Pay dirt.

#702 - Pay Dirt From The Human Genome

The 3 billion genetic instructions that form a blueprint for human life have now been cataloged, but the meaning of most of those instructions remains unknown. Therefore, the practical significance of deciphering the book of human life remains murky except in one area: many new pharmaceutical drugs will soon be possible. Unfortunately, this is a mixed blessing. A raft of new drugs may benefit t...

Cultivating the Clinician Innovator: Is There Pay Dirt in Academic Medicine?

First, few would disagree with the authors that we are in the midst of great changes in health care because of the rapid pace of technological innovations. Recently, as I sat at a company board dinner, another guest pulled out his Alive Cor (noncontinuous, patient-triggered event monitor), which works via his smartphone to help confirm his bouts of paroxysmal atrial fibrillation and allows him ...

Eating Dirt

Sign on the wall of El Santuario de Chimayo, New Mexico T his place feels old beyond human recollection. The carvings and paintings were surely done by human hands, but no one remembers whose hands those were. The work is striking, especially in the apse behind the altar. There, the colors of surrounding hills have been transferred onto nearly luminous wooden reredos full of Catholic symbolism....

Dig the Dirt

It seems kind of strange that eating parasitic worms causes a cure rather than a disease. Yet, this fact is no stranger than many other man-bites-dog stories about "real life" in contemporary times. Such stories arise at moments of changing equilibria in the processes of the social construction of reality. They are especially evident during periods of intense dialectic in which long held theses...

Bread and Dirt