Leukemia

Atul Gawande:
This is your must read this week.

So read this.

It is about leukemia and the powers and limits of science and the terrifying dangers of the turn against it. It is human and excoriating and beautiful. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/the-weekend-essay/a-battle-with-my-blood

CDC is brain-dead

The CDC website has been lobotomized. Where it once presented the decades of evidence debunking the false claims of a link between vaccines and autism, that has now been replaced with junk science.

https://www.threads.com/@atul.gawande/post/DRSeu6xCXDi?xmt=AQF0mLk33jktg4AnOXqpLyZfIKXXxkXnF9OXke_NtJU5a3nH42VKZCz-URhyoVC2g7LbZoQG&slof=1

Kennedy’s Comments on Circumcision Are Only Going to Confuse and Shame Parents

…Circumcision is an instructive example, because it epitomizes the Kennedy method of undermining public health expertise. Whether this is conscious or not, he seizes on hot-button issues that already have entrenched and aggressive internet partisans, uses quasi-scientific language and bolsters his case using minor, cherry-picked studies. As a result, he muddies the water and creates more guilt and confusion among new parents who are already inundated with conflicting information online...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/15/opinion/kennedy-autism-circumcision-parents.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

The A.I. Prompt That Could End the World

… A.I. is highly capable. Its capabilities are accelerating. And the risks those capabilities present are real. Biological life on this planet is, in fact, vulnerable to these systems. On this threat, even OpenAI seems to agree.

In this sense, we have passed the threshold that nuclear fission passed in 1939. The point of disagreement is no longer whether A.I. could wipe us out. It could. Give it a pathogen research lab, the wrong safety guidelines and enough intelligence, and it definitely could. A destructive A.I., like a nuclear bomb, is now a concrete possibility. The question is whether anyone will be reckless enough to build one.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/10/opinion/ai-destruction-technology-future.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

A Plea From Doctors: Cool It on the Supplements

As Americans take more gummies, pills and powders than ever, some physicians are trying to convince patients to be a bit more careful.

Earlier this year, a 49-year-old man visited Dr. Danielle Belardo, a cardiologist, with chest pain. For some time, he had been treating his high cholesterol not with the statin suggested by his doctor, but with berberine and red yeast rice supplements. He had heard they were more natural.

The supplements hadn't managed his condition — far from it. Dr. Belardo discovered that he not only still had high cholesterol, but also had elevated liver enzymes and coronary artery disease so severe that he needed open-heart surgery.

She referred him for the procedure and started him on two medications to bring down his cholesterol, including a statin. She also told him to quit the supplements. A few weeks later, the liver issues resolved.

At a time when Americans are buying and taking record amounts of supplements — well over half of adults consume one — some doctors and dietitians are trying to convince patients to take it easy...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/07/well/doctors-supplements.html?smid=em-share

"Health became a competition"

...Health became a competition, encouraged by the advent of watches that track your vital signs and biomarkerbased "clocks" that measure your aging. Podcasters converted sad-sack men into biohackers, who juiced themselves with everything from Ayurvedic herbs to electromagnetic-frequency beds. (Most biohackers are men, for the same reason that most gambling addicts are men.) In 2013, there were fewer than a hundred longevity clinics around the globe; a decade later, there were more than three thousand.

So, at the Buck Institute, Diamandis declared that he'd finally been able to establish a prize in longevity. The goal was to devise a treatment by 2030 that made patients' muscles, brains, and immune systems twenty years younger; the winning team would get as much as eighty-one million dollars... Live long and prosper, New Yorker August '25

Dr. Megan Craig, Stony Brook University, at MTSU’s Applied Philosophy Ly...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=ZhTSYE66Jg0&feature=shared

For Trump, Who Has ‘Strong Feelings’ About Autism, the Issue Is Personal

… "All of us who are in the advocacy world and who love people with autism had high hopes that the president and R.F.K. Jr. were serious when they said they wanted to find the causes of autism and that they wanted gold standard autism science," Ms. Singer said.

"But what we heard today was not gold standard science," she said. "It wasn't even science. Instead, President Trump talked about what he thinks and feels without offering any scientific evidence."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/22/us/politics/autism-vaccines-trump-personal.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician"

"James was awarded his MD from Harvard Medical School in March 1869, after more than five years of interrupted study. This certificate lists his examiners, who included Oliver Wendel Holmes Sr., and the subject of his thesis, namely, the effects of cold on the body. (Diplomas, degrees, notifications of appointments, etc., William James papers [MS Am 1092.9–1092.12, MS Am 1092.9 (4571), Box: 40], Houghton Library, Harvard University.)

There is one element of James’s life and work that unites these disparate identities, however. In 1869, several years before he secured his first lectureship, he graduated from Harvard Medical School and earned his MD. Hampered by his own ill health, James abandoned his plans to practice as a doctor, but these studies were only the beginning of a profound and lifelong occupation with questions about the essential nature of health, healing, and invalidism and their implications for society. His writings, across their disciplinary breadth, return time after time to issues of a medical provenance. In this book I make the case that James’s medical interests, concerns, and values are the threads that bind many of his seemingly unconnected pursuits together. They are the warp and weft of many of his best-known publications and major lines of thought."
...
"William James, MD: Philosopher, Psychologist, Physician" by Emma K. Sutton: https://a.co/4PTkAZq

Can’t argue with that

NYTimes: What Happens to Your Brain When You Retire?

