Words about science and hiking
Jon Otter tweeted out this graph today, and it just blows me away: “Trust apportioned” is apparently the term in UK English for what we in the US call hospitals. So the dotted lines are hospitals and the solid lines include community cases. Huge drops in C diff diarrhea and MRSA BSIs. This is the English Read More …
Liquid biopsy is all the rage now for cancer screening. But screening – testing apparently healthy people for a disease – is the Great White Whale of cancer diagnostics. I predict it will lose more venture capitalists more money over the next decade than every other Dx play combined. But that’s OK—redistributing money from wealthy Read More …
Scientists show high levels of hostility aggression, and conscientiousness compared to the general population, at least according to psychologists. As a scientist and a manager of scientists, I agree but would add another trait: fear of failure. Science is supposedly distinguished from other forms of knowledge by falsifiability: if a statement cannot be disproven it Read More …
I’m always glad whenever I see a microbiology theme breach the moat of the NYT and make it on to their opinion page. But I usually end up disappointed once I actually read it. That’s the case with this call to biobank the world’s human gut microbiome. It’s far from the worst idea published this Read More …
Disclosure up front: I helped found SomaLogic and was its first R&D director. I left the company in 2004, but exercised my options and still hold its stock. I am definitely not neutral about the value of proteomics as a diagnostic and prognostic platform. Last Sunday’s NYT magazine had a pretty good article about the Read More …
This one comes to us from the Children’s National Medical Center in Washington DC and is particularly heartbreaking: a 2-year old with congenital heart disease suffering a post-surgical Pseudomonas aeruginosa infection. Pseudomonas infections are particularly liable to become resistant over the course of antibiotic treatment, and in this case treatment options were limited by allergic reactions to Read More …
@LizSzabo tweeted out this abstract from ASCO reporting that adverse events from Keytruda therapy were much higher than expected from clinical trial results. My retweet added a snarky remark about how pharma has gotten pretty good at picking its patients for trials and that this result should be no surprise at all. Let me expand Read More …
I love genetics. Among the many disciplines of biology, it is perhaps the most elegant – that is, it explains much with just a few simple principles. The genetics class I took at UCSC so entranced me that I gave up all ambition to study psychology or be a writer, and became a molecular biologist Read More …
The term “mutation” is a bit loaded, as it implies a defect or deficiency or aberration of some sort. But the value of a particular version of a gene is very much dependent on its context – what might be a defect in one context conveys an advantage in another. And that context means not Read More …
At a high level, we would become more like other English-speaking countries that have universal healthcare and higher taxes (ie., all of them): the UK, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. Except we would have more guns and violence. In other words, not much would change in terms of national character. But there are a few specific Read More …