Women in science and medicine
terrasig | November 2, 2008If you haven't already heard it elsewhere, one of your favorite blogging physicians, Dr Val Jones, has recently hung out her own e-shingle at Getting Better with Dr Val. Many of you know Dr Val from her previous blog at Revolution Health, Dr Val and the Voice of Reason. Dr Val served there as Senior Medical Director and oversaw the growth of the consumer health portal as it grew to 120 million pageviews per month (!).
Here's how Dr Val describes her new digs:
Getting Better is the continuation of Dr. Val Jones' previous blog at Revolution Health: "Dr. Val and the Voice of Reason." The…
terrasig | September 15, 2008I'll be a little light on blogging this week so I'll mostly be sharing a couple of quick reads I've stumbled upon recently.
This one is presented in light of my post last week on National HBCU Week and the accompanying post from my colleague, DrugMonkey (whose referral generated even more discussion).
This tidbit is from the journalism and news production students of James Logan High School in Union City, CA:
"I always, always, always like mathematics." Marjorie Lee Browne.
Marjorie Lee Browne (9 Sept 1914-19 Oct 1979) was a notable mathematics educator, the second African-American woman to…
terrasig | August 28, 2008All of us at Terra Sig world headquarters are sending out hearty congratulations to the boys over at Deep Sea News - Peter Etnoyer, Craig McClain, and Kevin Zelnio - on the announcement of their September move to the Discovery Channel online.
I've had the good fortune of meeting all three gentlemen in person, even breaking bread with Craig. I can tell you that they are individually and collectively superb stewards of the deep sea and tireless promoters of conservation and habitat preservation. Best wishes to you fellas - we'll miss you but we'll keep reading (plus the Zelnio family is…
terrasig | August 26, 2008[Sort of a repost from the last two years, updated appropriately - APB]
Six years ago at 11:24 am EDT (1624 GMT), your humble blogger was handed the keys to a whole new vocabulary of love.
The gift came in the form of a 7 lb. 13 oz. (3,544 gm), 20.5 inch (52 cm) bundle of drooling, peeing, meconium-pooping bundle of baby girl, yanked from an incision in PharmGirl's abdomen.
The lessons of compassion and unconditional love I have been taught by these two women have comprised the most formative experiences of my life.
In return, PharmGirl has suffered tremendous indignancies on my behalf: the…
terrasig | July 21, 2008Go on over and offer your best wishes to Dr. Ventii.
She was just awarded her Ph.D. in cancer biochemistry from Emory University in Atlanta.
Karen writes the blog, Science to Life.
Congratulations, Karen!
terrasig | May 22, 2008Well, things have changed in my life that have begun to impact my posting frequency so I really appreciate the support of readers when I last spoke of this change of life (no, not menopause).
I've even gotten so distracted that I have neglected to read the daily fishwrapper - that is until today's recycling when I stood outside on the street at 6 am rummaging through my blue bin to read Tuesday's paper (hell, it was news to me). At least I was courteous enough to the neighbors to throw on a pair of shorts.
In it, I learned that an academic physician settled with her employer for $200K after…
terrasig | April 25, 2008Okay, some people are smoking some bad dope.
Whilst helping the PharmKid get down to the car for school this morning, I came upon PharmGirl, MD, in a rage while sitting in front of her laptop. The object of her vitriol was a 17 April article in BusinessWeek entitled, "Are There Too Many Women Doctors?: As an MD shortage looms, female physicians and their flexible hours are taking some of the blame." The article derives from a point/counterpoint pair of essays in the 5 April issue of BMJ (British Medical Journal) entitled, "Are there too many female medical graduates?" ("Yes" position, "No"…
terrasig | April 4, 2008Actinomycin D was the first antitumor antibiotic isolated from Streptomyces parvallus cultures by the lab of 1952 Nobel laureate, Dr Selman Waksman, at Rutgers University. However, it took a young Chinese physician and the confidence in her by a future US Surgeon General for this natural product drug to positively impact the lives of children with cancer.
An unusually engaging Boston Globe obituary by Gloria Negri caught my attention this week that announced the death of pediatric oncology pioneer, Charlotte Tan (Hsu), MD, of pneumonia on 1 April in Brookline, MA. Dr Tan's 1959 paper in…
terrasig | April 2, 2008One of the drawbacks to writing under a pseudonym is that when people around you do well, it's sort of dodgy how you can use the blog to congratulate them publicly. In fact, dear readers might ask: "Why bother putting this up on the blog?" Well, I'm just proud - like a parent - like an anonymous, proud parent.
In my various iterations of adjunct professorship, I get to interact with some really tremendous students in the health sciences - some I even convince to come do some lab work or some literature projects in the name of our national medical research agency. Some do both - and a…
terrasig | March 14, 2008It's been a roller coaster of a week for Charles E Jordan High School in Durham, North Carolina. (Wikipedia history here).
As we noted earlier this week, Jordan's Shivani Sud took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search for her work on biochemical markers of stage II colon cancer. The Intel (formerly Westinghouse) Science Talent prize is referred to often as the "junior Nobel prize."
