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Poster Session
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Atul Gawande at The New Yorker, The Cost of Defunding Harvard:
Sarah Fortune, a professor and the chair of the department of immunology and infectious diseases at Harvard’s school of public health, is among the world’s leading experts on tuberculosis, the No. 1 infectious cause of death globally. She had a sixty-million-dollar N.I.H. award for a seven-year moon-shot effort to unravel exactly how tuberculosis makes people sick, in order to find ways to better control the disease. It is now the beginning of the fifth year of the contract, which has supported work involving some sixty people across fourteen institutions—including Case Western Reserve University, in Ohio, the University of Pittsburgh, the University of Colorado, and clinical sites in South Africa and Uganda. That work—in humans, animals, and machine-learning models—had already revealed a pathway to a truly protective vaccine against T.B., which was previously believed impossible. The team had been conducting testing in macaques of an injectable vaccine developed by researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital.
But, on Tuesday morning, Fortune had received an e-mail with a letter from the N.I.H. ordering her to stop her research, “effective immediately.” Virtually all spending was halted. This was reminiscent of the stop-work orders and terminations at U.S.A.I.D., which ended more than eighty per cent of the agency’s programs and led to layoffs for some two hundred thousand people in the U.S. and around the world. These programs and people had saved lives by the millions. The indifference to, and even celebration of, the destruction is what is most horrifying.
I was just reading Spirituality and religion in oncology (Peteet, J. R., & Balboni, M. J. (2013). CA: a cancer journal for clinicians.), which quantifies the positive effects of going beyond the physiology of cancer to the person enduring the disease, especially at the end of their life. Here’s a part that struck me:
My sister (who just got her PhD in applied mathematics) Katy sent me a great article about a talking, learning 5-year-old intelligence research parrot named Alex (parrot) - Wikipedia:
He called an apple a “banerry”, which Pepperberg thought to be a combination of “banana” and “cherry”, two fruits he was more familiar with.
The ideas for the following theory have been steeping in my head for a while. And since I’m doing something similar to kottke’s operation clear all browser tabs, you get to read my thoughts on the topic. See, the theory is about why we have a different density of hair on different parts of our body. To begin: evoultionary biology dictates that the different hair densities on our bodies must have conferred an advantage to individuals who had favorable distributions of said hair.
Taken in the research lab - you can never wear rings or jewlery while doing chemistry, they simply get in the way.
After eleven months of chemistry research, and with the help of my esteemed (and much more experienced) colleague … I have succeeded in making step two of my six step antibiotic synthesis! There was no sarcasm in that previous statement, either. I am psyched. It’s going to be a good summer of research.
I’d just like the point out that, recently, I was rockin’ down the hall of the chemistry department at the end of a long day of work, passionately mouthing the words to “Hair of the Dog” by Nazareth. It was all going great until I looked over and saw the stockroom manager looking at me with an expression of horror, grief, and pity all rolled into one facial contortion.
You may or may not remember that one person in high school who was so involved with a single topic that any social interaction was painfully difficult. So it is with one person I know, who is in fact not in high school, but is St. Thomas’ chemistry stockroom manager. Problem is, she is not just antisocial, but extraordinarily passive aggressive. Her ability to wilt a freshman chemistry student after they request a reflux condenser without knowing the joint size is only rivalled by her ability to aggravate someone who knows what they want but is cut off by her ridiculous superiority complex.