Zyprexa

Much much much ado on the web this week, on the too-many fronts I try to visit. From my list of notables: Carl Zimmer, who clearly doesn't sleep, writes up a nice post about a Nature paper announcing Limusaurus, a newly discovered fossil that is, Zimmer notes, is "not -- I repeat NOT -- the missing link between anything"-- but nevertheless sheds some light on how dinos may have turned into birds (more or less). Bonus: Great pictures of Carl holding up three fingers. Ed Yong, who seems to be drinking the same strength coffee as Carl Zimmer lately, looks at an interesting correlation: Hidden…
I'm having difficulty even reading, much less posting about, the river of stories about pharma and device industries, FDA regs, conflicts of interest, and so on. But I'll take a stab here at spotlighting the main events and making some sense of where this is headed. For I don't think it's just coincidence that brings in a few days an archetypal pharma scandal, an unexpected and emphatic Supreme court reversal, an underwear check administered to the entire faculty of the Harvard Medical School, and the decision to "make an example" of surgeons who took kickbacks for using medical devices. The…
Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907). Oil and gold on canvas by Gustav Klimt. [larger view]. I have not been writing much recently because I've been quite ill and haven't even managed to leave my apartment for the past week to locate a stable wireless connection. Actually, I am not ill in the strict sense of the word as we understand it. Instead, I am ill because I am experiencing withdrawal from the last of the so-called "mood stabilizing drugs", citalopram, that the doctors got me hooked on before they unceremoniously dumped me from their program for poor people roughly six months…
I stirred some ire last week when I asserted that the Times (for -- disclosure dept -- whom I sometimes write) and similar mainstream papers offer a public good through their unique combination of a) access to information and 2) clout with the public and government. Several readers took me to task (see the comments section of the post linked above), arguing that these papers have failed their public mission by dropping the ball several times lately, most notably during the run-up to the Iraq War. "Let the dinosaur die," is the argument. In a similar vein, some science bloggers (see this post…