Two and three days later, we learned the identities of the suspects apprehended in the murder of Eve Carson, student body president at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Both young men,…
terrasig | March 12, 2008[Welcome mental_floss blog and Daily Kos readers. After you read about this outstanding young woman, you can learn more about me, my life story, and this blog here.]
If you read elsewhere at ScienceBlogs.com, you'll know that several bloggers have been discussing race and gender issues in the scientific and medical research communities as well as the challenges facing young scientists who pursue academic research careers. So, I was overjoyed this morning to see this glowing face on Shivani Sud, a local young woman of Indian heritage who took first prize in the Intel Science Talent Search (…
terrasig | March 7, 2008
Eve Carson | student body president | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
This photo was taken on Monday, 3 March. Eve was shot less than 36 hours later. The entire campus, community and alumni mourn her death. She had a ethic of public service so strongly symbolized in her response to why she does what she does. [Photo by Tony Deifell]
Primary UNC-CH website
10,000 celebrate Carson's life
Rose Hoban WUNC-FM report on celebration of life
Chancellor's message to students following arrests of suspects (13 March)
Remarks of Eve's father, Bob Carson
Remembering the student's president…
terrasig | March 1, 2008It's my great pleasure to congratulate Skookumchick (Rants of a Feminist Engineer) and the world of women bloggers in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) on the first anniversary of their blog carnival, Scientiae. With the theme of "renewal," I'll leave it to Skookum to explain how and why she started the carnival:
I decided to start the thing-that-would-turn-into-Scientiae (name by Theo Bromine) because I had found it to be meaningful to read all these amazing blogs being written by women in science, engineering and math. I found it helpful to hear their stories, to…
terrasig | February 15, 2008Apologies that I've been a bit preoccupied to put up my own content last night and today. In the meantime, I must direct you to an excellent ethics discussion by the always insightful Prof Janet Stemwedel on the research program led by Dr Edythe London, the UCLA researcher who has been terrorized personally by the Animal Liberation Front.
Janet's thoughtful analysis of this situation exemplifies why she is one of the leading bioethics commentators on the web today. I share Janet's concern that the public has been unusually silent in response to the attacks on Dr London.
terrasig | February 9, 2008I'm an engineer. But a comparatively weird engineer: a feminist, radical, social justice-y engineer. In my research, I combine theoretical frameworks from women's studies, sociology, science and technology studies to apply to the study of engineering and engineering education - I like to think of my work as feminist engineering research.
With that introduction, Dr Alice Pawley joins ScienceWoman at On being a scientist and a woman.
Welcome, Alice - we look forward to some great discussions and commentary.
terrasig | January 25, 2008When Duke genetics researcher Dr Marcy C Speer died of breast cancer last August at age 47, a huge void was left in the community of her friends, her university, and her field. As Director of the Center for Human Genetics at Duke University Medical Center, Dr Speer was tremendously successful as a scientist, collaborator, and role model. Among her many accomplishments and recognitions was her appointment and service to NIH's Genetics of Health and Human Disease study section.
NIH's Center for Scientific Review, or CSR, is the entity charged with all aspects of the peer-review of some 80,000…
terrasig | November 8, 2007About 10 days ago, I wrote a post on my thoughts regarding gender issues in science and medicine. In the post, I made note of the recent recruitment of Nancy Andrews, MD, PhD, from Harvard to become the new medical school dean at Duke University. In my post, I noted:
What would normally be a modestly newsworthy story for a dean who happened to be a man is instead noted in the press release and on the webpage as:
Andrews, 48, is the first woman to be appointed dean of Duke's School of Medicine and becomes the only woman to lead one of the nation's top 10 medical schools.
When I read that, I…
terrasig | November 5, 2007Just a quick post today following from an interesting comment by lindata on my post about gender in science and the Scientiae blog carnival.
lindata points out that blinding evaluators from the identity of musicians during auditions has resulted in increased representation of women in symphonies - I had not been aware that this work has been going on for more than 30 years. Here is a quote from the 17 March 1997 issue of Business Week:
Starting in the 1970s, report Claudia Goldin of Harvard University and Cecilia Rouse of Princeton University, symphonies began to implement major revisions in…
terrasig | November 3, 2007During the week, I got too tied up to mention that one of our posts on thinking about gender in science and medicine got picked up by Yami McMoots at Green Gabbro for the 13th edition of the Scientiae blog carnival.
Scientiae "is a blog carnival that compiles posts written about the broad topic of "women in STEM," (STEM=science, technology, engineering and mathematics)." My good friend here at ScienceBlogs, Zuska, encouraged a few of us boys to submit something on the inner dialogue we have about gender in our profession. I continued to be bewildered that women continue to be treated…
terrasig | October 31, 2007Welcome, Reader: This post was updated on Halloween 2009 to remedy linkrot and add an interesting tidbit on the famous Macbeth passage. As it is likely you ended up here via a search engine, click here to go to the updated post.
Have you ever wondered, perhaps on 31 October, why witches are depicted as riding brooms?
The answer is alluded to by Karmen Franklin at Chaotic Utopia in her post as to why witches need to know their plant biology.
The excerpts I'm about to give you come from a superb and accessible pharmacology text entitled, "Murder, Magic, and Medicine," by John Mann, host of…