AI slop and scientific publishing

A Science Magazine OpEd.
   

AI in scientific publishing: Slower, worse, and more expensive
H. HOLDEN THORP, Ed., Science Magazine

There’s a saying in the management world, popularized by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin in the 1990s, that the goal of technological improvements is to make products faster, better, and cheaper. Although this strategy had some success in the aerospace industry, the zealots of artificial intelligence (AI) have been making the same argument regarding how it will transform work, claiming that so little human effort will be required that humanity will enter an era of radical abundance, free from disease, drudgery, and danger, among other benefits, leaving society with more time for creative pursuits. But history tells a different story. When machines began to increase productivity during the second industrial revolution, American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor’s The Principles of Scientific Management encouraged corporations to use surveillance to get employees to work harder and longer, an approach that exhausted and discouraged workers and led to the transfer of knowledge and any decision-making from workers to management, while enriching the profits for only those at the top. Yet, it remains foundational to the American economic enterprise. Indeed, scientific publishing is starting to experience some Taylorism with the insertion of AI. Rigorous human checking of AI-generated research papers is creating bottlenecks as publishers strive to maintain the integrity of the scientific record. The challenge is requiring even more human effort, making the whole endeavor slower and more expensive...

 

These factors are complicating scientific publishing. The rate of research submissions at Science and other journals is increasing because conducting research and producing papers are accelerating. But because more papers contain more AI-generated errors, greater human oversight is required to check the findings...

 

The creation of robust human-curated scientific literature has never been more crucial. The propagation of AI slop in the scientific record and generally on the internet is making science less trustworthy...The history of Taylorism indicates that society should fight to protect the welfare and agency of those being pushed to do too much by technology in the name of production.

If the scientific community fails to address the influence of AI, then authentic research and validated findings will slow down to an expensive trickle into established knowledge, and the opportunities for flawed or fabricated information to be seen as reality will grow—all while AI profiteers cash in.

TAYLORISM, UGH

INTRODUCTION 

President Roosevelt in his address to the Governors at the White House, prophetically remarked that “The conservation of our national resources is only preliminary to the larger question of national efficiency.” 

 

The whole country at once recognized the importance of conserving our material resources and a large movement has been started which will be effective in accomplishing this object. As yet, however, we have but vaguely appreciated the importance of “the larger question of increasing our national efficiency.” 

 

We can see our forests vanishing, our water-powers going to waste, our soil being carried by floods into the sea; and the end of our coal and our iron is in sight. But our larger wastes of human effort, which go on every day through such of our acts as are blundering, ill-directed, or inefficient, and which Mr. Roosevelt refers to as a lack of “national efficiency,” are less visible, less tangible, and are but vaguely appreciated. 

 

We can see and feel the waste of material things. Awkward, inefficient, or ill-directed movements of men, however, leave nothing visible or tangible behind them. Their appreciation calls for an act of memory, an effort of the imagination. And for this reason, even though our daily loss from this source is greater than from our waste of material things, the one has stirred us deeply, while the other has moved us but little. 

 

As yet there has been no public agitation for “greater national efficiency,” no meetings have been called to consider how this is to be brought about. And still there are signs that the need for greater efficiency is widely felt. 

 

The search for better, for more competent men, from the presidents of our great companies down to our household servants, was never more vigorous than it is now. And more than ever before is the demand for competent men in excess of the supply. 

 

What we are all looking for, however, is the readymade, competent man; the man whom someone else has trained. It is only when we fully realize that our duty, as well as our opportunity, lies in systematically cooperating to train and to make this competent man, instead of in hunting for a man whom someone else has trained, that we shall be on the road to national efficiency. 

 

In the past the prevailing idea has been well expressed in the saying that “Captains of industry are born, not made”; and the theory has been that if one could get the right man, methods could be safely left to him. In the future it will be appreciated that our leaders must be trained right as well as born right, and that no great man can (with the old system of personal management) hope to compete with a number of ordinary men who have been properly organized so as efficiently to cooperate. 

 

In the past the man has been first; in the future the system must be first. This in no sense, however, implies that great men are not needed. On the contrary, the first object of any good system must be that of developing first-class men; and under systematic management the best man rises to the top more certainly and more rapidly than ever before. 

 

This paper has been written: 

 

First. To point out, through a series of simple illustrations, the great loss which the whole country is suffering through inefficiency in almost all of our daily acts. 

