Monthly Archives: May 2009

Blog rally for the Healthcare X PRIZE

Paul Levy, CEO of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, has organized a blog rally to help design the Healthcare X PRIZE, a competition to improve the value of health care. Deadline for public comment is this Friday (5/29). Scott Shreeve, MD Senior Health Advisor at the X PRIZE Foundation, writes: … the X [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Systems medicine: seeing the forest

As we learn more about how our bodies work, new medical advice keeps emerging that contradicts the old.  One year estrogen replacement therapy is heralded as the best thing to treat osteoporosis; later it is seen as dangerous. The same drug that successfully treats an enlarged prostate causes problems during cataract surgery. A lot of [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Future old wives’ tales of health and sickness

As a kid growing up in the American Midwest, I loved Laura Ingalls Wilder’s accounts of pioneer life. Along with explaining how cheese and butter are made, how a sod house is built, and how it feels to ride in a covered wagon over the frozen Mississippi, she described sickness, including a bout of fever [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

Behind the scenes in business and academia

On Monday David Brooks argued that a major reason for the cultural divide between business and academia is that successful business people are dull: “The C.E.O.’s that are most likely to succeed are humble, diffident, relentless and a bit unidimensional. They are often not the most exciting people to be around. For this reason, people [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

NIH Draft Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research: one more week to comment

There’s only one week left for the public to comment on the NIH Draft Guidelines for Human Stem Cell Research. The deadline is May 26th. Having worked with embryonic stem cells (albeit mouse, not human) as part of my doctoral research, I support stem cell research. Even though the guidelines are a huge step forward [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

Hard vs. soft solutions: the retinal prosthesis

At what point do “soft” solutions (tissue engineering, stem cells, gene therapy, biological manipulation, etc.) begin to make more sense than “hard” biomedical devices (metal electrodes, metal or plastic mechanical structures, electronics, etc) in terms of efficacy, safety, and cost? Partially inspired by the success of cochlear implants, a research team at MIT has been [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Leave a comment

3 Myths about academia

There’s been a lot of discussion in the New York Times this week about the problems with academia. It started with Mark Taylor’s op-ed, “End the University as We Know It”, and a few days later, John Tierney of TierneyLab wondered “What if Scientists Didn’t Compete?” Having spent years in academia, and fresh from a [...]
Posted in Uncategorized | Tagged | Leave a comment

© 2009-2010 Lily Kim All Rights Reserved -- Copyright notice by Blog Copyright