Category Archives: Garrulous insolence

Coffee Break: Breaking American Science, COVID Undercount, Food Politics, St. Patrick, and a Brief Diversion

Part the First: The Slow Death of Biomedical Research Continues in the United States.  We have covered this before, but the entire unfolding situation gets more surreal by the week.  STAT News has been a go-to source, as in NIH will spend its full budget this year, agency director promises House appropriators. The first shot […]

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Coffee Break: Vaccines, Libraries, and Diet…Nothing About the War

Part the First: As Giants Still Walk the Earth.  Stanley Plotkin began practicing medicine in the 1950s.  When he was an intern, outcomes for patients such as this little boy were frightening and devastating: Stanley Plotkin recalls a night in 1957, during his pediatrics internship, when a father brought a gravely ill toddler into the […]

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Coffee Break: Pluto’s Republic, Dietary Guidelines, Vaccine Nonsense, Ancient Poison Arrows, and Renaissance DNA

Part the First: We Live in Pluto’s Republic.  With apologies to the shade of Walt Disney, this was bound to happen eventually.  From Corey Robin, who notes that at Texas A&M a philosophy professor must dispense with Plato in his course because the content will be in violation of this edict: “No system academic course […]

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Coffee Break: Science and Belief, Working AI, ADHD Update, and Research Support

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 […]

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Coffee Break: CDC – Vaccines – Autism, Oh, My!; Wellness; Prioritized Science; Very Ancient Art; and MAGA

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 […]

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The Making of the MAGA Right

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.  […]

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Coffee Break: CDC and Acceleration of the Doom Loop

Part the First and Only on this Friday Afternoon: One More Revolution of the Accelerating Doom Loop of Science. The following is an update to our previous discussion earlier this week.  As everyone should know by now, the Secretary of Health and Human Services has fired the Director of the Centers for Disease Control, Dr. […]

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Coffee Break: Biotech vs. Science, NIH Under New Management, More on Malaria, Dreams of De-Extinction, and an Aside on the State of America

Part the First: Is This How to Do Science? San Diego, with the University of California-San Diego and the Scripps Research Institute leading the way, has been a Biotech/Little Pharma hotspot since the beginning, a strong third behind Boston and the Bay Area. Ups and downs are common, but in the current climate it is […]

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