Practicing clinicians have traditionally played a central role in research, advancing breakthrough treatments for innumerable diseases, from smallpox and cholera to heart disease and cancer. While their insights remain important as ever, recent years have seen the role of the physician-scientist become greatly diminished. Explaining the reasons for this shift as well as potential solutions is a new book called ‘The Vanishing Physician-Scientist?’ (Cornell University Press) by Dr. Andrew I. Schafer, the E. Hugh Luckey Distinguished Professor and chairman of the Department of Medicine at Weill Cornell Medical College and physician-in-chief at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital/Weill Cornell Medical Center. ‘In the last 30 years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of non-physicians Ph.D.s conducting medical research that starts in a laboratory, while the number of physicians in academic medical centers conducting research has declined,’ says Dr. Schafer. ‘This is a major shift from the previous era when physicians often initiated research based on patient observations and led the research effort from clinical studies to laboratory work.’ He attributes the change to a variety of factors, principally explosive advances in basic biomedical sciences such as genomic and molecular medicine, whose pace has outstripped clinical observation and has […]
The U.S. government, desperate to add jobs to a feeble economy, is looking skyward for help: to the wind and the sun. ‘We should put more Americans to work building clean energy facilities,’ Obama said to applause during his State of the Union address Wednesday. Solar and wind power projects tend to appeal to politicians on both sides of the aisle. They are clean and domestic sources of power, and thanks to this government largesse, they are growing fast. The American Wind Energy Association reported last week that in 2009 the nation’s wind power grew 39%, and that it has grown by 39% annually for the past five years. It’s a similar story with other technologies, like solar power, and abroad, where generous government subsidies in Europe and huge government-backed projects in India and China are fueling growth. Of the top 10 largest renewable energy projects in the world, five were completed in the last two years. In Depth: The World’s Biggest Renewable Energy Projects That’s the good news for renewable advocates. The bad news: Renewable energy remains a stubbornly small percentage of both the United States’ and the world’s energy portfolio. In the U.S., […]
WICHITA, Kan. — Abortion never came up in jurors’ brief deliberations Friday at the end of Scott Roeder’s trial in the murder of abortion provider Dr. George Tiller, according to the jury’s foreman. ‘It was never spoken of,’ said the 54-year-old, whose first service as a juror came in a trial that drew reporters and activists on both sides of the abortion issue from coast to coast. He said the jury discussed only the question of whether Roeder was guilty of first-degree murder for shooting Tiller while Tiller served as an usher in his Wichita church, and whether Roeder was guilty of aggravated assault for pointing a handgun at two people who tried to block his escape. Because of security concerns, the juror asked that his name not be used. He said he didn’t want to take any chances that someone might lash out against him. The guilty verdict was unanimous from the beginning of the deliberations, he said. ‘There wasn’t much to argue about.’ They found the evidence against Roeder ‘overwhelming.’ That’s why it took only 37 minutes to decide, he said. For security during the trial, he said, jurors were […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
