Science/medical journalism
terrasig | January 8, 2009With tears in my eyes and my head bowed in deep respect, I share with you the account of Kevin Leitch's vasectomy via Twitter:
http://twitter.com/kevleitch
Kev is an autism and manic depression advocate in West Midlands, UK, who blogs at LeftBrainRightBrain and was one of my earliest followers on Twitter. (P.S. you can follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/abelpharmboy)
All Twittering in response, which includes Kev's own tweets, can be found using the hashtag, #kevsnip.
I first learned of his plans via Twitter but he also posted his scheme here. I am largely credited with the first…
terrasig | January 2, 2009Regular readers know that I am a big fan of the Wall Street Journal Health Blog. While the WSJ is often most associated by us lefties with its conservative op-ed page, the Journal has consistently maintained a high standard for science and medical reporter (which I hope continues under Rupert Murdoch).
With that said, Jacob Goldstein today brings us a good news post on childhood cancer survivor, Dr Trevor Banka, who is now doing his oncology residency (presumably surgical oncology) at Detroit's Henry Ford Hospital with Dr Michael Mott. Mott is the very same surgeon who operated on Banka's…
terrasig | November 16, 2008Picking up the Sunday paper after walking the PharmBeagle, I saw Dr Misha Angrist of the Duke University Institute for Genome Sciences & Policy featured on the frontpage of the local fishwrapper. Ace higher ed reporter, Eric Ferreri, put together a lovely article on this local hero. As Misha notes elsewhere:
In 2007 I became the fourth subject in Harvard geneticist George Church's Personal Genome Project. As the PGP moves forward, I am chronicling the dawn of personal genomics, that is, people obtaining their genomic information for whatever reason(s) and figuring out what to do with it…
terrasig | October 31, 2008PalMD has a nice post up at denialism blog reviewing a recent NYT article on a foundation run by DKNY's Donna Karan donating $850,000 USD to Beth Israel Medical Center to study the combination of Eastern and Western healing methods. PalMD has the details but he then gets into an area about which I am rather passionate: the incredibly low scientific-based bar that is allowed by journalists and hospital administrators for individuals to be considered "experts" in complementary and alternative medicine (CAM).
As the good doctor notes of one such expert:
Other than his standard medical…
terrasig | October 17, 2008Scott Hensley, editor of the WSJ Health Blog, just reminded me that his colleague and blog lead writer, Jacob Goldstein, put together a neat slideshow on the fluorescent marine proteins for which this year's Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded. I've been a bit behind in my reading of other blogs so it was refreshing to see this nicely accessible coverage.
The WSJ blog post, The Nobel Prize in Chemistry and the Beauty of Fluorescent Protein, has the slideshow embedded. You may also go directly to the slideshow here.
(h/t Scott Hensley)
terrasig | October 9, 2008You probably thought this was going to be about Dr Robert Gallo.
Driving in to lab this morning I heard Dan Charles' story on NPR's Morning Edition about the unheralded scientist, Dr Douglas Prasher, who first cloned the green fluorescent protein gene from Aequorea victoria in 1992, as published in Gene. This amazing laboratory tool, you will note, was the focus of yesterday's awarding of the 2008 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Prasher freely distributed the cDNA to those requesting it, including at least two of the three recently Nobelists.
Because of funding shortfalls from both NIH and the…
terrasig | October 8, 2008I am about to lead a discussion of science and medical blogs with a group of journalism students in a course entitled, Medical Journalism. While many of the students are specifically majoring in medical and science journalism in a master's program, some are undergraduates in general journalism and mass communications looking to get a flavor for medical writing for print and broadcast.
My question to the valued readers of this humble blog is:
What would you tell these young, knowledge-seeking minds about how science and medical blogs and bloggers might contribute to their future careers as "…
terrasig | August 28, 2008A couple of colleagues turned me on the other morning to a press release by researchers at the University of Warwick who recently published in PNAS that their data apparently overturns the Meyer-Overton Rule regarding solubility of a compound in olive oil and its propensity for crossing biological membranes. I'm having trouble understanding exactly why their conclusions are earth-shattering.
At the turn of the last century, Meyer (1899) and Overton (1901) independently conducted experiments to demonstrate that the longer the carbon chain of a molecule, the better it partitioned into olive…
terrasig | August 15, 2008The statin class of cholesterol-lowering agents is rich with history and lessons in the power of natural products, the potential of the prepared mind, and just how precarious the path of drug development can be.
American Scientist, the official publication of the scientific research society Sigma Xi, hosts this issue an absolutely lovely article entitled, "Statins: From Fungus to Pharma."
Expertly and engagingly written by University of Pennsylvania biology professor Dr Philip A Rea, the article launches with the story of a then-young Japanese biochemist, Akira Endo. (Evidence of my…
terrasig | April 2, 2008An open letter to the Framing Wars:
Can we start by just considering Chris Mooney as a person distinct from Matt Nisbet?
The problem I see is that Chris is suffering blogospheric vitriol far beyond his own comments because of his association with Matt Nisbet. To the best of my knowledge, Matt Nisbet is a communications professor trying to make a name for "framing" as an academic area of research in his discipline (I've only met him once). As I lack academic credentials in his discipline, I am inadequately prepared to pass judgment as to the scholarly gravity of such an area of study. In a…
terrasig | March 30, 2008In attempting to re-engage my academic brain stem, I've been doing a little continuing education the last couple of weeks at various forums hosted by the University-That-Tobacco-Built. Last week I had the pleasure of attending a forum of the Duke student organization, Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE), that featured four academic leaders (who were women) and Bora Zivkovic discussing non-bench science careers.
