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The radical "trillionth ton" meme

The more I read about the trillionth ton (or tonne for our non-American friends), the more intrigued I am by its power to change the way we approach the threat of global warming. I wrote last week about the idea, which represents a whole new way of thinking about carbon emissions, but I'd like to take another stab at it, in hopes of spreading the meme further than my last post managed. The "trillionth ton" refers to the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. Before the invention of the steam engine and everything that followed since the middle of the 18th century, there was a certain amount of…

Lawsuit Against Ca Science Center...

...for canceling the showing of a creationist film, Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record.  The background is on Greg Laden's Blog, href="http://scienceblogs.com/gregladen/2009/10/los_angeles_venue_cancels_inte.php">Los Angeles Venue Cancels Intelligent Design Film: You'll recall that it was recently reported that the California Science Center, which is loosely affiliated with the Smithsonian Institution, had planned a screening of "Darwin's Dilemma: The Mystery of the Cambrian Fossil Record" which is apparently a creationist documentary. Well, now, the venue has…

Power Laws and Cities

Bettencourt et al. in PNAS looked a variety of cities of various sizes. They wanted to determine what the effect of population size of the city has on their properties including physical properties like roads, but also economic properties like consumption. What they found was very interesting. What they found was that 1) these properties all appear to follow a power law with respect to population and 2) these properties fall into specific categories depending on the power law. The first thing we should talk about before going to this paper is what is a power law. Power laws are ubiquitous…

Anonymous Medical Blogger Sued for Defamation and Violating HIPAA

An anonymous medical blogger in Texas is being sued by a hospital for defamation and for releasing patient information: An unlikely Internet frontier is Paris, Texas, population 26,490, where a defamation lawsuit filed by the local hospital against a critical anonymous blogger is testing the bounds of Internet privacy, First Amendment freedom of speech and whistle-blower rights. A state district judge has told lawyers for the hospital and the blogger that he plans within a week to order a Dallas Internet service provider to release the blogger's name. The blogger's lawyer, James Rodgers of…

The Year in ID

What a year it has been for the Discovery Institute and the Intelligent Design movement! Below the fold, I detail the advances that ID has made in the short time since Judge Jones delivered his ruling in Kitzmiller v. Dover. January Dembski: Just as a tree that has been "rimmed" (i.e., had its bark completely cut through on all sides) is effectively dead even if it retains its leaves and appears alive, so Darwinism has met its match with the movement initiated by Phillip Johnson. Expect Darwinism's death throes, like Judge Jones's decision, to continue for some time. But don't mistake death…

Oh, no, not again…once more unto the breach

This is your last gasp on the topic of the proper way to make a sexual advance. I'm just going to wrap up a few dangling bits. Jen has slammed Richard Dawkins for some comments here. I can confirm that those comments were actually from Richard Dawkins. I also have to say that I agree with Jen and disagree with Richard. Richard did make the valid point that there are much more serious abuses of women's rights around the world, and the Islam is a particularly horrendous offender. Women have their genitals mutilated, are beaten by husbands without recourse to legal redress, are stoned to death…

Comparing the Candidates on Health Care

The New England Journal of Medicine compares the candidates visions for health care reform. (Hat-tip: PalMD) On John McCain: The McCain campaign emphasizes key advantages of this approach. First, the current tax exclusion disproportionately benefits higher-income Americans, since its value depends on a worker's tax bracket. Providing an equal credit to all Americans is a fairer allocation of federal revenues, and since the credit is refundable, even those who do not pay taxes would qualify for federal payments. Second, the tax exclusion benefits only persons with employer-sponsored insurance…

Caution and Optimism about Lifespan Extension

There is a great review of anti-aging science in Nature by an Jan Vijg and Judith Campisi. Life extension has been in the news with compounds like resveratrol -- a compound found in red wine -- shown to increase the life span of nematodes, yeast and most recently mice (though the mice in that study were on an unhealthy high calorie diet). Explaining how these compounds work is a more difficult challenge. We think that these compounds work by influencing pathways that regulate overall metabolism. We also think that these same pathways are altered by caloric-restriction -- a technique that…

