Joseph F. Clark, Ph.D.

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 [...]

So here is some math that I find very humorous. The NIH announced two months ago their challenge grants in support of the stimulus package, also known as ARRA. In the challenge grants it was announced that 200 grants would be awarded 1 million dollars each. That is the amount of the stimulus package for [...]

There are people who proclaim themselves as experts. But how does one become a perceived an expert? Having a lot of information on a subject does not make an expert. A text book has a lot of knowledge but that text book will not answer a question without someone looking in it and it needs [...]

When I worked on the ambulance I was doing that to ‘help people’ and my goal in my career over 20 years later is still to ‘help people.’ On the ambulance and when I worked in the Emergency room I was helping people one person at a time. That was rewarding, frustrating and hard work, [...]

The National Institutes of Health fund about 40,000 grants to do medical research. Of those funded projects only 14 have to do with medical research in the pre-hospital setting. This is just sad. Over 50% of all medical emergencies that come to hospitals arrive via the ambulance. Paramedics, firefighters, EMTs, Police and a host of [...]

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 [...]

The federal government is spending a lot of time and effort on a federal bailout or stimulus package. Some of this stimulus package money is going to medical research. Over ten billion dollars is allotted to the national institutes of health to fund medical research projects. This money is grant funding that is being done [...]

So I’m looking at a shelf of books in my office and realize that most of them were published pre 2000. In the electronic age, most of my educational media is electronic. Now it seems I have more e-books and e-journals than paper anything. Less and less of what I do involves ‘hard copies’ of [...]