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.
‘Science is not the only path to knowledge. When it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.’ Jonah Lehrer’s fascination for the theoretical discoveries of artists in the nineteenth and twentieth century resulted in the book ‘Proust was a neuroscientist’.
Rumour has it that many people who work in a lab enjoy cooking. Apart from the organisational parallels that can be drawn between following a protocol and a recipe, did you realise how much the two activities can have in common?
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.