A poll on kitty experimentation

There is an extremely common sort of experiment to understand plasticity of the developing brain. These are important experiments to understand an important phenomenon: the brain does not simply unfold ineluctably to produce a fully functional organ, but actually interacts constantly with its environment to build a functioning organ that is matched to the world it must model and work with. This was one of the very first things I learned as a budding neuroscientist; my first undergraduate research experience was in the lab of Jenny Lund at the University of Washington, where we were given…

NY Times Reviews Mooney's Storm World

Chris Mooney's Storm World is reviewed in Sunday's edition of the NY Times, a major moment for any author since the attention will surely give a major boost to the book's profile and sales. Indeed, to date, the buzz about Chris' new book has been glowing. (Full Disclosure: Currently on a joint speaking tour with Chris, I have first hand experience with the growing buzz. I've been in rooms where climate scientists have been lining up to have Chris autograph multiple copies of his book.) But don't take my word for it, consider the evidence: The Boston Globe called his tale of the science…

Texas, Where The Living Is Contradictory

Our culture wars make for strange ironies. The fight over the cervical cancer vaccine is a case in point. Yesterday news broke that a vaccine for cervical cancer might not be all it's cracked up to be. Cervical cancer is caused by a virus known as human papillomavirus. It infects epithelial cells in the skin and other surface layers of the body, including the vagina and throat. On rare occasion it causes its host cells to start replicating madly, creating growths that sometimes progress into full-blown tumors. It's a major menace: the American Cancer Society estimates that it causes 17…

The Return of the Puppet Masters

Are brain parasites altering the personalities of three billion people? The question emerged a few years ago, and it shows no signs of going away. I first encountered this idea while working on my book Parasite Rex. I was investigating the remarkable ability parasites have to manipulate the behavior of their hosts. The lancet fluke Dicrocoelium dendriticum, for example, forces its ant host to clamp itself to the tip of grass blades, where a grazing mammal might eat it. It's in the fluke's interest to get eaten, because only by getting into the gut of a sheep or some other grazer can it…

Modeling the Diffusion of Information In Brain and Behavior

Complex cognition can be predicted by remarkably simple tasks. For example, the speed with which you choose one of two possible responses can reliably predict IQ. Some theories propose that this relationship is due to differences in something called "processing speed," but more recent work has shown the effect is really due to the slowness of your slowest reaction times on such simple tasks. Known as the "worst performance rule," this can be revealed through various RT distribution decomposition techniques (e.g., "binning" of reaction times or ex-gaussian analysis). A particular class of…

Memory in Moment-to-Moment Action: Reactive Control in Older Adults

How does memory help to accomplish moment-to-moment goal-directed action? Classic accounts, such as Baddeley's working memory model, suggest that there are separate storage and processing ("executive") mechanisms, whereas newer accounts (proposed by a variety of researchers) propose that storage and processing are intertwined in the form of maintained goal or context representations. According to these newer theories, individual differences in the strength of goal representations can more or less efficiently "bias" perception and behavior, particularly in cases where habit or environmental…

Switching and Maintenance: One and the Same?

Yesterday I reviewed evidence showing that set switching (e.g., your ability to suddenly switch behaviors) and rule representation (your ability to represent rules in a game, for example), may be distinct processes, at least insofar as they may show distinct developmental trajectories and rely on distinct neural substrates. Today's post will review a new study from Developmental Neuropsychology that also aims to show distinct developmental trajectories for set switching and rule maintenance, and how these claims hold up to a deeper analysis. Huizinga & van der Molen administered four…

Eye of the Beholder

As a species we are consumed by love. Ask yourself, how many cultural productions (films, stories, songs, dances, arts) do not have love, the loss of love or the absence of love as their central theme? Would you be satisfied with what was left over? That fact that love has so much power over us is just one reason why evolutionary research is so fascinating. A well-worn trope of human culture is mens obsession with female infidelity. Othello. Madame Bovary. Desperate Housewives. These are just three Western examples of this concern that are paralleled in nearly every society throughout…

Plants, Empire and the Ignorance of Western Civilization

Aldous Huxley wrote in his Collected Essays that, "Most ignorance is vincible ignorance. We don't know because we don't want to know." In Plants and Empire: Colonial Bioprospecting in the Atlantic World, Stanford historian Londa Schiebinger highlights the role that such intentional ignorance played in the dissemination of knowledge (and the lack thereof). Whether this ignorance is of local plants and languages--because of the early scientific tradition of naming species only after revered European naturalists--or whether it is of the abortifacients that women would use to terminate an…

