Excellent Article in the Washington Post
Robert Waldmann
This is an extraordinarily good article by Washington Post standards.
OK I’m biased. The topic is how great my dad Thomas Waldmann MD is, but it is really a good article. In particular, when explaining what is so extraordinary about my dad it addresses an important issue of general interest.
“Carrying out clinical studies is a real challenge and it has become more so in the past years,” Stephen Katz, the director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases, said.
“The challenge to get the product to meet quality control standards is extremely hard, but Tom has been unwavering in his commitment to doing so. He did it all himself, he went to all the meetings himself and made sure it got done. He paved the way for others,” Katz said.
Indeed.
I talk to my dad about his work at least once a week. The effort of scientific research plus patient care plus writing articles for academic journals is negligible compared to the effort of getting permission from the IRB and especially the FDA to try to treat people. He’s just asked for permission to try to treat people with IL-15 (with a document of about 1,000 pages) and he doesn’t know what to do with his time now that he is just working as a scientist and a physician and not a supplicant of the FDA.
Interestingly the author of this really very good article is The “Partnership for Public Service” which wrote it “jointly” with the Washington Post. Fine by me so long as the article is good (which it really is).
I give a slightly edited description of said partnership
“This article was jointly prepared by the Partnership for Public Service, a group seeking to enhance the performance of the federal government and washingtonpost.com.”
Oddly after writing a good article, they miss-punctuated the byline incorrectly adding a comma in a way that made it appear that washingtonpost.com was a co-author of the article and not an organization, like the federal government, which the Partnership is trying to improve (good luck with that).
Anyway for more on the organisation which managed to get a brief substantive excellent article on a highly technical subject published on www.washingtonpost.com see their web site
http://www.ourpublicservice.org/OPS/