A Place and a Name “In My house and within My walls I will give them a place of honor and renown which is better than sons and daughters; eternal renown will I give them, which will never be terminated,” – Isaiah 56:5 What I like about Dante is that he puts every…
What I Learned in Ecuador: Here’s a nifty fact. There are about 200,000 wolves on the earth, but 550 million dogs. Dogs are domestic wolves, bred by men for our own purposes. There are 20 thousand lions but 600 million house cats. In fact, as I am reading in a new book Homo Deus by…
Future Man All of us can look forward to the extinction of our own life, though some like myself dwell on this much more than others. I am one who does what every popular psychologist tells us abjectly not to do. Practically all of them recommend we live for the present only, whereas I find…
Talking to a retired physical chemist in my office I asked of his interests outside his specialty. I was surprised to hear that he was reading avidly and studying the future of humankind. He said, “Time has come for mankind to change to a new form hitherto unknown.” I thought, that’s an odd thing for…
Future Man: Eutopia or Dystopia There are many who will read the description of man in the future that I present, a best guess at a look at the future a sort of science fiction model and say I don’t like it. I feel that way myself a lot of the time. People in their…
When I’m driving I sometimes watch other swiveling heads perched over their windows. Their horizontal turning subtends an angle of about 120 degrees. With help from mirrors and other devices, human heads survey the autoscape in front their eyes, computing positions and trajectories of other cars in their little world. This has been the scheme…
As a neurologist I take keen interest in the Zika virus. Zika is a superspecialist that attacks the nervous system. We had good evidence by the time an article in the New England Journal of Medicine that showed serious abnormalities in 29% of Zika positive women tested by ultrasound. The World Health Organization has declared…
I’m captivated when my plane lands, of making out the individual things on the ground, the trees, buildings and cars individually coming into focus. Before the plane landed I either didn’t know about them or I can even imagine they did not exist, a little like the tree falling in the forest and no one…
Patients benefit when we follow protocols. Judgement gets in the way of best practice. Writings of Atul Gawande, MD and others have cemented the importance of protocols in the mind of the physicians and non-physicians alike, enough for us to ask if there is any role at all for clinical expertise. Everyone says you are…
I just saw Turandot at the Metropolitan Opera. I am always blown away by the music and the sets, especially in a project of this magnitude coordinating of hundreds of individuals of talent. Running a hospital is a similar task but childsplay compared with that. The premise of this incredibly beautiful production, is that real men…