on Pandemic Responses, a Human Pathogen that Eats the Plastic of Medical Devices, and the Secretary of Health and Human Services Speaks Out

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 […]

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Coffee Break: More on the Disruption of American Science and Good News on Intranasal Viruses to Combat Respiratory Viruses

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, […]

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On the Practical Importance of Basic Research for Human Health

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 […]

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Coffee Break: The Attack on Scientists and Scientific Research Continues, Plus One Great Result on a Vaccine That Prevents Cancer

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 […]

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Coffee Break: The Current State of Science During Trump v.2.0 Plus One Signal Advance

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.  […]

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Prevagen®: A Most Curious Dietary Supplement for Your Brain

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 […]

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