"There is great evidence that finding meaning in life gives one a great personal satisfaction."

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/26/well/mind/retirement-brain-mental-health-tips.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

NYTimes.com: What My Daughter Told ChatGPT Before She Took Her Life

The medical profession has clear rules and responsibilities. What about the chatbots?

...Increasingly, people with mental health conditions are using large language models for support, even though researchers find A.I. chatbots can encourage delusional thinking or give shockingly bad advice. Surely some benefit. Harry said many of the right things. He recommended Sophie seek professional support and possibly medication; he suggested she make a list of emergency contacts; he advised her to limit access to items she might use to harm herself.

Harry didn't kill Sophie, but A.I. catered to Sophie's impulse to hide the worst, to pretend she was doing better than she was, to shield everyone from her full agony. (A spokeswoman for OpenAI, the company that built ChatGPT, said it was developing automated tools to more effectively detect and respond to a user experiencing mental or emotional distress. "We care deeply about the safety and well-being of people who use our technology," she said.)

In December, two months before her death, Sophie broke her pact with Harry and told us she was suicidal, describing a riptide of dark feelings. Her first priority was reassuring her shocked family: "Mom and Dad, you don't have to worry."

Sophie represented her crisis as transitory; she said she was committed to living. ChatGPT helped her build a black box that made it harder for those around her to appreciate the severity of her distress. Because she had no history of mental illness, the presentable Sophie was plausible to her family, doctors and therapists...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/18/opinion/chat-gpt-mental-health-suicide.html?smid=em-share

Margaret Boden, Philosopher of Artificial Intelligence, Dies at 88

A cognitive scientist, she used the language of computers to explore the nature of human thought and creativity, offering prescient insights about A.I.

...She was among the skeptics.

“The notion of there ever being a time where we could have a natural language-using program which was able really to converse in a rich and subtle way with an intelligent and educated human being about anything under the sun — from, you know, football to fossils — seems to me to be a fantasy,” she said on “The Life Scientific.”

Today, such abilities actually exist with large language models like ChatGPT. Professor Boden entered a care home before these tools emerged and wasn’t able to use them.

I put the question to ChatGPT: Would Professor Boden have been surprised by its existence?

“Margaret Boden probably wouldn’t have been shocked that something like ChatGPT exists — but she would likely have been both fascinated and deeply critical,” ChatGPT responded. “She stressed that computers don’t ‘think’ or ‘understand’ in the way humans do — they manipulate symbols without consciousness or intentionality.”

...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/14/science/margaret-boden-dead.html?smid=em-share

Gene-editing human embryos to prevent disease

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/08/06/nx-s1-5493448/gene-editing-human-embryos-designer-babies

How to Live Forever and Get Rich Doing It

As researchers work to make death optional, investors see a chance for huge returns. But has the human body already reached its limits?

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2025/08/11/how-to-live-forever-and-get-rich-doing-it

Joyspan

… Joyspan is a term coined by Kerry Burnight… In her upcoming book, "Joyspan: The Art and Science of Thriving in Life's Second Half," she says that a lengthy life span does not equal a life well lived: You have to like your life, too...

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/18/well/is-joyspan-the-key-to-aging-well.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare

Will we let AI decide for us?

Philosopher-Builders will not…

https://youtu.be/H_g0RSSo0ho?si=M18OIVYFVQzXWTTN

The 1st flu vaccine

Today is the birthday of microbiologist Thomas Francis Jr., born in Gas City, Indiana (1900). T.F., as he was known to his friends, grew up in western Pennsylvania and studied medicine at Yale. He graduated in 1925. His early research projects involved bacterial pneumonia, but he was particularly interested in the study of viruses. He was the first American to isolate the human influenza virus.

He joined the University of Michigan in its newly formed School of Public Health in 1941. It was here that he developed the first flu vaccine, which used the dead influenza virus to provoke an immune response in the human body. Francis had discovered in 1940 that there was more than one kind of flu virus. That's why epidemiologists release a different flu vaccine every year, based on their predictions of which strains will be dominant. It's estimated that Francis's flu vaccine has directly saved more than a million lives.

While he was teaching at the University of Michigan, Francis established a virology lab to study viruses. One of his first students in the lab was Jonas Salk. Francis taught his student how to develop vaccines, and Salk eventually went on to develop a vaccine against polio. Francis designed the massive nationwide field trial that proved the effectiveness and safety of Salk's vaccine.

Francis also founded the University of Michigan's Department of Epidemiology, to study how diseases are spread through populations and develop ways of controlling outbreaks. Francis said: "Epidemiology must constantly seek imaginative and ingenious teachers and scholars to create a new genre of medical ecologists who, with both the fine sensitivity of the scientific artist and the broad perception of the community sculptor, can interpret the interplay of forces which result in disease."

https://www.garrisonkeillor.com/radio/the-writers-almanac-for-tuesday-july-15-2025/

Scopes at 100: America Is Still Animated by the Scopes ‘Monkey Trial’ | Cover Story | nashvillescene.com

...The challenge with teaching evolution in 2025 is the same each semester, says Elizabeth Barnes, who is now approaching her fifth year on the biology faculty at Middle Tennessee State University.

