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.
I finally got a chance to write about Patrick O'Brian's splendid Aubrey-Maturin novels. Captain Jack Aubrey, the hero of those Dickensically rich novels, provides a model of decision-making relevant to the paper reviewed in this week's Mind Matters,, the weekly blog seminar on mind and brain I edit at sciam.com. This week's topic is whether big, complicated decisions -- buying a car, going to war -- can be reliably made with little deliberation. The paper under review argues that you can. Our Mind Matters reviewers, psychologists Alex Haslam and George Loewenstein, differ decisively.
Posted on February 6, 2007 12:57 PM • 2 Comments •
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.
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...
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 •
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...
Nature reporter Declan Butler, who has done some of best reporting on avian flu and (separately) the use of the internet as a means of communicating science, has updated his superb Google Earth avian flu maps to use Google Earth's new time series function. The resulting maps are both beautiful and even more informative and striking than before. The dynamics of the flu's spread are more clear, and the time series highlights the dynamic nature of this virus, particularly the way the flu has reappeared in some places, flaring up again — an important aspect that's otherwise easy to overlook.
If I like what I see, I'll receive 5 more issues (6 in all) for just $19.95. 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 
