I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.) Right now I'm writing my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which explores the hypothesis that the genetic roots some of our worst problems and traits — depresison, hyperaggression, violence, antisocial behavior — can also give rise to resilience, cooperation, empathy, and contentment. The book expands on my December 2009 Atlantic article exploring these ideas.
I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years.
According to a poll (pdf) conducted in the days before the Super Bowl, "Democrats strongly prefer the Saints, by a 36-21 margin, but Republicans are narrowly going for the Colts, 26-25. Independents lean toward the Saints as well, 33-20." Hopefully, Democrats take some lessons from their favored team, too.
Early in the game, the Saints failed to score when they had the ball on their opponent's three-yard line. Big setback, and eerily reminiscent of the metaphors many are using for health care. But then the Saints decided against walking off the field and throwing the game to the Colts. Instead, they ran their plays again and came back to win.
Five crates of Scotch whisky and two of brandy have been recovered by a team restoring an Antarctic hut used more than 100 years ago by famed polar explorer Ernest Shackleton.
Five cases of Scotch and two of brandy, and all of it heavy. You can see the importance Shackleton put on a good nightcap
This puts me in mind of John Wesley Powell's Grand Canyon expedition, as described in his classic account of same. Powell had nearly as trying an adventure as Shackleton did — an 8, I would say, to Shackleton's 10 — and when he and his party finally emerged from the canyon into the world of relative safety and food, he took account of their remaining food supplies. The list, published in the book, provided pretty thin gruel. As I remember, there was a bit of flour, perhaps some corn meal and salt — hardly enough to make anything. They had clearly exhausted virtually all food supplies, save what they could catch, gather, or shoot, some time before.
There was only one thing the party (of a dozen or so, if I remember) still had in good supply. They still had 80 pounds of coffee.
I love that. I too would hate to run out of coffee, especially in a stressful envrironment. So when I think of that 80 pounds, I like to imagine the conversation as Powell and his team assembled and packed their provisions before setting out and leaving all stores behind:
I was thrilled this morning to learn that this humble, erratic blog was named one of Top 30 Science Blogs by Eureka, the new monthly science magazine recently launched by the Times of London. I find myself among some most admirable company, including giants, longtime favorites of my own, and a few blogs new-to-me-but-presumably-really-good-anyway.
Given my history of ambivalence about blogging, my sporadic rhythm, my not-best-practice of ranging far and wide, and my generally low traffic, I find this recognition a surprise, but a happy one. I feel a bit like I've been upgraded (possible in this one context) from Sean Penn to Sally Field.
It's also gratifying in two other ways. As I make most of my living writing for print, I find it heartening as well to get this recognition from a wonder of wonders -- a print monthly that just launched, despite much noise about (and evidence for) the demise of serious print journalism. That it comes from the UK, where I'll likely be moving later this year to work on my new book for a while, makes it that much sweeter.
So thanks, Eureka, and thanks especially to regular readers -- and welcome to new ones.
PTSD, pharma, adjuvants, bad movies -- these are a few of my favorite things, and readers' too.
What's Neil doing here? He wasn't on Neuron Culture; I posted his clip on my catch-all, David Dobbs's Somatic Marker, because I love him. So he comes first. From 1986. Looks as if he's having a particularly good time here.
"This is a pretty big deal if it holds up in future trials. One caveat I've not had time to check out is whether the morphine was often applied as part of an more robust medical response in general, which itself might reduce later PTSD symptoms. I hope the DOD soon follows up with another, larger study, for as Ben Carey notes, the has some substantial implications if indeed it holds up."
Me (right) hypnotizing Carl Zimmer just before the Rebooting Science Journalism session at ScienceOnline 2010. It worked. Carl had planned to use his 5 minutes to just say, "We are DOOOMED." Instead he talked about duck sex.
Many at the conference, and pretty much everyone in the Reboot session, agreed that the distinction between journalist and blogger would continue to fade -- and that "good science journalism" would increasingly be defined as well-informed, well-crafted, transparent writing about science. (Transparent as in clear, yes -- but especially as to declaration of possible conflicts of interest.)
