Happy Fourth of July
Some 4th of July thoughts, reprinted from a few years ago, and still (as ever) relevant: This, at least, I have observed in forty-five years: that there are men who search for it [truth], whatever it...
View ArticleTaxing Graduate Students
Today’s blog post will be of interest mostly to US readers, since it concerns the US tax code. There has, of course, been a huge push recently for an overhaul of the tax system, with bills passing both...
View ArticlePfizer’s Cutbacks
Update: it appears that these are actually the previously announced Neuroscience cutbacks taking effect – some reports I’d received made it sound as if this were something new. I’ve changed the title...
View ArticleA Poisoning in England: But Which Poison?
Chemistry doesn’t make the news as often as you might think, and when it does, it’s often in a grim way. Such is the case in the UK right now, with the poisoning of Sergei and Yulia Skripal in...
View ArticleOn Lies, and Liars
]\Today’s topic is “lies”. We will start with the cases of Elizabeth Holmes and Ramesh (“Sunny”) Balwani, of Theranos. As the world knows, Theranos was not what it was represented to be – John...
View ArticleNationalist Medicine? What Crap is This?
I would guess that, at this point, I’ve worked with people from every region of the planet except Greenland and Antarctica. That’s how it is in drug research, and how it is in science in general. The...
View ArticleThe FDA’s Latest Actions and Problems
It’s been clear for many years now that some drug companies are abusing the “restricted distribution” idea to keep generic competitors from being able to enter their markets. That, in fact, was a basic...
View ArticleDeliberate Vaccine Misinformation
Over on my Twitter feed, which veers off-topic a bit more often than this blog, I had a series of tweets the other day about troll/bot accounts. And as fate would have it, that very subject now...
View ArticleFighting It Out Over Stem Cells
This is going to sound weird, but remember stem cells? I know that they’re still an active and important area of research and all, but I’m referring more to the period of political enthusiasm about...
View ArticleBorn CRISPRed. Now What?
Are there CRISPR-modified human babies now or not? I was waiting to write about this story in hope that it might get a little more clear, but so far that doesn’t seem to be happening. So here we go....
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After Such Knowledge
So now we know more about the CRISPR human baby story. And it’s even worse than it looked. Let me recommend this report from Sharon Begley at Stat, from the International Human Genome Summit in Hong...
View ArticleSen. Warren’s Generic Drug Idea
Here’s a proposal from Sen. Elizabeth Warren to have the government manufacture generic drugs directly. (I was traveling yesterday and wasn’t able to blog this then). It’s clear that there are some...
View ArticleBack For More, 2019 Edition
So, here we are. Today is the day that many people are heading back into offices and labs, feeling as if it’s been a month since they left, or perhaps like it’s been about two days. I can’t decide...
View ArticleSydney Brenner, 1927-2019
A scientific giant, Sydney Brenner has died at the age of 92. He was present at the beginning of molecular biology – while in the chemistry department at Oxford, he car-pooled with Dorothy Hodgkin,...
View ArticleMerck and Its Ransomware Problems in Court
Well, this story is not specifically about the drug industry, although anything that shuts Merck down for two weeks, costs them around a billion dollars, and disrupts the US drug supply chain certainly...
View ArticleOpening the Lid on Sarepta’s Drug Approvals
Let’s talk Sarepta. And FDA approval, because you can’t bring up that company without immediately starting a regulatory affairs argument. I was not happy when their initial exon-skipping therapy...
View ArticleCoronavirus
As the world knows, we face an emerging virus threat in the Wuhan coronavirus (2019-nCoV) outbreak. The problem is, right now there are several important things that we don’t know about the situation....
View ArticleHarvard’s Chemistry Dept. Chairman in FBI Custody
I suspect that most readers will have heard the news that Charles Lieber, nanoscale materials chemist and chair of Harvard’s chemistry department, was arrested yesterday by federal agents. He was...
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Antiviral Theatrics?
This will be a very rare link indeed for me, to the People’s Daily Twitter account out of China. I’d seen some clips like this before, but wasn’t sure of their provenance. This, though, is an official...
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Get Real
Since this is going to be a post about the coronavirus, let’s start off with this PSA: wash your hands. These viruses have a lipid envelope that is crucial to their structure and function, and soaps...
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