Diverse perspectives on science and medicine
Freezing and storing your own eggs when you are not trying to get pregnant used to be rare. It was something young women with cancer might do, if treatment could badly damage their eggs
“I hope that other women can benefit from my experience”, wrote Angelina Jolie of her double mastectomy. She showed great courage and generosity, sharing data and emotions with clarity. It’s been just over 2 years since
There’s a lot of outrage about outrage storming around women in science and science journalism at the moment. And fear of causing it, too. It’s easy to cast outrage as inimical to thinking and
P is for pandemonium. And a bit of that broke out recently when a psychology journal banned p–values and more, declaring the whole process of significance testing “invalid”. There’s a good roundup of views about this development from
Another day, another fuss about an animal study. This time, it’s a cancer scare around a common antibacterial in soaps: triclosan. “The dirty side of soap,” says the headline on the university’s press release. “Triclosan,
She started by asking me something like, “We understand you know a lot about AIDS, is that right?” “A fair bit, I guess. Why?” It was 20 years ago, in Sydney – before the antiretroviral
“Risky” is definitely not a one-size-fits-all concept. It’s not just that we aren’t all at the same level of every risk. Our tolerance of risk-taking in different situations can be wildly different, too. Our judgments
His first big clue came when people started hemorrhaging after chewing gum. Lawrence Craven did tonsil and adenoid surgery in his office. And it usually went well. But in the mid-1940s, “an alarming number of
You could get a very sore neck watching all the claims and counter-claims about mammography zing back and forth. It’s like a lot of evidence ping-pong matches. There are teams with strongly held opinions at
Act I: An ounce of “prevention.” “Prevention is better than cure.” Aphorisms like this go back a long way. And most of our dramatic triumphs against disease come from prevention: clean water, making roads