🧪 For the five people out there who are interested in T-cell malignancies, one of the last papers we wrote with Dr. Waldmann is now out as early access at Blood Advances. It is a modest phase 1 trial of IL-15 and Campath with interesting results.
📚 Five months into the year, and I’ve abandoned my first book: The Ministry for the Future. Broad strokes and cipher characters à la Three Body Problem just didn’t go well with the specific issues The Ministry… was trying to raise.
How times change. What in the 1990s was fluff about the importance of learning, thinking, free speech, and civility for America’s continued progress now bounces between prophetic and controversial.
Of course, it wasn’t fluff. It was as true then as it is now, only this time there is no background hum of optimism to drown out the warning sirens. The country, subsumed by ignorance left, right and center — each stupid in their own way — went from being haunted by Demons to being run by them. We are living through Carl Sagan’s nightmare, brains turned off, phones in hand, fingers at the ready. So it goes.
Two excellent episodes of Healthcare Unfiltered 🎙 in two weeks:
More podcasts with both would be a very good thing. Highly recommended!
A not so great Plenary Session 🎙 episode this week, in which Vinay wonders why people are leaving academia for industry while his guest explains how important page breaks and pictures are in NIH grant proposals he reviews, while “the science is all the same”.
Infuriating!
“This is not the Apollo program; we’re planning to stay there for a whole month,” said Jim Green, NASA’s former chief scientist. He added, “The concept of acquiring materials and having habitats on the moon is viable.”
2025 is the year of the first Artemis launch and I can’t wait.
Also, if this week has already burned you out, Quanta Magazine is an excellent source of optimism.
“We all got fooled by the 1990s . . . We got fooled into thinking that liberal democracy is easy and natural. It’s not — it’s hard and it’s unnatural. And so we need to start taking it seriously.”
This interview with Haidt is outstanding. Must get the new book once it’s out.
🧪 For the five people out there who are interested in T-cell malignancies, one of the last papers we wrote with Dr. Waldmann is now out as early access at Blood Advances. It is a modest phase 1 trial of IL-15 and Campath with interesting results.
“There can be found, inside every American, a miniature Puritan yearning to grow large and seize control.”
📚 Starting the morning with some Gerd Gigerenzer. Hope he doesn’t get into trouble for implying the media and health agencies are spreading disinformation.
Oh, who am I kidding? It’s in a book, no one will see it.
“So, Barack Obama has taken up fighting disinformation. NYT notes how his administration didn’t regulate tech. When I started writing about it, a decade ago, the pushback I got from the Obama universe was intense, and is hinted at the below profile of me.”
So starts a Twitter thread from Zeynep Tufekci on groupthink of an administration. Maybe he should have jumped straight to narrating Netflix docu-series.