Author and journalist David Dobbs writes on science, medicine, and culture for the New York Times Magazine, Slate, Scientific American Mind, and other publications; "Buried Answers," one of his features for the Times Magazine, will appear in Houghton Mifflin's esteemed 2006 Best American Science and Nature Writing. The author of three books (see below), he is currently working on a book about the experience and neurobiology of fear. You can find more of his work at his website.
Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral.
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”
The Great Gulf
An epistemological argument disguised as fish fight.
The Northern Forest (with Richard Ober)
An environmental debate misses the most essential relationships in the ecosystem at hand.
From the Never Thought You'd See This Department comes the one-person play Big Pharma, in which writer-director-actor Jennifer Berry apparently skewers said industry. How many plays get reviewed by both the LA Weekly and PLOS Biology? At least one. As the PLOS Biology review notes, Anyone who has experienced the assault of the pharmaceutical industry's marketing campaigns would appreciate Jennifer Berry's one-person play Big Pharma: The Rise of the Anti-Depressant Drug Industry and the Loss of a Generation. Since the mid-1990s, spending on drug promotion has grown steadily, reaching $21 billion in 2002. Berry explores the fallout of this expanded...
I love midday naps, and before I had kids and all time evaporated, I used to take 2 or 3 a week: Kick back the recliner, shut 'em for 20-30 minutes, and wake up a new man. Worked for Churchill during the war, so why not for me? Like a run or a good night's sleep, it was an investment of time that made me both happier and more productive. Yet, stupidly, few of us take them these days.
Why not? We can't afford the time. Or so we think. The study below suggests that perhaps you may well get the time back, in spades, by living longer. Sleep when you're dead? Sleep now, maybe you'll live longer.
There's more news -- unflattering to the company -- about Eli Lilly's, um, selective release of data about its antipsychotic drug: Lilly is trying to squash the full release (aka "the leak" or "unauthorized publication") of some internal memos that allegedly document its attempt to cover up Zyprexa's. dangerous side effects. But as Jake at Pure Pedantry outlines, the attempt -- which itself hardly looks good -- will likely fail, partly because many of of the documents have already been posted on web servers outside the U.S. and thus out of reach of U.S. courts.
This is the latest of several horrifically damning scandals in the drug industry, and it seems to embody and dramatize almost every flaw, foible, folly, and fuck-up that is costing the drug industry its credibility, and quite a few patients their lives.
In my preceding post, about Eli Lilly pressing primary-care physicans to prescribe the antipsychotic drug Zyprexa for elderly dementia, I meant (but forgot) to mention a blog that is following the much wider Zyprexa saga of which this "Dementia is the message" scandal is only a small part.
Posted on December 21, 2006 10:56 AM • 1 Comments •
I try to keep on top of controversies about drug companies, but lately it's hard to keep up with all the latest revelations and laundry spills -- and to wrap your head around the variations. Today the New York Times reports that Eli Lilly mounted an organized effort to convince doctors to prescribe its powerful schizophrenia and bipolar-disorder drug Zyprexa for elderly patients with symptoms of dementia -- despite that dementia in the elderly rises from causes quite different than those of schizophrenia or bipolar disorder, is far less serious problem than schizophrenia, and that Zyprexa seems cause sometimes serious weight gain and susceptibility to diabetes (for which it is facing several lawsuits).
Posted on December 21, 2006 12:16 AM • 4 Comments •
Stroke damage in a human brain _____________________________________________ Horrors: I've forgotten to post several articles I wrote about findings presented at the Society for Neuroscience conference last week. I'll work my way backwards, I suppose, so here's the latest, about a University of Milan discovery that blocking a certain cell-wall gate in the hour after stroke (in a lab rat) could prevent almost all damage. Check it out at Scientific American....
In his recent New Yorker article, "The Risk Pool," as well as a blog post, Malcolm Gladwell has drawn attention to yet another reason to move to a single-payer health insurance system: the punishing competitive disadvantage that American companies and industries suffer when they provide health insurance, especially health insurance for their retirees and pensioners. Gladwell's piece is mainly about retirement benefits, both pensions and health-care; he focuses on the "dependency ratio," which is the ratio, within a company, an industry, or a country, of working wage-earners to nonworking dependents, primarily the young and the retired. The higher the ratio...
You don't see this every day: Jake at Pure Pedantry draws due attention to an incredible case report in the American Journal of Psychiatry showing that a lesion in a patient's brain cured the patient's drug addiction, apparently by knocking out the reward circuit that made the addiction pleasurable. (It also made the man badly depressed.) A stroke that destroyed parts of a drug addict's globus pallidus (pale areas) left him depressed but ended his addiction. Neither drugs nor (alas) wine gave him pleasure any longer. The article, unfortunately, is pay-per-view, but Jake's summary is compelling on its own. To...
from New Scientist, 30 May 2006: Wild birds have helped transmit the deadly H5N1 bird flu across Eurasia, a meeting of 300 scientists at the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) concluded on Wednesday. But killing them to prevent further spread of the disease is not the answer, they warn. I wrote an article about this in Audubon this spring, concluding from the divided and tenuous opinions and facts at hand then that wild birds almost certainly did help spread avian flu. Since then, opinion among scientists has swung a couple of times as the evidence bounced about. The appearance...
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $14.95. That's 50% off the cover price! If I'm not completely satisfied, I'll simply write "cancel" on the invoice and owe nothing. The free issue is mine to keep.
Author and journalist 
