David Dobbs: Reef Madness : Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral
Oliver Sacks calls it "brilliantly written, almost unbearably poignant... The coral reef story becomes a microcosm of the conflicts -- between idealism and empiricism, God and evolution -- which were to split science and culture in the nineteenth century, and which still split them today.”
David Dobbs and Richard Ober: The Northern Forest
What's wrong with the land-use debate in the Great North Woods (and elsewhere).
Brian Greene, editor: The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 (The Best American Series)
Contains my NY Times Magazine story on the decline of the autopsy
Gina Kolata, Editor: The Best American Science Writing 2007 (Best American Science Writing)
Contains my NY Times Magazine story on an experimental brain surgery for depression.
David Dobbs: The Great Gulf: Fishermen, Scientists, and the Struggle to Revive the World's Greatest Fishery
An epistemological argument disguised as a fish fight.
For Claudius Conrad, a 30-year-old surgeon who has played the piano seriously since he was 5, music and medicine are entwined — from the academic realm down to the level of the fine-fingered dexterity required at the piano bench and the operating table.
IN TUNE Dr. Conrad, a pianist and surgeon, says that he works better when he listens to music and that music is helpful to patients.
“If I don’t play for a couple of days,” said Dr. Conrad, a third-year surgical resident at Harvard Medical School who also holds doctorates in stem cell biology and music philosophy, “I cannot feel things as well in surgery. My hands are not as tender with the tissue. They are not as sensitive to the feedback that the tissue gives you.”
Like many surgeons, Dr. Conrad says he works better when he listens to music. And he cites studies, including some of his own, showing that music is helpful to patients as well — bringing relaxation and reducing blood pressure, heart rate, stress hormones, pain and the need for pain medication.
But to the extent that music heals, how does it heal? The physiological pathways responsible have remained obscure, and the search for an underlying mechanism has moved slowly.
Now Dr. Conrad is trying to change that.The effort, called Sentinel Initiative,
will be the first time the FDA will have an opportunity to monitor
almost immediately how drugs are affecting the public. To do so, the
agency will mine databases of more than 20 million patients who receive
their drugs through Medicare. The idea, of course, is to catch side
effects that might otherwise go undetected for months or years.
File this under "Interesting if true" -- or what scientists call "needs replication."Molecular and statistical genetic studies in 15 Finnish families have shown that there is a substantial genetic component in musical aptitude.
Musical aptitude was determined using three tests: a test for auditory structuring ability (Karma Music test), and the Seashore pitch and time discrimination subtests. The study represents the first systematic molecular genetic study that aims in the identification of candidate genes associated with musical aptitude.
Thanks to CL Psych who flagged this issue the other day and posted one academic paper acknowledging that not only are there weird problems such as genital anesthesia--such a polite term--connected with anti-depressant use in some cases, but that the rate of sexual dysfunction on the happy pills isn't very happy at all. In fact, it's much higher than doctors have commonly assumed and than pharma companies have been willing to admit.
The Economist has a short but telling article on whether the so-called 'autism epidemic', occasionally touted in the media, may simply be a change in how developmental problems are diagnosed.
It covers a new study that did something really simple - it tracked down 38 people who, years ago, had been diagnosed with a delay in language and re-assessed them using the latest diagnostic interviews.