Some things I just don't understand

I gotta admit that I just don't get it. Perhaps it's my overly narrow world-view, or perhaps it's my lack of imagination, but I really don't get it. Let me explain. I've got this horrid pain in my back and leg. It's searing, aching, gnawing. My foot is numb, but still hurts. It tingles, feels heavy, and it's weak. Sometimes it feels like electricity is jumping through it, sometimes like little worms are crawling in it. Being a curious person, I look for ways to explain this. I'm sure this horrid crawling feeling could be explained thusly: Perhaps there are actual worms crawling…

Comparative Approaches to Grand Challenges in Physiology-updates

Image from the American Physiological Society's website.http://www.the-aps.org/mm/Conferences/APS-Conferences/2014-Conferences/… I am really excited about the comparative physiology conference that starts this weekend in San Diego! Here is a press release about the meeting (author Stacy Brooks from the American Physiological Society): Bethesda, Md. (September 25, 2014) — More than 400 comparative and evolutionary physiologists will gather to present new research and discoveries in animal physiology at the American Physiological Society’s 2014 intersociety meeting “Comparative Approaches to…

Exercise and Body Weight

Image by atomicjeep I came across a very interesting article in the Ottawa Citizen this weekend, unpleasantly titled "For Canada's obese, exercise alone isn't going to cut it". The crux of the article is this - exercise will not help you lose weight. Every few months it seems that this issue pops up, including a cover article in TIME magazine last year, which Peter has previously dissected. This is a complicated issue, and given the sensational title, I wasn't expecting much from the Citizen article. But the article is actually very well written, and includes interviews with a number…

First recorded experiment? Daniel 1: 1-16

One of the earliest references to a controlled experiment is from Daniel 1: 1-16 in the Old Testament of the Bible. In this 'experiment' Daniel pits his nutrition regime of "pulse" to eat and water to drink versus the best cuts of meat and the most highly rated wine. Check out the experimental methods and results below: 1:1 In the third yearof the reign of Jehoiakim king of Judah came Nebuchadnezzar king of Babylon unto Jerusalem, and besieged it. 1:2 And the Lord gave Jehoiakim king of Judah into his hand, with part of the vessels of the house of God: which he carried into the land of…

Newton's Laws in Science Fiction TV and Movies

Chad notes, in response to PZ's rather absurd assertion that biology is the only Dumped Upon science, and that physics is so well treated in movies and TV, that "Most of the SF movies I see are lucky if they can get Newton's Laws right, let alone any of the finer points of astrophysics." Indeed, this was the topic of one of the two talks I gave at Hypericon a couple of weeks ago. Let me try to explain one aspect of this: specifically, the motion of space fighters. Don't get me wrong. Star Wars is a great movie, one of my all-time favorites. It's even still a pretty good movie if Han doesn't…

Enjoying Oahu: Turtle Beach and Shark's Cove

As a marine biologist by training, I naturally love the ocean and just about everything in it. So it is such a treat for me to be able to just go out and enjoy what I love. Right now, I'm in between my last job as a simple graduate and being a full time graduate student, so I've got a little free time to explore. And, being on an island in the middle of the Pacific which is only something around 38 miles across, exploration naturally tends to include the ocean. As a blogger, of course, I feel the need to share such excursions with you. So, it's quite happily that I have decided to extend my "…

Florida folk music loses Steve Blackwell

Another reason I reposted yesterday on my Stetson Kennedy visit in January was to also note some bad news that came my way this week. Steve Blackwell, Florida folk guitarist and magnificent songwriter, lost his battle with malignant melanoma last Sunday. He was only 58. His memorial service will be this afternoon in Punta Gorda, Florida. As I wrote in May of the first time I heard Mr Blackwell at the Stetson Kennedy Foundation inaugural event: My admiration for Arlo Guthrie notwithstanding, the musical highlight of the night was the Steve Blackwell/Dan Leach duet of "Beluthahatchee on my…

They Should Call It "Tree-of-Hell"

At this point in the fall, most things in my garden have closed up shop till next spring. Oh, there are some chrysanthemums blooming, and the Virginia sweetspire and chokeberry tree have put on their fiery fall colors, but there's not much in the way of growth going on. Except for the evil invasives. Sunday I went out to take a closer look at my beauty bush, which is currently sporting a heavy crop of bright purple berries, and discovered to my dismay about ten or more tree seedlings springing up all around it. Three of them had already grown quite thick little trunks and were threatening…

