This book tells the story of the discovery of the mechanisms behind prion disease, interlaced with the tragedy of an Italian family that carries a mutation that causes fatal familial insomnia.
With a subtitle that says ‘How drug companies mislead doctors and harm patients’ you’re hardly expecting a comedy. ‘Bad Pharma’ is a very important read for anyone prescribing drugs, anyone taking drugs or anyone otherwise involved in the health care system.
We tend to take textbook knowledge for granted, but once upon a time these ‘facts’ were still to be discovered. Eric R. Kandel (1929) witnessed and importantly contributed to this small-step-by-small-step process in the field of neuroscience.
Everybody seems busy nowadays, and for many of us, this results in stress. Scientific research in particular is a highly stressful occupation. Perhaps in reaction to this phenomenon, more and more scientists are starting to explore the biological aspects of stress.
If there is one certainty in life, it is that time has always been there, and will always remain. But although it is a basic fact of our existence, most people don’t tend to reflect much on the characteristics and implications of time. Eva Hoffman did.
A lot of scientists who are “scared” of statistics fall into the trap of ignoring the existence of anything beyond a t-test. But using the right method to analyse your data is essential to having confidence in your results, and there are a lot more methods out there than the t-test.