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Tuesday, October 23, 2018

"An American Sickness" update: a conversation with Elisabeth Rosenthal


An excellent expenditure of 36:15. After which, see my posts on "An American Sickness."


Hat tip to THCB for the podcast link.

See also "Overcharged?" Paying for health care. And, perhaps my "Shards" post.
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UPDATE: TECH ERRATUM


Apple Watch. Yeah, I have one. Use it principally as a watch (though the "Dick Tracy Wrist Radio" phone feature can be handy).

 

In the wake of my recent aortic valve surgery, I have a heightened interest in useful real-time cardiac monitoring. I looked into this Apple stuff and decided nah...

NEW BOOK COMING SHORTLY

Just read a great Wired article, "Meet the Carousing, Harmonica-Playing Texan Who Just Won a Nobel for his Cancer," an excerpt from this soon-to-be-released book.

JAMES ALLISON LOOKS like a cross between Jerry Garcia and Ben Franklin, and he’s a bit of both, an iconoclastic scientist and musician known for good times and great achievements. He also doesn’t always answer his phone, especially when the call arrives at 5 am, from an unfamiliar number.

So when the Nobel Prize committee tried to reach Allison a few weeks ago to inform him he’d been awarded the 2018 Nobel Prize in medicine, Allison ignored the call. Finally, at 5:30 am, Allison’s son dialed in on a familiar number to deliver the news. The calls have not stopped since.

Allison’s breakthrough was the discovery of a sort of secret handshake that cancer uses to evade the immune system, and a means to block that handshake—what the Nobel committee hailed as “a landmark in our fight against cancer,” which has “revolutionized cancer treatment, fundamentally changing the way we view how cancer can be managed.” (Allison’s co-recipient was Tasuku Honjo of Kyoto University.) Advances in cancer typically come in 50-year increments; the science that Allison and Honjo helped advance, cancer immunotherapy, has made a generational leap seemingly overnight…
Having now lost both of my daughters to cancers, I am keenly interested in these developments for others. I'm sure the Biden Cancer Initiative people are on top of this news.

I look forward to the book's release.

SETH MEYERS ON THE GOP AND HEALTH CARE

 
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More to come...

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