On the new acquisitions shelf of the college library I find a little book that almost gets lost among its bigger, bulkier companions — “A Modest Proposal: A Plan for the Golden Years,” by Régis Debray.
Medicine
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Pushing drugs
Two people I’d be happy to never see in the media again: Robert Bazell and Robert Jarvik.
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The big sting
I have my annual physical tomorrow, and I have a list of things to ask my doctor about: Allegra‑D, Ambien, Nexium, Celebrex, Viagra, Lipitor, etc., etc. I’m not even sure what all these drugs are for, but according to the ads I watch on TV, I’m supposed to ask my doctor if they are right for me.
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If it walks like a quack, and quacks like a quack…
Scientists tend to resist any attempt to infuse their work with spiritual values. They are fearful, rightly so, of diluting a successful knowledge-generating methodology with “mysticism.” With creationists, pseudoscientists and New Agers storming the gates, intent on bringing down the walls, who can blame scientists for jealously maintaining their aloofness from “spirituality.”
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Who gets to have the new smart pills?
“I am a little world made cunningly of elements and an angelic sprite,” wrote the poet John Donne in about the year 1609. He meant, of course, that he was a creature of matter and spirit, body and soul. Today, we would amend his lines to read: “I am a little world made cunningly of elements.” Full stop.
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Facing new questions about transplants
In a recent story in The New York Times Magazine, author Charles Siebert recounts his interview with Dr. Peter Butler, a British plastic surgeon who is prepared to supervise the first transplant of a human face. That’s right, a human face.
A mosquito of the genus Anopheles • Jim Gathany/CDC (Public Domain)
Genetic science tests our wisdom
Malaria kills more than a million people a year, most of them children under the age of 5 in sub-Saharan Africa. Hundreds of millions of people have the disease, in varying degrees of severity.
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Cancer: Our cells against ourselves
Now that bubonic plague, smallpox, cholera and many other diseases of high mortality are mostly things of the past, the Big C looms as the most frightening way our bodies can go wrong.
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Alternatives: For amusement only
In 1770, an English country doctor named Edward Jenner noticed that milkmaids who had previously contracted cowpox, a relatively mild disease of cattle, were immune to the more virulent human affliction, smallpox. His observation led to the development of a cowpox vaccine for the prevention of smallpox.
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Terrorism revived the smallpox issue
Like most Americans of my generation, I have a dime-sized scar on my upper left arm, the badge of a disease that — with luck — my grandchildren can safely forget.