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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Coffee Break: A Triumph of Gene Editing

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 […]

Whither mRNA Therapeutics Under the Current Regime and Beyond?

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 […]

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 […]

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, […]

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 […]

Climate Change: Where are We and Where are We Going, in Five Recent Books?

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 […]

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 […]