Tell Me Your Barbie Story

So, I can't sleep because I'm very worried about my mom right now. I won't bore you with details; she's okay for the moment but a lot is weighing on my heart. The upshot is, you get a post about Barbie dolls. Yes, Barbie dolls. Inspired by Keet & Nini, whose site I found by way of Astrodyke. Thank you, Astrodyke! The stuff about Barbies is in this post at Keet & Nini's. Keet talks about her daughter loving Disney princesses and playing with Barbies, and reminisces about the other girls in her high school Science Club. She concludes: I wonder what they are doing now, and…

How Do We Break The 20% Barrier?

This is the first of three discussion posts for Week 1 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on "Joy of Science" under in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Eisenhart & Finkel and Brainard & Carlin. "Women (Still) Need Not Apply" by Eisenhart and Finkel and "A Six-Year Longitudinal Study of Undergraduate Women in Engineering and Science" by Brainard and Carlin seem to be in conflict with each other. Can "compensatory strategies" like women in engineering (WIE) programs make…

Who's NOT a Leader?

I just wanna hurl chunks right now at fellow Sb'er Chad, who writes Uncertain Principles. Chad wrote this foolish entry about the so-called pipeline problem of women in physics. Which just goes to show that even an advanced degree in physics is no guarantee you won't have your head up your ass now and then. The gist of Chad's post seems to be that, since he is a nice guy, it is awfully unfair of unnamed personnages to go about bashing physics profs for their bad behavior vis-a-vis women, especially since most of his colleagues on the faculty are also nice guys. Here's the whiny end of…

Perjury and Hypocrisy

It's amazing what a difference a few short years can make. Once upon a time, many prominent Republicans believed that perjury was a crime so heinous as to warrant throwing the president out of office. Today, however, we find that many of these same characters believe that any sort of jail sentence is far too harsh a punishment for that very same crime. There's likely to be stiff competition among leading Republicans for the "biggest tool in the drawer" award over the next news cycle or two, and the final winner probably won't be clear until after the Sunday morning shows are over. At the…

Gonzalez,Textbooks, and Research

Yesterday, Casey Luskin posted yet another article outlining still more of the Discovery Institute's complaints about the Iowa State decision to deny tenure to DI Fellow and ID proponent Guillermo Gonzalez. This one complains about the characterization of Gonzalez as "having slowed down considerably" and "not started new things." (That characterization appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education last week.) I have no intention of getting into a debate over the precise merits of Dr. Gonzalez's case, for a number of reasons. First of all, I'm one of those who believes that the effort that…

Howling

I know what I feel, and I don't like it. I don't know what to say, and I don't like that, either. I've been trying to write this post for two hours and three beers now, and I've spent most of that time staring at a blank white box on the screen. I've started to write things time after time, and I've deleted them time after time, and for all I know I'll throw out this attempt five minutes from now. Or maybe not. It's been another hour and another two beers and I don't seem to have managed to write anything else, but those few words are still staring back at me as I look into the screen.…

Yes, Virginia, there is a difference between astroturf and grassroots

Amanda Adams of OMB Watch was kind enough to draw my attention to a post by Paul Sherman over at the blog of the Center for Competitive Politics. It appears that Mr. Sherman liked neither the tone nor the substance of my last post on astroturf disclosure legislation. He was appalled by some of the things I said about the fine folks at American Target Advertising, citing my post as an example of how "proponents of disclosure...can be downright nasty to those who disagree with them." The tone of my response to Fitzgibbons and the ATA folks, and the tone of the remainder of this response to Mr…

Why the denial camp is winning (and we're all losing) the climate wars

It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the defensive have some thinking to do. First, consider the timing of recent events. As the year began, climatologists were able to launch what should have been a devastating counterattack to the nonsensical but appealing notion that global warming has been replacing by global cooling. The records show that the…

