Medicine
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On wasteful medical spending.
Something feels icky about *participating* in the sort of waste that might doom our country…
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On CRISPR and the future of humanity.
Human embryos were edited to confer HIV resistance: a simple experiment that presages scary things.
assisted reproduction, CRISPR, DNA editing, ethics, Gattaca, genetic control of intelligence, genetic manipulation, genetically-modified organisms, genome, impact factor, in-vitro fertilization, neurodiversity, research ethics, research journal rankings, scientific publishing, tilting the scales of the genetic lottery, Xiangjin Kang
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On medical spending.
We spend huge amounts on medical care in the U.S., but cheaper interventions would improve people’s lives more.
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On humor (and bad medical advice).
In which I write a bodybuilding-mag-style paean to eating cat feces.
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On stuttering.
During his first year of graduate school at Harvard, a friend of mine was trying to pick a research advisor. This is a pretty big deal — barring disaster, whoever you choose will have a great deal of control over your life for the next five to eight years. My friend found someone who seemed…
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On attempts to see the world through other eyes.
Recoloring an image is cool … but is it enough to imagine how other animals view a certain scene?
A Different Form of Color Vision in Mantis Shrimp, animal cognition, animal vision, animal vision tool, attention, brain plasticity, color vision, colorblind glasses, cone cells, crotalomorphism, dichromat, distinguishing between similar colors, eyes, facial recognition, frequency shifting, fusiform gyrus, gene therapy, glasses to let colorblind people see color, human facial recognition, image processing, mantis shrimp, mantis shrimp research, mantis shrimp vision, neurological processing, New York Times, peacock vision, perception, photoreceptors, retrovirus, species, starling vision, summer of science, tetrachromat, Thoen study, trichromat, vision, visual spectrum, what do bees see, what do dogs see, what does the world look like to other animals, what does the world look like to other creatures
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On playing outdoors, and allergies.
K has been on a big kick reading books about sending students outside. Obviously, I approve. Being outdoors seems to make most humans happier, and people who spend time outside seem more likely to care about preserving our environment. Plus, K even has scholastic reasons to ask students to sit contemplatively outside — it’s reasonable…
allergies, allergy, allergy epidemic, AP biology, asthma, autoimmune disorders, cute kid photos, David Strachan, eating peanuts to cure a peanut allergy, expecting to fight makes us more aggressive, farm animals, farmed-animal sanctuary, fatherhood, fieldwork, Hay Fever Hygiene and Household Size, hygiene, hygiene hypothesis, immune system, immunology, let your kid eat dirt!, oral immunotherapy, outdoor learning, outdoors, outside, parasites, parasites as medicine, parenting, pathogens, peanut, play, spending time on a farm to prevent allergies, The Watchmen, Uplands PEAK, vegan animal sanctuary -
On identical twins & opportunity.
If you haven’t read it yet, do yourself a favor and look up Susan Dominus’s article on accidentally-swapped identical twins (who were then raised as two sets of fraternal twins) in the New York Times Magazine. It’s long, so it might take you a while. But your time will have been well spent. I was…
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On memory (part three): getting rid of memories.
This is third in a series. See parts one and two. Not all memories are good, obviously. I’ve done plenty of stupid things, blurted out plenty of awkward remarks in conversations, that I’d prefer to forget. And those are harmless. They might make me flush and feel retroactively embarrassed if I think of them at night,…
Blueberry, cognitive behavioral therapy, Do No Harm, Henry Marsh, Jan Kounen, memory, memory erasure, memory replacement, PKM zeta, post-traumatic brain disorder, psychedelics in psychiatry, PTSD, Ramayana, Renegade, speculative science, thought substitution, treating mental illness with psychedelics -
On how human different humans happen to be (hint: equivalently human).
I finally read some of the initial papers (circa 1981) describing an outbreak of opportunistic infections among previously-healthy homosexual men in the United States. The case studies are harrowing — a dispassionate litany of suffering, ending with death. And, yes, these are papers from before I was born. I should’ve read them already, or at least…
Frank Brown Cloud 