Indra half-joked the other day that if we were constrained to speak only truth, nobody would say anything at all. Inaccurate like most humor, but one gets the point ( Read more... )

"Those who make the mistake of thinking in terms of a first cause are fated never to become men of science. . . . We shall never succeed in changing our age of iron into an age of gold until we give up our ambition to find a single cause for all our ills, and admit the existence of many causes acting simultaneously, of intricate correlations and ( Read more... )

"In general insulin will promote anabolic processes of a cell while causing a reduction in catabolic processes."

That's the best single-sentence description of insulin I've ever seen, from John T. Hancock's Cell Signaling (p. 246, 2nd ed.), an otherwise disappointingly unhelpful text.

Here is one small example (indirectly via Patri), of a multitude I could choose, of why I'm working on what I'm working on right now: in this paper the authors check how damaged the hearts of marathon runners are compared to relatively sedentary people. Surprise! Their hearts tend to actually be in *worse* shape -- i.e. they show more scarring, ( Read more... )

The notion that I'd have serviceable drafts of chapters to circulate by the end of January is comical in retrospect, but the project itself is having its first desired effect: I wanted to write a book on how to think systematically about health because I didn't know how, but knew enough to see that nobody else did either. It's forced me to go up a ( Read more... )