Information and metaphysics

There's a famous anecdote about Wittgenstein and his friend Piero Sraffa by Norman Malcolm (Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir): Wittgenstein was insisting that a proposition and that which it describes must have the same 'logical form', the same 'logical multiplicity', Sraffa made a gesture, familiar to Neapolitans as meaning something like disgust or contempt, of brushing the underneath of his chin with an outward sweep of the finger-tips of one hand. And he asked: 'What is the logical form of that?' Sraffa's example produced in Wittgenstein the feeling that there was an absurdity in the…

The ontology of biology 2 - How to derive an ontology in biology

There have been several attempts to produce an ontology of biology and the life sciences in general. One of the more outstanding was Joseph Woodger's 1937 The Axiomatic Method in Biology, which was based on Russell's and Whitehead's Principia and the theory of types. In this, Woodger attempted to develop a logic system that would account for all the objects of the theories of biology, especially of embryology, physiology (including cell theory) and genetics. It was hard going even for logicians (Tarski himself wrote an appendix), and the theory thus elucidated seemed to be very post hoc - it…

What is atheism?

Every so often we start a discussion somewhere about who is and who isn't an atheist. PZ Mackers has the poster shown below up on his blog: I want to look at the term and associated meanings of "atheist" and cognate terms, because the way I taxonomise the world, only two of those guys are possibly atheists. Sagan and Hemingway, maybe. I don't know much about them; but Jefferson, Franklin, Darwin were all deists; Lincoln a theist (though not an orthodox Christian), and also Clemens (unless that's Tom Selleck), and Einstein a "Spinozan theist". Atheism has a number of conflicting…

How Do Floating Water Bridges Defy Gravity?

The term “floating water bridge” may sound nonsensical, but it’s the most logical name for a phenomenon that occurs when two beakers of water set slightly apart are zapped with high-voltage electricity and the water molecules jump across the gap to connect and form a thin thread of water. The molecular structure that suspends this liquid bridge has stumped scientists for over a century. Now, a team of scientists has peered into floating water bridges with high-energy x-rays using the Advanced Photon Source (APS) at Argonne National Laboratory. Their work, “Floating water bridges and the…

Stephen Jay Gould's view of life

Shortly after my wife and I were married in the summer of 2006, but before our apartment was lined with overstocked bookshelves, we used to make at least one weekly stop at the local public library. While she browsed a wide array of sections, I invariably scaled the back staircase to the science section on the second floor. The question was not whether I wanted to read a science book, but which one. One of the first I picked up was Stephen Jay Gould's essay collection The Lying Stones of Marrakech. Rightly or wrongly, I recognized him as the voice of evolutionary science, a topic that had…

I get email

I have sad news to report. John A. Davison has gone insane. No, I know, he's been nuts for a long, long time, but I was just purging the ol' trashed mail folder today and discovered that he has been writing to me two or three times a day, usually just by dumping his latest comment on his poor dead blog, which mainly consists of him talking to himself about how everyone is ignoring him, and isn't joining his crusade against Richard Dawkins, Wesley Elsberry, and PZ Myers, and how we're all terrified of JA Davison and Darwinism is going to disappear any day now to be replaced by his theory. As I…

Typical Health Insurance Costs

I was prompted to rant again about health insurance, after reading a post at Blogcritics.  The author was highly critical of the href="http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/09/25/AR2007092501474.html">SCHIP proposals.   href="http://blogcritics.org/archives/2007/09/25/185410.php">SCHIP: It's for the Insurance Companies, Not the Children Written by Dave Nalle Published September 25, 2007 Whenever someone in government makes a proposal and says it's 'for the children' you know you're about to be screwed. The 'for the chidren' argument is one of pure emotion…

Will blogs reshape the scientific process?

Shelley Batts, Nick Anthis, and Tara Smith authored an article on science blogging which appeared yesterday in PLoS Biology. In their words, We propose a roadmap for turning blogs into institutional educational tools and present examples of successful collaborations that can serve as a model for such efforts. The article gives solid examples of how blogging has facilitated scientific collaboration, in fields from plant genetics to science policy. I don't think anyone disputes that blogs can open the lines of communication and enable interactions across research groups, institutions, and…

How to keep the astronauts from losing it on long voyages

In light of the Lisa Nowak love triangle/kidnapping/nutness NASA is re-evaluating how it...well...evaluates astronauts for psychological fitness for space flights. Part of the problem is one of sex frankly; astronauts are not allowed to have it while on duty. NASA has been intransigent about the idea of the astronauts have intimate relations, justifying this policy because they would rather not deal with any of the associated problems on manned missions. On the other hand, for particularly long flights -- such as trips to Mars -- sex could be a stabilizing force. Anyway, an interesting…

