Well, well, well! Look at you, finishing up a basic biology text and gaining all sorts of new knowledge. That’s impressive, especially considering you last tackled this subject over 50 years ago! But hold on tight, because it turns out you’re not as up-to-date as you thought you were. The world of biology has undergone…
In Re: climate change I was nursed on the idea that living things adapt through mutation driven diversity and became a fervent acolyte all my life. Temperature and sea levels are on the rise. By current estimates from NOAA and other sources it will take 7 or 8 years for sea level to rise one…
Muscle Learning in the heart and muscle. In 1949 Donald Hebb famously proposed in the book, The Organization of Behavior a revolutionary idea: Activation of pre-synaptic neurons leads to strengthening connections between neurons. This idea immediately gave birth to a physiologic model for learning. Any activation of a neuron that stimulates another neuron, especially recurrent…
Man and Nature Recent research in May 14, 2021 Science Magazine found in the human gut, a major extinction of bacteria with the end of hunter-gathering. It is now possible to study Native Americans poop DNA and RNA, to compare it with modern poop. Not only individual species but whole classes of bacterial organisms, were…
Alternate Path to SatietyNow comes study in the New England Journal of Medicine issue March 18 on Semaglutide, a diabetes medicine which along with healthful diet and exercise induced a near 15% average weight loss in overweight subjects. This is a once a week injection given at high dose, one of a class of diabetic…
Attention: Aldous Huxley in his famous book, The Doors of Perception saw the brain as a limiting valve. The idea of the brain as organ of perception is either erroneous or only partly true. The brain shuts out unwanted stimuli rather than perceiving and responding to them. Huxley wrote in thrall of a mescaline experience…
The Limits of Credulity: Don’t berate yourself for being wrong. History has proven us to be wrong about practically everything. Never has anyone predicted the future accurately. Everyone knows successful people learn from their errors. Failures give up after mistakes. Captains of industry get up, dust themselves off and try again, less right than persistent.…
Gardening while listening with my best Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones, I happened on an album of Leonard Bernstein’s “Essential Works.” How many of us have a body of work in this life that could be mined for a collection of what’s “essential?” Want to know more about your great-grandpa? Why not take out his “essential works…
Covid Positives: What good came from the Covid Pandemic? Plenty. Lessons Learned: No one can be too smart. Local and federal governments locked down the economy of the world, instead of focussing on high exposure regions such as Milan and NYC. We now know the virus spreads in situations of high exposure. The probability of…
Legend has it that Beethoven made an offhand comment to a subordinate when asked, to explain the opening of his famous fifth symphony. “That is fate knocking at the door.” This apocryphal story is debated. It reminds me of the Jewish scholar Hillel who asked by a man mockingly, “Teach me Judaism while I…
Covid-19: China’s Chernobyl: Parallels: High technology in the hands of autocratic regime. Nuclear Energy in Chernobyl 1986 Biotechnology- China 2019 2. High incompetence. a. Poor preparation for emergency procedures which caused Chernobyl meltdown b. We haven’t final details in case of Wuhan. We know that Corona virus human transmission was being studied in a Wuhan…
Contagion: SARS Cov -2 Big Picture: Authors of the Genesis legend of Adam and Eve, wrote of the expulsion from Eden and rise of knowledge and civilization. Civilization exposed hazards and introduced unnatural mortality to humankind. From Egypt to Mesopotamia, China, and India, cities gave rise an elite oppressors and hoards of the miserable, leading…
The price we pay for maintaining our unique private pay healthcare system is financial insecurity. Financial class is the most critical determinant of healthcare. The poor can’t afford to pay for their medical care. Yet they cannot be turned away from hospitals. They get mostly emergency and disaster care rather than preventive care, but care…
Medical Practice Nightmare It was like I was in a dream. I was referred a woman with symptoms of near fainting and dizziness. She came to me with a sheaf of papers from another hospital. I read through test after test, after test, MRA of the abdomen, MRA of the chest, of the neck of…
Neurologist Anjan Chatterjee in his TED talk on beauty noted how Francis Galton sought to build a composite face of criminality. Using his new technique of combining faces, Galton expected to find the grotesque face of criminality but instead brought to life a face of beauty. What happened? Galton didn’t realize that beauty is an…