Decades ago, I read a column by Andrew Young, the former Atlanta Mayor and UN representative, in which he wrote that you should never trust anyone who says they aren’t racist. You should say I’m working on my racism. Recently, the former South Carolina governor and current GOP presidential candidate Nikki Haley omitted to mention […]
Every day brings new of “breakthroughs” in biomedical research. Most of these are incremental advances, and many you never hear about again because they couldn’t be replicated, failed in early clinical trials, or some other problem. But as described in this link from Wired, I think this could be real progress for Parkinson’s therapy research. […]
I’m reading Homelands: A personal history of Europe by Timothy Garton Ash. The book is organized by decades, and the decade of 1980-89 was a historically significant one for Central Europe. By the end of the decade, the “communist” dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany and Czechoslovakia had collapsed. Real history resists simplification, but to […]
My friend Gunter grew up in the German Democratic Republic (“East Germany”). He eventually established himself as a professor at the Genetics Institute at Martin Luther University Halle-Wittenburg, He first came to my attention through a series of papers he published in the early 1980s that I read as a postdoc. Then, in the summer […]
Here we are in a presidential election year, and one of the two major party candidates certain to get the nomination is still claiming the last one was stolen from him. Now, he refers to the criminals who were tried, convicted and sentenced to prison over their Jan 6 crimes as “hostages.” When did the […]
As a career research scientist, I’ve made many predictions in my time. It was fun and rewarding to design controlled experiments to test my predictions. And the wonderful thing about science is that, if your prediction is wrong, you learn something new. I don’t make many predictions myself these days. But I’m interested in the […]
I got my BA from the University of Tennessee-Knoxville in 1977. At the time, the university charged no tuition, but “fees” were about $165/quarter for a full load. Of course, as a state university, it was heavily subsidized by state tax dollars. Quite a feat for a state that has no income tax. The business […]
I’ve only voted for a Republican once (John Anderson, in a presidential primary in North Carolina), but if I lived in Vermont, I might vote for Republican governor Phil Scott: “Many point to his steady hand during crises, including last summer’s historic flooding and the pandemic, when he appeared in daily, low-key televised briefings to […]
Remember the wildly successful Trump University? Me neither. But elect Donald, and he promises to build on that success by stealing the endowments of major universities to create a national diploma mill. Click the link. Trump University 2.0
Eugenics is the practice of arranging reproduction within a human population to increase the occurrence of heritable characteristics regarded as desirable. Setting aside who gets to decide which human traits are desirable and undesirable, we simply don’t know enough about the genetic basis for things like industriousness, fidelity, thrift, honesty and countless other human behaviors […]