A good anecdotal lead. Carolina Solis is a medical student who did research on parasitic infections caused by contaminated well water in rural Nicaragua.
Like many researchers, she plans to submit her findings for publication in a medical journal. What she discovered could benefit not just Nicaraguan communities but those anywhere that face similar problems. When she submits her paper, though, she says the doctors she worked with back in San Juan del Sur will probably never get a chance to read it.
“They were telling me their problems accessing these [journals]. It can be difficult for them to keep up with all the changes in medicine.”
Washington recently got involved. Squirreled away in the massive $410 billion spending package the president signed into law last month is an open access provision. It makes permanent a previous requirement that says the public should have access to taxpayer-funded research free of charge in an online archive called PubMed Central. Such funding comes largely from the National Institutes of Health, which doles out more than $29 billion in research grants per year. That money eventually turns into about 60,000 articles owned and published by various journals.
But Democrats are divided on the issue. In February, Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., submitted a bill that would reverse open access. HR 801, the Fair Copyright in Research Works Act, would prohibit government agencies from automatically making that research free. Conyers argues such a policy would buck long-standing federal copyright law. Additionally, Conyers argues, journals use their subscription fees to fund peer review in which experts are solicited to weigh in on articles before they’re published. Though peer reviewers aren’t usually identified or paid, it still takes money to manage the process, which Conyers calls “critical.”
And cultural/generational change:
The pay-to-play model doesn’t jive with a generation of soon-to-be docs who “grew up Google,” with information no farther than a search button away. It’s a generation that never got lost in library stacks looking for an encyclopedia, or had to pay a penny for newspaper content. So it doesn’t see why something as important as medical research should be locked behind the paywalls of private journals.
Copyright issues are nothing new to a generation that watched the recording industry deal its beloved original music sharing service, Napster, a painful death in 2001. Last October, it watched Google settle a class-action lawsuit brought on by book publishers upset over its Book Search engine, which makes entire texts searchable. And just last week, a Swedish court sentenced four founders of the the Pirate Bay Web site to a year in prison over making copyrighted files available for illegal file sharing. And now the long-familiar copyright war is spilling over into medicine.
And, the article doesn’t mention this, but I’ll contend there’s a role for journalism to play. Here’s a modest proposal: allow medical researchers to republish key findings of the research in newspapers, magazines, something with a different revenue structure, and then make it accessible to everyone. Not perfect, but a programmatic effort would do some good.
Speaking of which — what are the new big ideas on the health/medicine beat? This is such a huge issue — it feels like it should have its own section in the paper every day.
Been recently fascinated with learning more about health care, reading a lot of Ezra Klein and Jonathan Cohn, catching up on essays by the likes of Paul Krugman and Atul Gawande. And the best thing I’ve read so far is this wonkish-but-accessible interview with health care policy super-couple Uwe Reinhardt and Tsung-mei Cheng. The interview teases out a number of distinctive policy critiques and ideas that aren’t surfaced in most of the layperson-friendly health policy lit I’ve come across, like this point about the oft-derided drug company profiteers:
If you look at total drug company profits in a given year, of every retail dollar sale, drug companies who manufacture the stuff get 75 cents. And of that, they make 16, 15 percent profit. So if you multiply that out, we have about $220 billion in drug sales; that’s about, say, $25 billion in profits. Now, that is a lot; you can buy two Princetons for that. However, if you then divide $25 billion through $2.2 trillion in national health spending, you get 1.2 percent; that is, drug company profits are 1.2 percent of total national health spending.
This was from Frontline’s excellent “Sick Around the World” documentary, where they profiled the health care systems of five developed countries and compared them to the US system. See also: Frontline’s follow-up, “Sick Around America.” (Note: T.R. Reid, the correspondent on “Sick Around the World,” refused to participate in “Sick Around America” after he found that the producers shafted the option of single-payer health care in the final edit.)
The hyperabundance of thoughts in the baby brain also reflects profound differences in the ways adults and babies pay attention to the world. If attention works like a narrow spotlight in adults – a focused beam illuminating particular parts of reality – then in young kids it works more like a lantern, casting a diffuse radiance on their surroundings.
“We sometimes say that adults are better at paying attention than children,” writes Gopnik. “But really we mean just the opposite. Adults are better at not paying attention. They’re better at screening out everything else and restricting their consciousness to a single focus.”
This (in bold) is the money-quote, though:
Gopnik argues that, in many respects, babies are more conscious than adults. She compares the experience of being a baby with that of watching a riveting movie, or being a tourist in a foreign city, where even the most mundane activities seem new and exciting. “For a baby, every day is like going to Paris for the first time,” Gopnik says. “Just go for a walk with a 2-year-old. You’ll quickly realize that they’re seeing things you don’t even notice.”
I can confirm that this is true.
Also, peep this graph charting synaptic activity + density according to age (via Mind Hacks):
Apparently, that’s where the real action is: contra Lehrer’s article, baby brains don’t actually have more neurons than adults, but way more (and way denser) synapses (aka the connections between neurons).
Also, just to free associate on the whole synapse thing: I had knee surgery a few weeks ago to repair a torn quadriceps tendon, and I’m in physical therapy now. Part of my PT involves attaching electrodes to my thigh to induce my quad to flex (this is called “reeducating the muscle.”).
Anyways, it is always weird to confirm that we are just made out of meat, and that if you run enough electrical current through a muscle, it’ll react whether or not your brain tells it to. That’s all your brain is — an extremely powerful + nuanced router for electricity.
Something Walter Benjamin said has interested me for a while now:
If centuries ago [writing] began gradually to lie down, passing from the upright inscription to the manuscript resting on sloping desks before finally taking itself to bed in the printed book, it now begins just as slowly to rise again from the ground. The newspaper is read more in the vertical than in the horizontal plane, while film and advertisements force the printed word entirely into the dictatorial perpendicular.
— One Way Street (1928)
If Benjamin’s right, then this is a reading revolution that’s still underway — expanding from film, advertisements, and newspapers to television, computer, and telephone screens. Even though we’re using all these different devices, they just might be participating in this dyad of vertical vs. historical reading.
I’ve become something of an amateur anthropologist of how people read — watching people read books or papers or from their phones or laptops in public places — but I’m curious: how do you read?
* What kind of device(s)?
* Where is your body?
* Where is your reading material?
* How do you prefer to read?
* How do you read most often?
* Where/how is it hardest for you to read?
* What are your reading surfaces — desks, tables, a bed, your own body?
* Do you use any prosthetic aids — glasses, something to raise your laptop upwards?
* How did you read as a child? Ten years ago? What’s changed?
Wow, super podcast find — on Apple Hot News, of all places. The Year Was 1959, a series of lectures (w/music) on a single year (but what a year) in the history of Jazz. Georgia State professor Gordon Vernick starts with three of my favorite records ever: John Coltrane’s Giant Steps, Miles Davis’s Kind Of Blue, and Ornette Coleman’s The Shape Of Jazz To Come. (The two other great albums that people usually talk about are Charles Mingus’s Mingus Ah Um and Dave Brubeck’s Time Out.)
When you look at 1959, it’s almost impossible to believe that it would be rock and roll (plus folk and ballad pop) that would chart the musical revolution. Rock was stagnant and jazz was endlessly inventive ten times over. Such a delight to listen — this one year is an education in music itself.
If you’ve got twenty-five minutes to listen to two smart + funny people talk about Marcel Duchamp, Ezra Pound, comparative literature, American poetry, and French philosophy, give this podcast a whirl. It’s by two of my teachers (and friends, and readers), the poet Charles Bernstein and literary critic Jean-Michel Rabat
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