The Pump Handle | Observing Science

Accumulated knowledge can be passed from one generation to the next. And so it is possible to pass on mistaken ideas, even ones that are harmful.

It’s worth retelling the story of the Broad Street epidemic of 1854 London to remind ourselves how difficult it is to change scientific dogma. Cholera, “whatever it was, or wherever it had come from,” as Steven Johnson described in The Ghost Map, arrived with a shattering velocity around Broad Street. Entire families died in a single night, hundreds of residents living in a five-block London neighborhood died over a few days. This outbreak attracted medical detectives because it followed a severe and more widespread cholera outbreak six years earlier that had killed 50,000 Londoners and made this problem a pressing medical mystery.

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Generating Science That Informs Decision-Making | Observing Science

Should science aspire to be useful? That is a deceptively simple question. It is often assumed that the fundamental role of science is to contribute to the improvement of the human condition. University marketing brochures make note of the practical utility of the work of their scientists. And yet, it is not so simple. 

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What To Do When Science Gets It Wrong | Observing Science

In February 1953, one of the world’s pre-eminent scientists, Linus Pauling (who went on to win two Nobel Prizes) published, with Robert Corey, a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences called “A proposed structure for nucleic acids,” suggesting a triple helix as the foundation for what we now call DNA. He was, of course, wrong. 

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Juneteenth, and the history that shapes our health | The Healthiest Goldfish

Reckoning with the past, to shape a healthier future.

These essays aim to tackle what is most fundamental to the pursuit of health. Centrally, this means addressing ideas, recognizing that all we do in pursuit of health fundamentally starts with the ideas we embrace. However, these ideas are shaped by a broad range of forces, including, perhaps centrally, our history. Our history shapes our health. Where we come from, our family circumstances, our access to education and safe neighborhoods, the conditions of our past all influence our health in the present.

Just as we have a history as individuals, we also have a past collectively, as members of a society, as citizens of a country. Just as our past as individuals profoundly affects our health in the present, our health as a people cannot be understood without consideration of our common history. Our present is shaped by a range of intersecting legacies. These include the legacies of various philosophical systems, such as the Enlightenment, the legacies of wars, of colonialism, of technological progress, of movements for social justice.

And, in the US, they include—centrally, tragically—the legacy of slavery.

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The obligation for humility and compassion | The Healthiest Goldfish

The values at the heart of our work in health

In this series of Healthiest Goldfish essays, which started more or less at the beginning of 2023, I have been aiming to articulate a practical philosophy of health. In so doing, I have intermittently mentioned the importance of humility and compassion as values that should inform what we do and how we do it. However, I have never focused on the former as a central thought in a full essay. I thought I would do so here, coupled with compassion, which I think emerges from the former.

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Science and Safety | Observing Science

The work of science can at times be abstract, ideas and experiments emerge from labs and are published in academic journals. But science leads to technological innovation, and the many products of science reach the general public and become part of daily life. The regulatory agencies that ensure safety of these products play a critical role then in the business of science.

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On our responsibilities when faced with moral atrocities | The Healthiest Goldfish

Choosing what to do, how far to go, in a suffering world. Part three of three.

In my last two essays, I engaged with the question of how our morals might constructively guide the arguments we advance and the science we generate in pursuit of health. I did so as part of a broader, ongoing, conversation about our values and how they inform all we think and do in our efforts to build a healthier world. The challenge is that in engaging with the world we are regularly faced with events and ideas that are truly terrible, that lead to much suffering, destruction, and death. These events pose a challenge to a values-driven field like public health. When we see moral atrocities, there is an implicit challenge to us to act on what we are seeing, to put our values into practice by saying or doing something, anything, to address the suffering of the world. I have lately found myself thinking about these moments and their implications for how we should or should not act.

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Patent Rights and Wrongs | Observing Science

Article One of the U.S. Constitution includes the intellectual property clause. Congress can “promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for a limited time to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries.” Two years later, in 1790, the U.S. Patent Office opened, rewarding the creation of new technologies, inventions, and ideas with government-granted monopolies, protected from competitors. After more than two centuries of practice, we are still struggling with this reward system, asking ourselves whether it is sufficiently and correctly motivating or skewed to produce problematic pricing and ruin our chances for health equity.

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