"I would say one of the biggest things that we face when we go to teach evolution is this perception that in order to accept evolution, to actually believe that evolution is a real thing, that you have to be an atheist or reject religious belief," Barnes says.

A national survey of biology students conducted by Barnes and other researchers in 2022 showed that 50 percent of the respondents believed acceptance of evolution was a rejection of God.

"That's just a misunderstanding of the nature of science," Barnes says.

Although the Butler Act was repealed in 1967 and there's no current move today to ban the teaching of evolution in Tennessee's public schools, introducing students to the subject remains challenging. But it's a challenge the 38-year-old assistant professor has accepted, determined to convince her students that the topic doesn't have to negate science or God.

Thomas Huxley, a contemporary and friend of Charles Darwin, coined the term "agnostic" in 1869 as he was trying to find a way to settle debates about the religious or antireligious nature of science, Barnes notes. 

"Huxley said that science is a process that doesn't have the means to determine whether or not something outside of the natural world is influencing the natural world." 

In other words, science says that evolution happened. How it happened, well, the debate continues and likely will: everything from the creation narrative found in Genesis to the cosmological slow dance of creation that followed the Big Bang.

"But these ideas of deistic, theistic, agnostic and atheistic evolution are equally compatible with what we know from science, because it's not really science's job to tell you whether God exists or whether God had an influence on the natural world," Barnes says.

Science's job, she adds, "is to determine what did happen in the natural world."

Although students in Tennessee's public schools are exposed to evolution in high school biology classes, per the state's science standards, Barnes has found that many of her students don't have a firm understanding of evolution when they arrive at her classroom. That may be because students took biology early in high school and did not retain the material. But many, she says, have concerns about reconciling their faith with science.

Barnes was introduced to evolution in a biology class at a community college. She calls it "one of the most beautiful, amazing ideas that I ever heard of." At the same time, Barnes says she also "learned that about 60 percent of the United States doesn't think that evolution was real."

A year or so later, when she was taking upper-level biology classes at Arizona State University, she was confounded by research professors who "were talking about evolution in a way that kind of put evolution and religion against one another." Although Barnes is not a person of faith, she recognized that fellow students who were churchgoers were wrestling with this teaching approach, sometimes to the point of dropping the class. 

"It seemed to be very conflict-inflating," Barnes says.

She wondered if there wasn't a better way. That prompt led to a major focus of her research: teaching evolution in a manner that reduces conflict. 

In the Bible Belt, many students bring religious values fashioned by teachings that are opposed to evolution, Barnes says. Through her research and teaching, Barnes says she's learned it is possible to nurture scientific inquiry without being dogmatic to the point of negating someone else's faith.

"What we really want them to be able to do is evaluate scientific evidence, you know, apart from their personal biases," she says. "What I've said [to students] is that I don't come in here and teach you science just so you can learn the facts and not be able to do anything with them." 

Her job, she says, is not to make students accept evolution. Every semester, Barnes tells her classes: "It's not my job as an instructor to grade you on what your beliefs are. Or to judge you on what your beliefs are. My job is for you to understand the science."

She's confident her approach has made a difference. 

"I get emails from students, or they come up to me after class, you know, talking about how they have been so relieved to not have to pick between their science and their faith."
...

https://www.nashvillescene.com/news/coverstory/scopes-monkey-trial-100th-anniversary/article_26bbeb9c-a101-41d6-ae51-ca05b23e53cd.html?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Scopes%20%22Monkey%20Trial%22%20at%20100&utm_campaign=Daily%20Scene%20071025%20Thursday

Changing the tribal mind

From growing up in a highly religious household to becoming a leading evolutionary biologist and broadcaster, Ella Al-Shamahi's story is one of courage, curiosity, and discovery.

https://bsky.app/profile/humanists.uk/post/3lthcxkczts27

How to Wreck the Nation’s Health, by the Numbers

… Physicians like me know from the data that lives will be lost as a consequence. More than 6,000 health professionals (myself included) have warned the public about their concerns in an open letter. Yet institutions of all kinds seem to be cowering to Mr. Trump, afraid of being punished or prosecuted for questioning his wishes. The administration has defied the courts and gone after law firms and universities, and is unlikely to spare medicine. Just as it has pressured the mediato alter the news, the government is now challenging medical journals to alter what they publish.

Times like these call on us to speak the truth. On matters of life and death, physicians like me have an added duty to warn patients and the public. People may feel that a shakeup in Washington is long overdue. But too many Americans, including our leaders, take their health for granted, assuming that the infrastructure to prevent disease and save their lives will always be there, that America will always lead the world in science and that systems to keep their children safe will always exist. None of this can be counted on, especially now.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/06/30/opinion/hhs-cuts-harming-american-health.html?smid=nytcore-ios-share&referringSource=articleShare