Sidenotes: Taking a break & In Scripto

I realized the other day that I haven't posted in a month. With everything that is going on with finshing up with school, looking into career opportunites, and freelance writing, I haven't had a chance to update my blog. But I will be back in a couple of weeks with a post about the scientific platforms in politics. I am particularly excited about this year's election so I think it would be a great topic to blog about.

Also, I am a contributing copyeditor (in this first issue) and writer for In Scripto, the scientific online magazine published by Emory graduate students. Please feel free to check it out.

Science and the Summer Olympics

I haven't written a post in almost three weeks. That is because I have been enthralled with all that is the Summer Olympics in Beijing and the phenom that is Michael Phelps. I have been keeping up with him ever since I first got a glimpse of his talent watching the Athens Olympics back in '04. He is awesome. He is amazing. He is definitely the greatest Olympian in history. Of course Phelps isn't the only great athlete in this Olympic games. As an audience, we also have the pleasure of cheering on other great swimmers like Jason Lezak, Aaron Piersol, and Dana Torres and Jamaican runner Usain Bolt to name a few. But how do they do it? How do these athletes constantly become faster and faster and break more and more world records? Some say that it's genetics, that these athletes were born to do these things. For years, researchers have been studying the scientific factors that contribute to superior athletic performance for the select few who go on to be world-famous sportsmen. What they have determined is that it has more do to with physiology than genetics.

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Patient-funded drug research

If you are a biomedical research, scientist, healthcare profression, or just aware of the drug development process than you know how it can take an upwards of 15 years and $1 billion dollars for pharmaceutical companies and smaller biotechs to bring a drug to market. It can cause problems for both patients and the business side of these companies, delaying promising drugs and causing pharma to hustle to recoup discovery and marketing costs. This also contributes to the high cost of healthcare in the US and often leads to needy people being denied proper medications. However, a even lesser known problem with the drug development model is that pharma often does not pool their energies into developing therapeutics for less common diseases; for these disorders, there aren't a big enough population of people to justify the costs of development. That is where patient advocacy groups and a new movement of patient-supported research is starting to pick up the slack...

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