 

Second. To try to convince the reader that the remedy for this inefficiency lies in systematic management, rather than in searching for some unusual or extraordinary man. 

 

Third. To prove that the best management is a true science, resting upon clearly defined laws, rules, and principles, as a foundation. And further to show that the fundamental principles of scientific management are applicable to all kinds of human activities, from our simplest individual acts to the work of our great corporations, which call for the most elaborate cooperation. And, briefly, through a series of illustrations, to convince the reader that whenever these principles are correctly applied, results must follow which are truly astounding. 

 

This paper was originally prepared for presentation to the American Society of Mechanical Engineers. The illustrations chosen are such as, it is believed, will especially appeal to engineers and to managers of industrial and manufacturing establishments, and also quite as much to all of the men who are working in these establishments. It is hoped, however, that it will be clear to other readers that the same principles can be applied with equal force to all social activities: to the management of our homes; the management of our farms; the management of the business of our tradesmen, large and small; of our churches, our philanthropic institutions our universities, and our governmental departments.

Frederick Winslow Taylor. The Principles of Scientific Management (pp. 5-7). (Function). Kindle Edition.  

I came to the "quality control & management" movement in 1986 when I took up 5 & 1/2 yrs of contract employment with a forensic-level environmental radiation laboratory in Oak Ridge.

 

I joined ASQ—back then "ASQC," the "American Society for Qualty Control." I served the Lab as a technical apps programmer and Statistical Process Control analyst (SPC).

 

Back then, "Taylorism" was a cautionary tale of the outdated (mostly white male) paternalistic past. The Main Dudes were Shewhart and Deming.

 

  

 

Shewhart was esteemed history. Deming was methodologically "Biblical" in the era. We were all in. I soaked it all in. In 1992 I passed the intimidating ASQ Exam for Certified Quality Engineer. The 4-hour open book test from Hell with a fail rate of 50%. I headed to the nearest bar after finishing.

 

My subsequent Cert was 'Total Quality Management / Continuous Quality Improvement" issued in the wake of 6 moths' training at IHC in Salt Lake City. 

 

Eventually, all things went "Lean."

 

I became a member of ASQ's "Lean Division." Touted "Lean" books here on the blog.

 

 

When I began posting this blog, I made ample note of my affinity for progressive QC/QA/QI methods. By 2016 I was covering various "Lean Heathcare" events. On the heels of that stuff came our mixed-metaphor "Agile" schtick. (My dubiety reeks a bit.)

I eventually became the ASQ Las Vegas Section 705 Chairman, and then went on to co-found and lead the Nevada Quality Alliance (NvQA), a state-level Baldrige-modeled nonprofit assessment and award program.

QI has by now turned out to be a mixed blessing. Specifically under the likes of Jeff Bezos et al, much of it has become faux-quantifed (e.g., "6-Sigma") gussied-up Taylorism. I am pleased to see AAAS voicing their/our concerns. Unsure at this point as to what will prove to be effective remediation.

"The creation of robust human-curated scientific literature has never been more crucial. The propagation of AI slop in the scientific record and generally on the internet is making science less trustworthy."

apropos: "Is there a 'science' of science communication?"

 

CODA

[NY Times] A Florida pastor sued OpenAI on Wednesday, claiming that its chatbot, ChatGPT, had offered him “extremely dangerous medical recommendations” that led to delayed care for a life-threatening pulmonary embolism last year.

The lawsuit claims that ChatGPT had assured Scott Winters that the early warning signs of his health crisis were “not something dangerous,” and had dissuaded him from seeking medical advice, instead telling him to trust that “God did not design your body to endlessly fail.”

The suit, filed in the Superior Court of California in San Francisco, accuses OpenAI and its chief executive, Sam Altman, of negligence and the “unauthorized practice of medicine,” pointing to moments when the chatbot offered Mr. Winters diagnoses and treatment plans and encouraged him to ignore pleas from friends and family to seek medical care… 

Practicing Medicine without a license or SME.

Science Magazine: Timely new AAAS Editorial

Truth and democracy in an era of misinformation

   

Concern about misinformation and its toxic effects on democracy is widespread. A survey of nearly 1500 experts by the World Economic Forum ranked misinformation and disinformation (the latter being intentionally spread, whereas the former may arise accidentally) as the top global risk during the next 2 years. Examples of misinformation-fueled events abound. In the United States, baseless claims about election fraud in 2020 by the losing presidential candidate, Donald Trump, culminated in a violent insurrection against the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. At the time of this writing, Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, are fearful of the future after Trump baselessly alleged on national TV that immigrants there were eating their white neighbors’ pets—a racist trope dating back centuries...

