Opinion: Hold CEO's Accountable

by Paul Thacker for New Scientist

THERE have been so many stories about pharmaceutical companies promoting the misuse or abuse of their drugs that the names seem to merge - Zyprexa, Seroquel, Paxil and more.

The latest case concerns GlaxoSmithKline's Avandia (rosiglitazone), an anti-diabetes drug linked to heart attacks. Last month, the European Medicines Agency recommended its suspension from the market, while the US Food and Drug Administration made it all but impossible for doctors to write prescriptions for the drug.

With sales worth over $3 billion in 2006, Avandia was the world's best-selling diabetes drug until May 2007, when The New England Journal of Medicine published a study linking it to heart attacks. Reporters circled, and the finance committee of the US Senate investigated, forcing GSK to hand over internal documents.

Read the piece in New Scientist

Food + Community, Growing Together

by Christine Muhlke

The New York Times Magazine, published online October 8, 2010

When I began writing about American farmers and food artisans for this magazine’s Field Report column two years ago, I set out to learn the story behind the people whose ingredients were driving chefs to create great dishes. Little did I know it would become a column about communities — of producers, of customers, of eaters and enthusiasts

 After transcribing the first five or so interviews, I adopted the shorthand “comm”: “I don’t think that I would exist w/o the comm of ppl that are my customers and my suppliers,” I typed for Jeff Ford, a baker in Madison, Wis. “We’re showing how to build a local comm, we’re not showing em how to farm,” I scribbled for Tim Young, a Georgia marketing-service entrepreneur turned farmer. “Another piece for me about urban homesteading is rebuilding comm — it’s such a cliché — but rebuilding comm around food,” said Anya Fernald, a consultant for food businesses in Oakland, Calif. In a recent interview with Evan Dayringer, a farm apprentice, there are 26 comms in the course of three hours. At this point, my computer just fills in the word after the second M.

What are they talking about when they talk about community? In their case, it’s the network of people that they gradually knit around themselves based on a shared interest in food, from the grain supplier to the bakery apprentice to the farmers’ marketers and restaurateurs who order the loaves. It’s the schoolteacher who buys bread every week who eventually asks the baker if he’ll teach her students how to make pizza dough. It’s the cheese maker who trades for baguettes. It’s the sous-chef who receives the daily delivery and becomes a drinking buddy. Read the full article.



Rivalry in Love and Sport

File under Mind/Body, here is Michael Kimmelman's very good review of a couple of books about tennis that are really about so much more. 

"Finally, Agassi comes to love tennis, which had been a life forced on him, but now had given him a wife and, with the school, something to play for other than just himself or his father’s approval. “From punk to paragon” is how Bud Collins, the tennis commentator, described Agassi’s public transformation—the pigeon-toed teen brat in stone-washed denims, gambler’s shades, and a Mohawk who becomes a philanthropist, philosopher, and statesman. “To my thinking,” Agassi writes,

Bud sacrificed the truth on the altar of alliteration. I was never a punk, any more than I’m now a paragon…. Transformation is change from one thing to another, but I started as nothing…. I was like most kids: I didn’t know who I was, and I rebelled at being told by older people…. What people see now, for better or worse, is my first formation, my first incarnation. I didn’t alter my image, I discovered it.

Which is the (albeit convenient) parable of this remarkable and quite unexpected volume, one that sails well past its homiletic genre into the realm of literature, a memoir whose success clearly owes not a little to a reader’s surprise in discovering that a celebrity one may have presumed to know on the basis of that haircut and a few television commercials hawking cameras via the slogan “image is everything” emerges as a man of parts—self-aware, black-humored, eloquent."

Read the full article in the New York Review of Books

Hallucinogens Helping Cancer Patients Cope

Fascinating article By the Associated Press writer Malcolm Ritter, about an ongoing study at New York University hospital that uses psilocybin (magic mushrooms) to augment traditional psychotherapy. This is part of a broader trend to use psychedelics (including LSD) to help spurn breakthroughs that often elude traditional psychotherpeutic regimens, even after decades of treatment.

"The big white pill was brought to her in an earthenware chalice. She'd already held hands with her two therapists and expressed her wishes for what it would help her do.

She swallowed it, lay on the couch with her eyes covered, and waited. And then it came.

"The world was made up of jewels and I was in a dome," she recalled. Surrounded by brilliant, kaleidoscopic colors, she saw the dome open up to admit "this most incredible luminescence that made everything even more beautiful."

Read the rest of Ritter's article in the LA Times health section.

Long Day's Journey Into Sleep

Great personal essay by Patricia Morrisoe, a self-described "fourth generation insomniac," about the best night's sleep of her life:

"For my parents’ 50th wedding anniversary, our family went to Ireland to discover our roots and had the best sleep of our lives in a little town in County Sligo. Ten years later, we’re still talking about that incredible night. Forget the windblown scenery, the pink salmon, the monastic ruins and the wild swans at Coole. Forget my daredevil sister practically dangling off the Cliffs of Moher. “Remember that sleep,” we say, shaking our heads. “Wasn’t it just amazing?”

Read the rest of Patricia Morrisoe's piece on the New York Times website.  Or look for her book, Wide Awake: A Memoir of Insomnia.