Part the First: Pharmacopeia. Who doesn’t love a garden? It sometimes seems that all drugs come from plants, initially. My first biology teachers claimed they were taught that bacteria were plants back when life was either animal or plant. Garden of Healing is a bit long but very interesting. It is also a break from […]
Read more...The Neoliberal turn of late capitalism [1] rules our world. Quinn Slobodian has become the voice of our time in explaining how this has happened and why. In Globalists The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism (2020), he described, among other things, how the Liberals of Central Europe who became Neoliberals were most […]
Read more...Part the First: Algorithmic Intelligence in Clinical Medicine. From the article This Ohio health system tested an AI tool to predict sepsis. Here’s how it went. As the subhead notes: Summa Health’s experience highlights the challenges of AI adoption, especially at community health systems: Across emergency departments around Akron, Ohio, physicians were getting overwhelmed. In […]
Read more...On this Independence Day in one country in North America a few notes on life outside current politics, scientific and otherwise. Part the First: The Archaeology of Food Is Fascinating. Having read about Roman eating habits over the years I have wondered about two things, fish sauce and the dormouse. Now we know which fish […]
Read more...Shortly after COVID-19 was recognized as a worldwide catastrophe, my much better half asked me how long I thought this would this last. Based on my then 45 years of biomedical research experience I replied, “Three years.” I was wrong. That was more than five years ago, when the refrigerated makeshift morgues were parked on […]
Read more...Part the First: Financing Professional Education in the United States. College costs too much in the United States. Professional School costs way to much. Up until the present – who knows what will happen next as the broad attacks on American universities continue – graduate education at the PhD level in traditional disciplines in the […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
Read more...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 […]
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