Category Archives: Health care

Funding the Fundamentals of Biomedical Science: The National Institutes of Health in 2025 and Beyond

In the United States, the aim of the Current Administration is to support something called “gold-standard science.”  Their clear implication is that American scientists have been publishing something less than the gold standard – perhaps silver or bronze, or maybe even brass, when gold is the standard of the day (here and here).  We have […]

Read more...

Coffee Break: Garden of Healing, Good News on PEPFAR, Life in Biotech, and Our American Israel

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...

Coffee Break: AI in Healthcare and Science, the Nature of Charisma, and a Cure from a Mouse to a Patient

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...

Coffee Break: Ancient Food Facts, Cancer Therapy, the Conscious Brain, and Biohacking with Biotech…Plus Thomas Jefferson

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...

Trust in Science, Public Health, and Politics: Lessons from COVID-19

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...

Coffee Break: Funding Medical Education, A Human Ancestor, Tardigrades to the Rescue, Trashing the Earth, Plus MAHA and Measles

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...

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 […]

Read more...