 

Although specific instances of disinformation-fueled tragedies can be readily identified, the scientific landscape surrounding misinformation is sufficiently nuanced to require careful unpacking. Two intertwined issues are particularly challenging: the adjudication of what exactly constitutes misinformation and the identification of the intentions of the communicator, the latter of which is crucial to differentiating misinformation from disinformation.

We know that NASA landed astronauts on the Moon. We know that the COVID-19 pandemic was not caused by 5G telecommunications equipment. We know that Trump did not fake having COVID-19. We know that there was no widespread irregularity or fraud during the 2020 US presidential election. Those are facts, established with sufficient certainty that, in the words of the late Stephen Jay Gould, “it would be perverse to withhold provisional assent.” Any attempt to refute them can be unambiguously labeled as misinformation. It is unsurprising, therefore, that independent professional fact-checks of false claims have been found to not only correlate highly with one another but also with the ratings of bipartisan samples of the public.

 

But just because truth can often be readily ascertained, it does not follow that facts can always be unambiguously identified ... The existence of such ambiguity and contestation should provide the impetus for us to hone our evidentiary skills in adjudicating competing claims, in the same way that, throughout the history of science, uncertainty has stimulated development of better theories and methodologies to resolve challenging issues.

 

The existence of ambiguity does not license the claim that researchers should stop studying misinformation altogether, as some have suggested by appealing to the difficulty of adjudicating competing claims ... [R]esearch on misinformation identified the decades-long disinformation campaign by the tobacco industry that has contributed to the deaths of millions of people, despite the fact that the truth value of some specific assertions is difficult to adjudicate.

 

The existence of ambiguity also does not license the willful dissemination of falsehoods ... But even accepting that ethical imperative, how can we identify when a communicator is intentionally spreading disinformation rather than inadvertently misinforming others? How do we know that Trump’s “big lie” about the 2020 election is really a lie?

 

By definition, lies are intentional, and it is therefore unsurprising that they can leave fingerprints that differentiate them from truthful information.

At the level of individuals’ speech, many machine learning models exist that can identify willful deception from text, often with accuracies exceeding 90% ... 

 

At an institutional level, the legal system is no stranger to ascertaining intentionality on a daily basis. Inferring intentionality is the difference between manslaughter and murder, and the concept of perjury rests precisely on the identification of willful lies ...

The fact that the legal system is anchored in the notions of truth, honesty, and evidence entails two additional ways in which willful dishonesty can be identified. First, there are instances in which even literal truths can be found to be deceptive and hence subject to legal sanctions, for example, when sellers fail to disclose all relevant information about a product even though they truthfully report some of the information. Identifying truthful but misleading or deceptive information is particularly crucial in light of research that has found the impact of misleading information about COVID-19 vaccines to be greater overall than that of clearly false information. Second, because the penalties of lying to the court are severe, lawyers tend to be painstakingly honest in court. Hence, when they or their clients make statements in public that differ from those made in court, willful dishonesty in public can be inferred.

We know that Trump’s “big lie” about the election was a lie because his public accusations of fraud were made at the same time that his lawyers, who filed more than 60 (unsuccessful) lawsuits to overturn the election results, admitted in court that there was no evidence of fraud. Two lawyers who did claim fraud were sanctioned and fined by a federal judge ...

Although politics differs from jurisprudence, democracy similarly requires some degree of epistemic integrity. For example, citizens must know that elections are fair and that an incumbent will transfer power peacefully when voted out of office. Democracy also requires reliable shared knowledge for meaningful debate and to ensure normatively good policy outcomes ...

In summary, identifying the truth value of some assertions can be difficult, but that does not make clear falsehoods any less false. Similarly, it can be difficult to infer the intentions of a communicator, but that does not mean lies are suddenly truths, and it does not mean we cannot (or should not attempt to) identify lies. On the contrary, the distinction between truth and falsehood and the ability to infer intention has been at the heart of jurisprudence for centuries if not millennia, and the impetus and frameworks for making these distinctions are similarly critical to ensuring the integrity of democratic societies. Relinquishing these principles is unthinkable.

Read all of it. And, join AAAS. 

Goes to my prior post on Artificial Arguments.

