A high profile paper previously published in the highly prestigious journal, Nature, suggests that overwhelmingly, cancer results from “extrinsic factors,” namely behaviors and exposures, rather than the “intrinsic” transgressions of our chromosomes. The media response is a proclamation that no, cancer is not just about “bad luck.” So august a platform for so salient a proposition seems to demand a highly erudite response, and I’ve got just the one: duh.
Your body will do everything within its power to maintain balance to keep you alive.
Scarcely a week goes by these days without hearing yet again from some perch of lofty intellectual reflection that we know nothing about the basic feeding of Homo sapiens. We are told our research is flawed, our assessments useless, and thus our knowledge permanently something near to nil.
Each year in the U.S., approximately four billion prescriptions are filled. That's a big number. But perhaps an even "bigger" number is the four to eight million of those dispensed that will potentially involve life-threatening errors. Going to the pharmacy for a necessary medicine is not supposed to be a high-stakes game. But, even physicians and the nation’s most trusted profession -- pharmacists -- aren’t infallible. Generally, it’s not their fault. What goes wrong?
A fascinating and well-run randomized trial of 164 adults just published in the BMJindicating that eating a low-carbohydrate diet for maintenance of weight loss can increase energy expenditure has predictably generated widespread media attention. Some of the highest-profile entries in that barrage of brief attention, notably coverage in The Chicago Tribune and in The New York Times, massively misrepresent the study findings.
Much like patients and doctors have terrible experiences navigating the US sick care system, entrepreneurs struggle to find seed stage funding. As traditional VC's get bigger and bigger and are less willing and able to invest smaller amounts in higher risk early stage ventures and as companies stay private longer, the gap has been filled with a myriad of funders and platforms, such as single family offices, multi-family offices, mini-VCs, entrepreneur-investor matching sites, super angels, corporate venture groups, hospital system innovation centers and equity crowd funding sites.
Synthetic biology is a relatively new field of science that includes both the design and formation of entirely new biological systems or components, and the redesign and production of natural biological systems.