Two kinds of stories: "Wow" versus "This smells kinda funny"
In my own 5 minutes (see way below), I drew a distinction between "wow" stories (about cool/new findings, theories, etc) and "something smells funny here" stories (of more investigative or critical nature). The former are often easily and well done by bloggers with good BS detectors; Ed Yong's many excellent explanations of new or replicated findings are a prime example. This poses obvious competition to writers and pubs who rely heavily on such pieces.
The "Smells Funny" stories, however, may be more threatened by decline of paying venues if writers can't find supplemental funding to support the extensive reporting these require. I'm split on that prospect. On one hand, the MSM and traditional science press have bankrolled some great examples of this sort of story -- the numerous great stories the Times has done on conflicts of interest in pharma/psych research, for instance, as were the stories on the horrid conditions at Walter Reed. My own story on PTSD took many, many weeks of time and thousands of dollars of travel. Yet there are Smells Funny stories the MSM won't touch and others it botches badly; perhaps new models will do as well or better in funding these.
You've heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so - ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs - that the authors call marketing-based medicine. And they rely on internal documents from litigation - such as the much-publicized lawsuits over antipsychotics and antidepressants - to illustrate their point.
A stunning must-read from Ed Silverman on a must-read paper. The comments following Ed's post are also rich.
I imagine there will be blowback and some vigorous challenges to the facts and stats in the paper. But the industry emails quoted are themselves devastating, and suggest how successfully the marketing forces within the industry won out over those who wanted to make drugs that clearly worked, rather than aggressively sell drugs that either didn't work that well or worked for some but carried nasty side-effects that were downplayed.
Pharma, biotech, and medicine itself will be years digging out of the credibility hole this sort of thing put them in.
Jerry Coyne takes sharp exception to both a paper and a SciAm Mind Matters article by Paul Andrews and Andy Thomson arguing that depression might be an evolutionary adaptation. Dr. Pangloss punches back. (NB: 1. I was founding editor of Mind Matters, but no longer edit it, did not edit the Andrews/Thomson piece, and don’t know any of these people. 2. While my recent Atlantic article presented an argument for how a gene associated with depression (the so-called SERT gene) might be adaptive, this is not the same argument, at all, that Andrews and Thomson make — though it’s compatible with theirs.)
In a splendidly wrought post titled “A ‘Severe’ Warning for Psychiatry,” Neuroskeptic shows how the expansion of the depression diagnosis — which many argue was driven by pharma’s eagerness to expand the market for antidepressants — may have led to recent findings that antidepressants appear to work mainly for the more severe cases. Irony lives (though at great expense).
A while back I came close to writing a story on how the U.S. is in danger of falling behind both the EU and China in scientific productivity. Mooney & Kirshenbaum have a nice post — and an alarming graph — showing how rapidly China is gaining.
The Atlantic examines What Makes a Great Teacher, while John Hawks gapes at how hard it can be to fire even a really bad one. We don’t figure this out, we watch China and the EU pass us sooner rather than later.
Above: Kasparov after his first meeting with Deep Blue, in 1997, when he crushed DP. Later it wouldn't go so well.
In a splendid article in the NY Review of books, former world chess champion Gary Kasparov ponders the limitations of technology as a means of playing chess truly well. When I hit this paragraph late in the article, it struck me that you could write much the same thing about pharma. FromThe Chess Master and the Computer - The New York Review of Books:
Like so much else in our technology-rich and innovation-poor modern world, chess computing has fallen prey to incrementalism and the demands of the market. Brute-force programs play the best chess, so why bother with anything else? Why waste time and money experimenting with new and innovative ideas when we already know what works? Such thinking should horrify anyone worthy of the name of scientist, but it seems, tragically, to be the norm. Our best minds have gone into financial engineering instead of real engineering, with catastrophic results for both sectors.
I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find 
You've heard of evidence-based medicine. Well, a new paper summarizes a panoply of practices employed over the past two decades or so - ghostwriting, suppressing or spinning data, disease mongering and managing side effect perceptions among docs - that the authors call marketing-based medicine. And they rely on internal documents from litigation - such as the much-publicized lawsuits over antipsychotics and antidepressants - to illustrate their point.