See also #OnDisinformation. Mental Immunity, anyone?

32 days to election day. Ahhhh... The Daze of Our Lives.

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SATURDAY OCT 5TH UPDATE

Exactly one month to election day. I Finished Matthew Taylor's bracing book The Violent Take It By Force.

Couple of Money Quotes.

So, any and all manner of human logical & evidentiary "reason-based" arguments are irrelevant in the face of Biblical citations and summary "prophetic apostolic" assertions?

Silly me. A Science of Deliberation? Why bother?

 

Below: These are the lind of dopes we face.

 

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I minimally commend to you these two books for close study ASAP, one month out from Election Day.

 

Cited Ari's book here.

 

SUNDAY UPDATE

   

"On Sept. 28, JD Vance spoke at a Christian political event hosted by the most influential religious leader you’ve probably never heard of.

His name is Lance Wallnau, and he is one of the chief proponents of a radical religious doctrine called the Seven Mountain Mandate. He’s an election denier. He’s said Kamala Harris engaged in “witchcraft” in her debate with Donald Trump and that an “occult spirit” is working “on her and through her.” And he’s a leader of one of the most dangerous political factions in America: the religious movement that helped fuel the insurrection at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In fact, as Matthew Taylor wrote in his important new book, “The Violent Take It by Force: The Christian Movement That Is Threatening Our Democracy,” Wallnau himself was instrumental to the insurrection. “I sorted through hundreds of social media profiles of Christians who were present for the riots and the protests at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6,” Taylor said, “Strikingly, a common denominator you can find across many of those accounts are clips of Wallnau’s Facebook Live rants and links to episodes of ‘Flashpoint’” — a program on a Christian television network called the Victory Channel."... [NY TIMES]

 Read all of it.

 

Tangenitially apropos:
 

 

My TwitterX observation:

Uhhh… “RELIGION,” anyone? Jumps right off the pages, for me. “King,“ “Lord,“ “worship,” “God said,”… etc. anthropomorphism.

Justin Gregg.

 

BUT WAIT! THERE'S MORE!

 

Facebook friend posted about this.

On July 15, when former President Donald Trump first appeared at the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee, he brought along two new accessories. One was a large bandage covering his ear, which had been nicked by a would-be assassin’s bullet. The other was Ohio’s first-term senator and Hillbilly Elegy author JD Vance, who was about to debut as the GOP vice presidential hopeful.

Two days later, after paying tribute to his wife, Usha—the child of immigrants from India—and their three biracial kids, Vance portrayed a vision of America that resonated deeply with Trump voters. “America is not just an idea,” he said solemnly. “It is a group of people with a shared history and a common future. It is, in short, a nation.”

To many viewers at home, this seemed like the stuff of a boilerplate, patriotic stump speech. But the words “shared history” lit up a far-right evangelical corner of social media. “America is a particular place with a particular people,” Joel Webbon, a Texas pastor and podcaster, wrote on X. “This is one of the most important political questions facing America right now,” posted former Trump administration official William Wolfe. “Answer it wrong, we will go the way of Europe, where the native-born populations are being utterly displaced by third world migrants and Muslims. Answer it right, and we can renew America once more.”

Vance was embracing one of their most cherished beliefs: America should belong to Christians, and, more specifically, white ones. “The American nation is an actual historical people,” says Stephen Wolfe (no relation to William), the author of the 2022 book The Case for Christian Nationalism, “not just a hodgepodge of various ethnicities, but actually a place of settlement and rootedness.” For this group of evangelical leaders, Vance, a 40-year-old former Marine who waxes rapturous about masculinity and women’s revered role as mothers, was the perfect tribune to spread their gospel of patriarchal Christian nationalism...

The Case For Christian Nationalism?

 

 

Not buyin' this one.You can read the Amazon preview if you've time to waste.

A lengthy review here: "The Rise of Right Wing Wokeism" (pdf).

I first encountered Stephen Wolfe, through his writing, when I was doing my doctoral work. We were both working on similar intellectual themes and looking at similar sources. I quoted Wolfe—who has a PhD from Louisiana State University and is now a “country scholar at Wolfeshire”—once or twice in my dissertation. Since then, I’ve read an article here or there from Wolfe and have tracked with some of his comments on Twitter. When I saw that he had a massive book coming out making The Case for Christian Nationalism, I was eager to read a serious exploration of such a timely and controversial topic.

