Patients who donate their bodies to science and/or agree to participate in clinical trials are my heroes. I say that with the conviction of a scientist who has directly benefited from their benevolence. To do the research that I do on stroke I have collected hundreds of litres of human Cerebral Spinal Fluid (CSF) from [...]
Posts tagged medicine
Importance of the next breakthrough idea
In science ideas are like a currency and often better than money. A scientist is only as valuable as their NEXT idea. Yes, I said next idea. Once the idea is made public it is no longer novel and loses value. If the idea is not patented it can be taken by anyone and changed [...]
Lost Generation of Scientists
We are in the midst of a lost generation of graduate students. Grad students take 4-7 years to get a degree, but with 4 years of flat funding and now challenge grants’ funding being 1 in 100 there is a perception of no future in science by those students. No one wants to spend their [...]
Plea to NIH to fund research to decrease antibiotic use
The NIH needs to solicit and fund a massive effort to reduce, refine and replace the use of antibiotics. This is desperately needed because of the growing problem of drug resistance. Microbes become resistant to antibiotics via a kind of natural selection when the genes of the bacteria mutate and become resistant to our attempts [...]
Why do most research universities in the USA lose money on research?
Why do most research universities in the USA lose money on research? That is a question that comes up in numerous college, university and teaching hospital conference rooms. Deans, Department Chairs and essentially all administrators are asking that question. It is not because of the economy although the economy contributes to the very bad situation [...]
scientists in congress
I was asked an interesting question a while ago that deserved thought before responding. Here is the question and response. It seems that all of our politicians are lawyers. There are a few medical doctors in congresses but why are there no Scientists? Good question. The answer is, “I have no idea why there are [...]
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act; HIPAA is not Helping People
HIPAA; Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) The Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act was supposed to protect patient’s privacy from being abused by insurance companies. So a lot of confidentiality issues were addressed in the act. The result has done almost anything but help patients. What is has done is made research and [...]
Becoming a scientist
I intentionally avoid this discussion of how or when I knew that being a scientist was right for me. The reason is because the answer, while truthful and kind of humorous, is not the stuff of learned scientific careers. In fact some might call it somewhat nefarious. I was always interested in science, medicine biology [...]
Orphan Drugs and Orphaned Research
Let me say up front, this may be the most contentious blog I’ve written. So, beware. The definition of an orphan drug is that the market for said drug is less than 200,000 patients. This number of patients is considered to be not sufficient to be financially successful for drug companies to develop drugs. Orphan [...]
Geeks Are An Endangered Species
I think President Obama needs to present a state of the sciences in address; like the state of the union. Yes, of course, I’m biased in this subject, but times are desperate. I work in a university hospital and train physicians and scientists at the cutting edge of technology. What we do is discover new [...]
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