Words about science and hiking
A truism among early-stage investors is that “you don’t invest in technologies, you invest in people”. The idea is that a smart, resourceful team will find a way to succeed, even if their technology crashes hard on the rocks of reality. Great leaders, the thinking goes, will always find a way forward. That’s not a Read More …
I watched the HBO documentary on the Theranos disaster last night. Well, I watched the first half before I fell asleep. That’s not a criticism of the movie; the information transfer rate of movies (and podcasts) is just much, much slower than reading and the visuals weren’t sufficiently arresting to compensate for the slow rate Read More …
None of the above. It’s Goldman Sachs. Or the Supreme Court. Take your pick. These parents weren’t buying their kids the best possible education, nor were they denying one to anyone else. The Ivies are great schools, but we have a lot of great universities in this country. The education you might get at Harvard Read More …
Today’s sci journo fail is a bonus entry – it is also a history fail. The title, “COLONIALISTS ARE COMING FOR BLOOD—LITERALLY” pretty well sums up the argument: taking blood samples for therapeutic and diagnostic development purposes is exactly the same as stealing diamonds, gold, timber, arable land and people from poorer countries. Please. Blood Read More …
Phage therapy isn’t ever going to be the cure-all envisioned by overly-enthusiastic science writers. But it doesn’t have to be. Curing some patients of some indications is a noble and worthy goal in and of itself. And maybe when we learn to use phage therapy in limited applications, we can start thinking about tackling sepsis Read More …
To anyone trained in medicine or biology, this question seems laughably naive. One’s impulse is to brush it off with a quick and curt answer. But it is a very good and important question because it distinguishes modern from ancient disease concepts. The notion that specific agents cause specific diseases—something that now seems blindingly obvious— Read More …