This is a long review, so let me state my conclusion up front: I understand and sympathize with the desire for something like Christian Nationalism, but if this book represents the best of that ism, then Christian Nationalism isn’t the answer the church or our nation needs. For all the fine retrieval work Wolfe does in parts of the book, the overall project must be rejected...

And, we have @TheTheoBros on TwitterX.

I've started following them. LOL. Have to wonder whether it's a spoof site.

BTW: Learned a new word today: gynocracy.

 

More to come...

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More readings on deck

Lots going on this week. Barb McQuade's book was just released this morning. With various court actions in process and pending against Our Favorite President, these are timely.

 

Different topic. Coming March 5th:

 

 

In addition to new and ongoing book readings, I've spent a lot of time listening to the latest live audio Orals at the U.S. Supreme Court. Fascinating (well, most of it).

 

Stay tuned... 

 

FEB 29TH UPDATE 

 

Finished the Tristan Snell book. 

For decades, Trump had appeared invincible. But once we had proven that he wasn’t, more cases have followed in our wake. And while the earlier cases merely imposed some fines and repayments on Trump, these newest cases may dismantle his businesses and send him to prison.

Perhaps above all, what has changed in the legal battles against Trump is that he finally ran out of prosecutors and litigants he could buy off or intimidate. Campaign contributions and charity donations have suddenly become useless for Trump. Bullying and threats are not working. Our team at the New York AG’s office was not scared of Trump. Tish James and Fani Willis and Jack Smith are not scared, and they are not backing down. The same has been true of E. Jean Carroll, Michael Cohen, and their attorneys.

The courage and the relentless dedication that it requires to bring a case against a powerful figure, against all odds, against all opposition—that is the most indispensable element in holding such figures accountable and finally bringing them to justice. And we cannot and must not rely solely on elected officials and special counsel to have that courage for us. That courage requires all of us. It requires us all to have the collective determination to enforce the laws fairly, objectively, and persistently, no matter who is on the receiving end, no matter what the outcome is and whether we agree with it personally. It requires us all to fight, to vote, to advocate, to raise our voices, to insist upon people and policies to make accountability a reality rather than just an empty abstraction. Justice is not something that just happens: it’s a choice we make, not merely by our words or pleasant thoughts, but by our actions, with every ounce of zealousness we can muster.

Snell, Tristan. Taking Down Trump (pp. 177-178). Melville House. Kindle Edition. 

Very enjoyable and enlightening read. Now, I need to finish Attack From Within ASAP. Things are moving quickly this week.

 

BARB MCQUADE

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Enough Putin for now. Back to some science stuff

“When you give everyone a voice and give people power, the system usually ends up in a really good place,” Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook, said in 2010. Twelve years later, the world is not in such a great place. Facebook, Twitter, and other platforms may have given everyone a voice, but they’ve also unleashed a storm of negative effects—spreading disinformation, inciting hate, and endangering democracy…

It’s not a new phenomenon—“We feel your pain,” climate researcher Michael Mann says to the new victims—but the pandemic and today’s hyperpolarized climate have made things worse. And although an individual troll may be easy to block, the tsunami of abuse triggered by organized campaigns can take a serious toll.

For some researchers, the spread of mis- and disinformation has become a study subject in itself. Evolutionary biologist Carl Bergstrom believes our brains are maladapted for the daily diet of factoids and titillation that social media algorithms serve us, the same way our bodies can’t cope with an abundance of sugars and fat. As reporter Kai Kupferschmidt explains in his story, Bergstrom is convinced that “bullshit” spread online is one the biggest threats facing humanity in the 21st century—and that studying it is as important as climate science…

Don't get me started on Zuckerberg.

When Carl Bergstrom worked on plans to prepare the United States for a hypothetical pandemic, in the early 2000s, he and his colleagues were worried vaccines might not get to those who needed them most. “We thought the problem would be to keep people from putting up barricades and stopping the truck and taking all the vaccines off it, giving them to each other,” he recalls.

When COVID-19 arrived, things played out quite differently. One-quarter of U.S. adults remain unvaccinated against a virus that has killed more than 1 million Americans. “Our ability to convince people that this was a vaccine that was going to save a lot of lives and that everyone needed to take was much, much worse than most of us imagined,” Bergstrom says.

He is convinced this catastrophic failure can be traced to social media networks and their power to spread false information—in this case about vaccines—far and fast. “Bullshit” is Bergstrom’s umbrella term for the falsehoods that propagate online—both misinformation, which is spread inadvertently, and disinformation, designed to spread falsehoods deliberately...

