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I write on science, medicine, nature, culture and other matters for the New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, Slate, National Geographic, Scientific American Mind, and other publications. (Find clips here.) Right now I'm writing my fourth book, The Orchid and the Dandelion, which explores the hypothesis that the genetic roots some of our worst problems and traits — depresison, hyperaggression, violence, antisocial behavior — can also give rise to resilience, cooperation, empathy, and contentment. The book expands on my December 2009 Atlantic article exploring these ideas.
I've also written three books, including Reef Madness: Charles Darwin, Alexander Agassiz, and the Meaning of Coral, which traces the strangest but most forgotten controversy in Darwin's career — an elemental dispute running some 75 years.
If you'd like, you can subscribe to Neuron Culture by email. You might also want to see more of my work at my main website or check out my Tumblr log.
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March 21, 2008
Category: Culture of science
Some great stuff I've come across, lack time to blog on, but would hate for you to mis
In On being certain, neurologist and novelist Robert Burton, who writes a column at Slate, looks at the science of what makes us feel certain about things...
Why are drug costs are going up?"Because they can," say the folks at Managed Care Matters
Mind Hacks drew attention to the wonderful poem below by Wislawa Szymborska, which is a reaction to a not-so-wonderful film, from 40s Soviet science, of a decapitated dog head that (supplied with blood) still reacts to many stimuli. Grim film, beautiful poem. Excellent commentary and links at Mind Hacks.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 6:18 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 19, 2008
Category: Environment/nature
My story on "The Wild Salmon Debate: A Fresh Look at Whether Eating Farmed Salmon is ... Well ... OK," was published a couple weeks ago in Eating Well. You can see the Eating Well web version here or download a pdf here. In it I describe why I came to swear off eating farmed Atlantic salmon because of their impact on wild salmon fisheries, which have enough troubles as it is.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 12:07 PM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 12, 2008
Category: Brains and minds
In pondering these things I ran across this fascinating New York Times >article from 2004, "Did Antidepressants Depress Japan," about the introduction of the concept of depression in Japan beginning in the late 1990s. Before then, the article asserts, Japanese culture concerned itself little with depression outside of professional psychiatry and medicine. But when drug companies started pushing antidepressants beginning in 1999, a cultural awareness of depression grew -- and with it, the number of people who considered themselves depressed.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 9:47 AM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 10, 2008
Category: Environment/nature
An investigation by the Associated Press found trace amounts of scads of drugs in drinking-water supplies around the country. For a list of what was found in the watersheds of 28 metro areas, click here. Among the water%u2019s offerings were antibiotics, anti-convulsants, mood stabilizers and sex hormones. There were traces of sedatives in water serving the city that never sleeps.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:11 AM • 2 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 6, 2008
Category: Science policy
Why aren't your wages going up? Maybe because you're the one paying for the health insurance your boss is supposedly...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 8:50 PM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Brains and minds
There's been a lot of attention the last couple years to the possibility of brain-based lie detector tests -- most...
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Posted by David Dobbs at 1:52 PM • 2 Comments • 1 TrackBacks
Category: Medicine
With so much written here about placebos lately (see posts on Kirsch study below), I would not want to leave out this remarkable study: Placebo effect is stronger, apparently, if you pay more for the placebo.
This is a fascinating study described in a letter to the Journal of the American Medical Association. A crudely shortened version: Some researchers at MIT (none of them Bill Murray, as far as I can tell) gave light shocks to volunteers, then gave them some placebos that were costly and some that were cheap. The costly ones worked better.
It sounds like a bit of a stunt, but as Respectful Insolence points out in a nice write-up, the finding is perfectly consistent with what we know about placebos. It would seem to have unsettling implications for lowering health-care costs.
An excerpt is below; study is here, but behind a pay firewall.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 11:05 AM • 1 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: Culture of science
A quick heads-up: Nature weighs in on the flap over the Kirsch SSRI study that found antidepressants no more effective than placebo. I've given a lot of attention to the placebo issue. Nature stresses another point: That the Kirsch study underscores the need for clinical trial data to be public. At present it is not, as the drug companies have persuaded the FDA that releasing all trial data might reveal trade secrets. Nature argues -- as have many -- that what's being hidden is not proprietary trade secrets but information vital to public health:
No more scavenger hunts
The recent media flap over antidepressants highlights the need for data to be transparent %u2014 and for a mandatory database of all clinical trials.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 10:40 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
March 3, 2008
Category: Books
Now here's a match-up: the fine-grained, highly particularized, unpredictable, and insatiably curious mind of Nicholson Baker and the many-grained field of knowledge expressed in Wikipedia. In a great reading pleasure, Baker reviews John Broughton's Wikipedia: The Missing Manual in the current issue of the New York Review of Books:
Wikipedia is just an incredible thing. It's fact-encirclingly huge, and it's idiosyncratic, careful, messy, funny, shocking, and full of simmering controversies—and it's free, and it's fast. In a few seconds you can look up, for instance, "Diogenes of Sinope," or "turnip," or "Crazy Eddie," or "Bagoas," or "quadratic formula," or "Bristol Beaufighter," or "squeegee," or "Sanford B. Dole," and you'll have knowledge you didn't have before. It's like some vast aerial city with people walking briskly to and fro on catwalks, carrying picnic baskets full of nutritious snacks.
This is just Baker's cup of tea.
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Posted by David Dobbs at 11:33 AM • 0 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
