Worth a glance #13

Change the cancer conversation. I was surprised to see this in Nature, but the article makes many arguments for why the terminology —War on Cancer — is inappropriate. It is also unusual for Nature to highlight how dysfunctional some medical research is.

Lectures revisited. My friend and former colleague, Bruce Charlton outlines what good lectures are all about. The problem is that few meet aspire to or meet his standards. Although, for the record, and since we qualified at the same medical school, I found most of our lectures fairly poor.

Oliver Sacks in Nature quoting Vernon Mountcastle on his retirement : Mountcastle wrote: “I miss laboratory work in a way that is difficult to describe. It has always been my heart’s joy, and my own experience has always been that even the most trivial original discovery of one’s own evokes a special kind of ecstasy — it is almost like falling in love for the first time, all over again!” If more scientists worked directly at the bench themselves, we would have better science.

How Medical Tech Gave a Patient a Massive Overdose. I find none of this too surprising. We know quite a bit about IT and design, but hospitals in my experience ignore it. They are increasingly run by people who lack any sympathy for either those providing clinical care, or real patients. Excel spreadsheet merchants, all over the place. And if it is the UK, politics.