Tag Archive | History
Alan Turing’s Underrated Biology
By Rob Mitchum Alan Turing is best known as the father of the modern computer, a skillful World War II codebreaker, and a pioneer in the study of artificial intelligence. But in the last years before Turing’s death at age 41, he aimed his genius at a different target: the then-stalled field of developmental biology. […]
Mitochondria and Cancer: The Trigger Becomes the Treatment
Once considered the cause of cancer, a tiny organelle known as the “powerhouse of the cell” may soon spawn a new treatment. In 1955, Otto Warburg, recipient of the 1931 Nobel Prize for Medicine or Physiology, attributed cancer to damage to the mitochondria, tiny structures within each cell that are involved in energy production, the […]
Recalculating a 40-Year-Old Ecology Riddle
By Rob Mitchum In 1972, a physicist named Robert May tried his hand at a different scientific discipline, publishing a simple formula that inflamed the field of ecology. Scientists studying the structure of natural ecosystems had long assumed that diversity was an inherently good thing — those ecosystems stocked with thousands of species were likely […]
A Swine Solution to the Royal Disease
“A pox of this gout! or a gout of this pox! for the one or the other plays the rogue with my great toe.” – Falstaff, Henry IV Gout was once called “the king of diseases and the disease of kings.” Thanks to that proximity to power, gout has been well documented through history, from […]
The Curve That Changed the World
Let’s start with a statistic: almost 2,000 citations a year. One paper by Paul Meier, the Ralph and Mary Otis Isham Distinguished Service Professor emeritus of statistics, pharmacological and physiological sciences, medicine, and the college, has been cited more often, by a wide margin, than any other paper in the field. At last count it […]
Medical Ethics Summer School
It has been a couple months since the end of the spring quarter, and the with it the end of many of the Medical Center’s weekly lecture series. But a recent batch of videos posted to the website of the MacLean Center for Medical Ethics brought a whiff of the school year to the dog […]
How a 40-Year-Old Discovery Changed Medical Thinking
Even by academic standards, the language was restrained. “It is likely,” the authors note, near the end of the discussion section, “that more patients with this tumor will appear as girls who were exposed in utero come to maturity.” That quaint, passive construction, in the April 22, 1971, issue of the New England Journal of […]
The History of Health Insurance, Rashomon-Style
In Akira Kurosawa’s 1950 film Rashomon, the story of a crime is told three times from the perspective of three different witnesses/participants. Due to the biases of each storyteller, the details of the three accounts fail to align, ultimately leaving the film’s narrator – and the viewer – unsure about what truly happened in the […]
Fighting Disparities During Segregation
Reducing health disparities in the United States has been a top priority for our health care system in these early years of the 21st century. But efforts to narrow the health gap between black and white patients go much farther back, to the start of the previous century when the first African-Americans were graduating from […]
