jamesash

Point taken on lower efficiency of US health care spending.

http://www.vox.com/2014/9/2/6089693/health-care-facts-whats-...

Worth noting, however, that Europe, Canada, and the ROW get to freeload on innovative on-patent medicines whose R&D is essentially supported by higher American drug prices.

>What does national defense cost have to do with it?

Uh, more headroom for entitlement programs in general?

I see France at 10%, not 12%,http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_de_l'État_français but even at the latter number, that 6% difference (280 bn) would pay for a quarter of Medicare+Medicaid. With Medicaid costs set to expand by 12% under Obamacare next year (by 50 bn) eventually leading to 50% reduction in uninsured by 2024, having that kind of room in the budget would easily allow for universal coverage.

I cede the point, made above, that dollar-for-dollar US healthcare spending is less effective, but dispute that health care reform is entirely about making it more efficient. Decreasing the amount of uninsured has been at least as important an issue in the debate.

>Somehow Europe, Canada, Japan, etc, all make health care work but we can't.

The countries you mentioned largely have outsourced their national defence concerns to the United States, allowing them to have defence budgets of <10% of spending while the USA's defence spending stands at 17% of spending. That is not irrelevant to this discussion.

Listening to the audiobook of The Gallic Wars by Julius Caesar is rich in detail and really grabs you by the throat. The classically trained narrator is superb. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=snft290-FRc&list=PLpO7W_VntC...

Pretty breathless PR piece from Scripps that actually doesn't go into any notable detail on the chemical reaction, hits all the buzzwords (green, click, yada yada) and manages to spell sulfur "sulfer" and hydrolyze "hydrolize". (Here's an actually awesome recent piece of Scripps science)[http://openflask.blogspot.com/2013/08/ingenol-behind-scenes....].

Yes, when I read the title I was expecting the article to talk about Alexander Shulgin.

A long but very shallow article. - interviewed authors of paper that used the phrase, "silent pandemic" when claiming widespread behavioural and cognitive problems as a result of 12 compounds. Evidence presented in the article itself? "Rates of diagnosis of [autism] and ADHD are increasing..." [diagnosis is not necessarily preponderance], an increase in "subclinical decrements in brain function" [as measured how?] , and "genetic factors account for no more than 30-40% of brain development disorders" [based on what exactly?] From this thin stuff the authors then get plenty of column space to expound on their opinions. Re: the IQ experiments. If Bellinger's own lead-IQ model is correct [from the linked Environ Health Perspect. Jul 2005; 113(7): 894–89] , a decrease in blood lead concentration from >10 ug/kg [1970's] to 1.8 ug/kg [2009] should have resulted in 3 point increase in IQ scores. Where's any discussion of this? - FMRI reveals effects of methyl mercury in 3 [?] adolescents. How can you possibly determine loss of IQ points due to methyl mercury exposure on this set while controlling for other factors? Talk about small sample size. -The article asks, "Impressive as all this research investment is, the larger question remains: Why are we looking at these hazards now—instead of before we introduced these chemicals into the world?" 80k chemicals mentioned as being on "the market" although what this means isn't specified. "It would cost $5 million and 5 years per chemical to run the full battery of tests" according to quoted researcher. 400 billion dollars if done on the full set. 1) Who pays? 2) Why would any chemical company have a research presence in the USA if their product had a several year lead time for rollout due to testing requirements?

I made lemonade from the lemons: came out of an MIT postdoc with a Science paper, the academic track didn't pan out (2 application cycles) but I saw that there was a need for a great online organic chemistry resource, so I started building one. 4 years in, it's self-supporting, and I have many of the advantages of an instructor with very little of the red tape I'd be experiencing if I were teaching in academia. Miss the research sometimes, but I'm sure someone would accept me as a visiting researcher for a year if I ever wanted to get back into it.

Refreshing to read a NYT article that doesn't go out of its way to find the cloud in the silver lining.

Reading through this article reminds me of why I'm so critical of science journalism: it's in the attention business, not the science business, and directing undue scepticism about so-called "breakthroughs" would kill a lot of great "stories".

It is similar in that both require applying concepts to solve very specialized situations. This neurologist agrees with McCarty and can tell you why: http://bit.ly/16WUkba

The gap between grade inflation at colleges and universities could represent a gap in the energy, motivation and determination of students to complain about their grades.

There's asymmetry between the (nearly limitless) time and energy students have for complaining about their grades versus the (extremely scarce) amount of time professors have for addressing it. This is anecdotal, but I should note that the trendline is inversely proportional to the demands on professors' time over the past few decades.

In the MIT chem department one professor's tactic was to have the student evaluations right before dropping the hammer with a tough final exam.

I agree with you. As long as you're passionate about a subject, you can start your own micro-school. I couldn't get a job as an organic chemistry professor even with an MIT pedigree and a long list of papers, including one in Science. So I said screw it, I'm doing this anyway, and I'll treat it like it's my own business. So I started a blog devoted to teaching undergraduate organic chemistry, and I make money from funneling a small portion of the people who read the site into online Skype tutoring. So much fun to be my own boss and not have to deal with academic bureaucracy. Good luck to you.

Agree. As far as the tenure debate, becoming a candidate for being science professor at a top university requires INCREDIBLE single-minded focus, from college through Ph.D. through postdoc. And for that, you get a chance at an academic job, because only a handful are up for grabs in any given year. It's an incredibly high-risk proposition, with a lot of opportunity cost. Your chances are helped immensely if you're not interested in any other activities beyond working in your field. It's a monotonous life in many ways. Not many people would want it to begin with - that's why the Aspbergers types are often the only ones who make it through the filter.