One of the panelists was an old colleague, Dr Rochelle (Shelly) Schwartz-Bloom, an award-winning neuropharmacologist and educator in the Duke Department of Pharmacology &…
terrasig | March 22, 2008I usually don't do these kinds of linkfests but we're on the road for a Pharmboy family Easter weekend and there are a few items of interest that slipped through my fingers recently. Here are a few things that readers may enjoy this weekend:
Bora's blog gets its 1,000,000th visitor
Go over and offer congratulations to Mr Community.
Get a tetanus shot first, and be sure to use clean nails.
Adding new meaning to "get off the cross, someone else needs the wood," WSJ Health Blog alerts us to ritual crucifixions in the Philippines. By the way, belated congratulations to our Health Blog…
terrasig | February 25, 2008[Note: I originally posted this last Thursday under another title but it got lost in other events of that day. As I find it ironic that Mr Comarow has been attacked by an alternative medicine practitioner and advocate, I find this story worthy of reposting.]
A few weeks ago the skeptical blogosphere was up in arms about an article in US News & World Report by Avery Comarow on alternative medicine services in US academic medical centers. Mr Comarow is a senior medical writer for USN&WR and best known as editor for the last 18 years of the magazine's annual feature, America's Best…
terrasig | February 3, 2008
Yesterday was the 1st anniversary of Blogroll Amnesty Day, originally proposed by a reasonably prominent blogger who used the occasion to relieve himself of guilt when purging his blogroll and building back up only a list of those he reads regularly.
I learned via my new homies, PhysioProf and DrugMonkey that Jon Swift and Skippy have proposed this day instead as an opportunity for low-traffic bloggers to blogroll even lower-traffic bloggers to help everyone rise up in notoriety.
Despite being here at ScienceBlogs for 20 months, I have managed to keep my readership to a small but select…
terrasig | January 28, 2008If you read nothing else: Men with prostate cancer should avoid any dietary supplement containing testosterone (or anything that sounds like it) or that offers claims of increased virility, sexual performance, or increased muscle mass.
Consumption of a herbal/hormone dietary supplement has been linked to two cases of aggressive prostate cancer as reported in a paper in the 15 January issue of Clinical Cancer Research (abstract free; full paper paywalled) . The observations and follow-up studies were conducted by urologists at the University of Texas Southwestern Medical School and Baylor…
terrasig | January 23, 2008Plenty of e-ink has already been spilled regarding the panel on "Changing Minds Through Science Communication: a panel on Framing Science," from this past weekend's NC Science Blogging Conference (see Larry Moran, Rick MacPherson, Molly Keener, and Ryan Somma for examples). The panel was the least "unconference" session of the meeting, beginning with 10 min presentations from ocean conservationist and marine biology bloggers Jennifer Jacquet and Sheril Kirshenbaum followed by Chris Mooney, Sheril's co-blogger, freelance writer, and author of The Republican War on Science and Storm World.…
terrasig | December 30, 2007In rats, though. But still very interesting.
So says yesterday's New York Times Op-Ed by psychiatrist, Paul Steinberg, entitled, "The Hangover That Lasts." This timely piece follows our discussion on Friday about champagne choices for New Year's Eve, the premier event for binge-drinking.
While I'm not a neuropharmacologist, Steinberg's article piqued my interest because it focuses on the work of Dr Fulton T Crews and his former student Dr Jennifer Obernier (now with the National Academy of Sciences) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Dr Crews is director of the UNC Bowles…
terrasig | November 30, 2007There's a great interview up at the website of the North Carolina Biotechnology Center's BT Catalyst with Dr Chris Brodie, associate editor of American Scientist magazine, a publication of the Sigma Xi scientific research society. Chris recently helped to organize a new organization called Science Communicators of North Carolina (SCONC) and speaks with terrific clarity on the changing world for scientists wishing to be involved in public discourse:
In the culture of academic science, the first priority is to secure grants, followed by publishing scientific papers, teaching, administration…
terrasig | October 26, 2007Over at the WSJ Health Blog, Ron Winslow breaks the news that Jerry Bishop has passed away from lung cancer at age 76.
Winslow is an outstanding sci/med journalist in his own right and provides us with a detailed retrospective of Bishop's career and his role as a science writing mentor. In his 42 years with the Journal, Bishop broke many critical stories with what Winslow describes as "uncommon clarity and insight":
A page-one story published in 1966 included a spot-on prediction of what became the Internet--some three decades before the Web transformed communications...
...Another scoop was…
terrasig | September 22, 2007Great local coverage of Anton Zuiker, organizer with Bora Zivkovic of the NC Science Blogging Conference (SBC '08) (together with Brian Russell and the real Paul Jones).
The reporter, Dan Barkin of the Raleigh (NC) News & Observer, totally nailed Anton with this quote:
The Web has evolved into a tribal Internet of passionate bloggers like Zuiker, and he has become a sort-of local brand. He's a quiet visionary. He's a low-key doer. He's a let's-get-together-and-see-where-this-goes guy. It's the Zuikers of this new, interwoven world who may play a significant role in determining how far Web…