The Problem Isn't Religion or Atheism, It's Fanaticisim

Dinesh D'Souza, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, defends organized religion from criticism that links it with violence and wars: - In recent months, a spate of atheist books have argued that religion represents, as "End of Faith" author Sam Harris puts it, "the most potent source of human conflict, past and present." Columnist Robert Kuttner gives the familiar litany. "The Crusades slaughtered millions in the name of Jesus. The Inquisition brought the torture and murder of millions more. After Martin Luther, Christians did bloody battle with other Christians for another three…

Dilbert Creater Recovers from Spasmodic Dysphonia

I hadn't actually known this, but the creator of the Dilbert cartoons, Scott Adams, was diagnosed about two years ago with a rare disease called spasmodic dysphonia. Apparently he just recovered -- in spite of overwhelming odds against that happening. First a bit about spasmodic dysphonia. Spasmodic dysphonia is a movement disorder involving the muscles of speaking. It is characterized by spasms in the adductor and/or abductor muscles of the larynx (the adductor muscles bring the vocal cords together and the abductor muscles bring the vocal cords apart). Spasms in either muscles prevents…

Computers Are People Too, And Must Be Punished For Their Indiscretions

For several years, researchers have been contrasting human-human and human-computer interactions in order go gain more insight into theory of mind. The assumption is that people don't treat computers like, well, people. It's not a totally unfounded assumption, either. In several studies in which people have competed with computers in games like the prisoner's dilemma or the ultimatum game, their behavior has been different than when they played the same games with other humans. In the ultimatum game, for example, on player is given a sum of money and told to offer some of it to a second…

Priming "God Did It"

Recently, several social psychologists have posited a "Whodunit" system in the brain that's always looking to assign authorship -- either our own or somebody else's -- to actions. Most of the time, it's pretty easy to tell when we've done something, because we have all sorts of signals coming from the body, along with the brain's awareness of the signal's it's sending. But in some cases, particularly when bodily signals are ambiguous or absent, the "Whodunit" system can be tricked into thinking that someone else caused an action that was really of our own doing, or that we caused an action…

Liberal and Conservative Anterior Cingulate Cortices

Reading an article in the LA Times today, I learned something exciting: political differences in thought happen in the brain. At least that's what a new study published in Nature Neuroscience(1) purports to show, though I hear that the next issue of the journal will contain critical responses from Descartes, Malenbranche, and Eccles. Seriously though, the paper by Amodio et al. takes as its launching point the large body of evidence that political conservatives and liberals differ on personality dimensions related to openness to experience, tolerance of uncertainty, and cognitive complexity…

Friday Sprog Blogging: psychic visions.

In pondering the effects of nature versus nurture, the Free-Ride parents have become painfully aware that a large part of their offspring's environment is provided by the kids at school. This is how the sprogs came to be aware of the existence of The Disney Channel, whose offering seem to grate on the parental units as much as they delight the offspring. At Casa Free-Ride, the price for choosing a television program your parent does not care for is engaging in some critical thinking about its subject matter. Dr. Free-Ride: OK, so explain That's So Raven to me. What is the deal with Raven…

Is the NCAA encouraging academic fraud?

I'm pretty sure the National Collegiate Athletic Association doesn't want college athletes -- or the athletics programs supporting them -- to cheat their way through college. However, this article at Inside Higher Ed raises the question of whether some kind of cheating isn't the best strategy to give the NCAA what it's asking for. From the article: [M]any agree that the climate has changed in college athletics in ways that may make such misbehavior more likely. And it has happened since the NCAA unveiled its latest set of academic policies that raised the stakes on colleges to show that…

Book review: Generation Rx.

I recently finished reading Greg Critser's Generation Rx: How Prescription Drugs Are Altering American Lives, Minds, and Bodies. Frankly, I don't feel so well. Critser starts off by dropping us into the regulatory environment in the U.S. in the early 1970s, walking us through the multifarious forces that started to change that environment. Some of the changes seem welcome and important -- for example, removing the requirement that companies wishing to market generic versions of FDA approved drugs (once the patents had expired on those drugs) produce additional studies demonstrating the…