In January 2020, some 2 months before the World Health Organization declared the coronavirus pandemic a global emergency, a tweet appeared on virologist Benhur Lee’s smartphone. It linked to a website, virological.org, where scientists had just posted the genetic sequence of SARS-CoV-2. Lee, at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, quickly shared the tweet with his followers, along with the words “Here we go” and an animation of planes taking off. Within days, the pharmaceutical firm Moderna and the U.S. National Institutes of Health had announced plans to develop what just 10 months later proved to be an effective vaccine, based on the sequence that codes for the virus’ spike protein.

In an earlier age, it might have taken days or longer for such useful DNA data to reach interested scientists via a Table of Contents alert from a journal. But the rise of Twitter and other social media platforms enabled users like Lee to spread the word about the SARS-CoV-2 sequence within hours, sparking global conversations and accelerating efforts to develop vaccines and treatments.

It was an early sign of how the pandemic prompted many scientists—and the public—to turn to social media to share and learn about hot new findings. COVID-19 “changed the game” because the threat “immediately connects with the public, [so] there’s a much bigger natural audience” for information about pandemic science than for most areas of research, says Michael Thelwall, a data scientist at the University of Wolverhampton, City Campus, who studies social media. In particular, Twitter has become a go-to resource for anyone trying to make sense of the torrent of pandemic studies—and for those intent on quickly pushing back against misinformation…

But the pandemic has also helped demonstrate the limitations of social media. It can be difficult, for example, for scientists to be heard over the cacophony of messages on Twitter—some 500 million each day. And although some scientists have used the platform to elevate their online presence, that has rarely translated into concrete professional rewards. Eventually the sizable Twitter followings some have built during the pandemic may fade. And in the meantime, some have suffered from their digital fame, attracting harsh personal attacks and threats of violence. Despite such challenges, many researchers believe that—like it or not—the pandemic has forever altered how certain scientists communicate with each other and the public…

When Marion Koopmans, a virologist at Erasmus University Medical Center, visited a museum in Amsterdam with her family last year, she was spotted by the wrong crowd: people who hate Koopmans because of her work on COVID-19. “They started really yelling, banging,” she says. “Security locked the doors.”

Since early in the pandemic, Koopmans has found herself targeted by people who believe the pandemic is a hoax, the virus was created intentionally to cause harm, or vaccines are dangerous. She has received death threats, been accused of belonging to an elite network of pedophiles—a belief held by devotees of the QAnon conspiracy theory—and told she should be tried for crimes against humanity.

Now, Koopmans no longer makes public appearances without first alerting the police. As a frequent guest on Dutch TV, “I cannot go out on the street anonymously,” she says. Her family is not comfortable walking outside with her, and they worry about her ever traveling to the United States, where much of the vitriol originates…

A packed issue. Lots to consider. Goes materially to "#SciComm" topics.

JUST LEARNED A NEW ACRONYM

"MRgFUS"

What? Cheryl hipped me to an ad in Baltimore Magazine touting "Magnetic Resonance Guided Focused Ultrasound" tx now approved by FDA and being offered by the University of Maryland Medical Center (and elsewhere).

A non-invasive ultrasound treatment for Parkinson's disease that was tested in a pivotal trial led by University of Maryland School of Medicine (UMSOM) researchers is now more broadly available at the University of Maryland Medical Center (UMMC). Recent FDA approval of a device used in the procedure effectively opens up access to focused ultrasound beyond clinical trial participation. 

The device, called Exablate Neuro and manufactured by Insightec, was approved in late 2021 by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration to treat advanced Parkinson's disease on one side of the brain. UMMC is one of only several sites in the Mid-Atlantic region with the capabilities and expertise to perform focused ultrasound for Parkinson's disease and other movement disorders. The procedure requires a multi-disciplinary team, including a neurosurgeon, movement disorder neurologist, and neuroradiologist...

CPT Code 0398T (People gotta get paid.)

 

Of serious interest to me, given that Sinemet still

I also recently ran across news of human clinical trials in Denmark involving genetically modified stem cells engineered to be used as dopamine-generating neurotransmitter replacement brain cells. Apparently going on in multiple countries of late.

I'm ready for something. My Parkinson's is getting increasingly annoying.

But, ahhh... everyone should have my problems.

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