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.ā€¯
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.
A few weeks ago the Question Du Jour, on Seed's Scienceblogs and elsewhere, was "Why Do You Blog?" Here's my answer -- or rather, here I explaine Why I DON'T Blog More Often, and Why I Won't Be Blogging Here Anymore. With this post -- and with mixed feelings -- I bid adieu to my blogging home on Seed's Scienceblogs and return to my own, quieter venue You can find my blog at http://smoothpebbles.com, where I expect to post a few times a month. But in light of how little I've posted here lately, Seed and I have amiably...
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...
The studies in question find that bigger, more interesting cages and fatherhood both spurred growth of dendritic spines -- the neuron's info receivers -- in marmosets. I was quite interested to read this, since two years ago I moved into a bigger, funner house and soon after had another kid. The marmoset in me should be a lot smarter than it was a while back. Whether it is ... well, I'm not sure I'm smart enough to tell.
But this is fascinating stuff, and I recommend it highly. My intro to the posts (from the Mind Matters site) is below, or you can go straight there from here.
Now we know what Harvard's doing with all that money. Here's an amazing look at the state of the art in biological illustration and animation: a sort of cell's inner life, with extremely high production values. Takes a few seconds to load on broadband; don't think I'd try it with dial-up. But this is some serious eye candy. Wish I knew what half the stuff was....
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.
Among the responses to my previous post, "Why we're suckers for war talk", was a comment accusing me of "the error of assuming from start to finish that Bush's decision to go to war was in fact wrong." Well, people still argue about whether evolution or climate change are real, so why not argue over this? I suppose it's open to debate. Maybe I should leave that to history, rather to my own lyin' eyes.
Then again, maybe not. Instead, let's call a spade a spade; let us, please, set and keep the record straight.
Bush's war in Iraq was, is, and will remain a mistake, wrong in its premises, motives, rationales, and execution.
I'm not a reagular reader of Foreign Policy magazine, but thank goodness I check in regularly at The Thinking Meat Project, which draws attention to a fascinating piece by Nobel laureate Daniel Kahnemnn on on how common "error biases" in our thinking make us vulnerable to the strident certainty of hawkish arguments. The article explains why leaders (and the rest of us presumably) often fall for arguments that advocate "forceful action" when something more thoughtful is called for. This is not a cutesy essay by some trendy thinker; it's is a careful piece of work by Princeton economist Daniel...
Chris Anderson, editor of Wired and author of The Long Tail, recently raising some juicy issues about what it would be like to bring a Media 2.0 sort of transparency to a Media 1.0 (well, maybe, 1.6) "traditional" magazine like Wired. His proposals address questions that I, as a writer mainly in 1.0 venues like print magazines and books, have been mulling over in a back-of-the-head sort of way.
Posted on December 22, 2006 11:23 AM • 3 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 •
Amid the rash of school violence over the last few weeks, the town just next to my own placid, lovely Vermont town, Barre, was recently shaken when three teenagers got involved in a grisly murder of a down-and-out drifter and drug dealer.
Amid my guilt at not writing more on avian flu myself, I note well this typically excellent post from Effect Measure, pondering: Why so little word lately of bird flu? Its issues intersect, in a very rough way, with those raised about science journalism...
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 
