Roger W. Sperry, perhaps the premier brain scientist of the last century, always plunged ahead with the sentiment, “Try it. And don’t read the literature until after you have made your observations. Otherwise you can be blinded by pre-existing dogma.” That is surely a paraphrase of what he said to me a hundred times, and that is how we operated in those delicious carefree and exploring days at Caltech. “Try it.”….

Looking back at those early days, it is hard to overstate the adventurous nature of our project. Nobody thought the patient would actually provide evidence the mind could be split. Weeks earlier, a case of callosal agenesis, a birth defect where there is a complete or partial absence of the corpus callosum, had come through the laboratory and nothing seemed out of the ordinary. From a larger view, even though one of the world’s greatest neurobiologists was involved, neither Sperry nor certainly I, a green-as-could-be new graduate student, had any significant experience examining patients. To others it might have seemed to be a fool’s game and a waste of time. However, it was not, because at Caltech, the attitude was always, “try it.”

Michael S. Gazzaniga in PNAS

David Colquhoun has a good follow up post on the Imperial affair (the death of Prof Stefan Grimm) (see my earlier post on Corrupting the Young. He links to a blog post from Federico Calboli. Federico highlights what  this debacle says about UK science overall: there is inevitably collateral damage being done to the rest of the UK higher education community. If you are seriously trying to encourage young doctors to embark on a career as a clinical academics in the UK  this episode (and what is going on at Warwick) is an utter disaster.  It would be nice to think other institutions might come forward and condemn  some of this idiotic perforamce management(sic), but I fear they won’t. I now worry about the birthday card the Principal of my my own institution sent me earlier this year — I have never had one before. I just hope nobody is sitting there looking at birthdates and wondering who they might get rid of….

From an article in today’s NYT

Last year an Interlude video of Bob Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone,” which let viewers flip through a fictional TV wasteland — infomercials, game shows — in which actors mouthed Mr. Dylan’s lyrics, got more than 70 million views. Recently, an interactive video for “Stayin Out All Night“ by the rapper Wiz Khalifa, a Warner artist, was viewed 3.8 million times, while a conventional version on YouTube got only 3.6 million views. “This Interlude technology is game-changing,” Mr. Khalifa said in a statement. “I’m very glad to be at the forefront.”  For Warner, as well as for advertisers that have begun to use Interlude, the appeal of the technology lies in how it lures people to be more active viewers. According to Mr. Bloch, the company’s chief executive, 90 percent of Interlude’s music video viewers make choices while watching (videos will play even if a viewer does nothing). A more engaged audience yields higher ad rates,

Well, I haven’t sampled (no pun intended) the technology, but the key point is familiar to anyone who knows anything about how students learn: they have to engage, and the more effort them have to put in to any teaching session the more they will learn. Remember Robert Bjork’s phrase: desirable difficulty, in learning.

Terrific interview that gives a feel for Djerassi’s heft. A wonderful case-study of how medicine ‘works’.

I meant to write earlier, as a follow on from my part 1 post, but in all sorts of ways events have overtaken me, and the delay in any case helps me make my case. One reason for the delay was that I was on leave, chilling (or not) by the side of a pool stimulating my melanocytes (yes, I know I am a dermatologist…), reading interesting things, and wondering a little more about what is happening in the clinical academic landscape. It is of course worth commenting on the fact that I felt the need to take a holiday to do any serious work. My friend, and former colleague, Bruce Charlton, pointed out to me many years ago that if you walked into a colleagues’ office and they were reading a book or an article, they often seemed to act as though they had been caught reading porn, as though ‘real work’ didn’t involve reading or thinking. One wonders what an academic is meant to do? (My advice: put up an Excel spreadsheet on your monitor; the world will end not in war or pestilence, but in one giant Excel performance management spreadsheet, that will be unread because all those it refers to have left for better pastures, usually as performance managers, or Deans).

One of the things I talked about in Madrid (when I was corrupting the young, or at least trying to advise on medical science careers) was to draw attention to an article by Sydney Brenner published in Science in 1998. Now, in the pantheon of the experimental geniuses of modern biology, Brenner is up there in the first handful. I cannot remember reading anything by him that has not make me see the world differently. He has a depth and clarity of mind (and expression) that puts into shadow all the usual pomp of ‘serious academia’. I did one meet him, but suffered what I can only describe as stage fright, and choked on my first few words. Still, I can still read him.
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He declined to divulge the size of his gift to Stanford, but said it was sufficient to fund the study for a century and suggested the amount might be increased in the future. US style philanthropy.

Via Audrey Watters, and at BoingBoing

Two quotes from an article on the likely new GMC driven medical qualifying exam.

Richard Wakeford, a life fellow at the University of Cambridge who has researched medical assessment procedures, thinks that the Medical Schools Council may have accepted the inevitability of the introduction of a national licensing exam. But he believes that objections will still be raised to such an assessment. “I suspect that the really hostile medical schools will be the ones whose graduates include the least able ones and who will have to work like the devil to get them through a national test of any moderate severity,” he says.

and Krishna Kasaraneni, chair of the education, training, and workforce subcommittee of the BMA’s General Practitioners Committee says

Kasaraneni believes that the exam could help to raise standards among medical schools, but he is concerned that it could lead to the development of league tables for medical schools. “It will be overall a good thing, but there will be unintended consequences,” he says. “One of them will be about ranking medical schools and the stigma associated with that. The message that needs to come out is that all UK graduates and IMGs are assessed fairly and to the same standard. Where one graduated from is irrelevant.”

I am intrigued by Wakeford’s apparent certitude, but in total despair that people think it shouldn’t matter where you studied. Widget factories. So much for ambition, for both students, institutions and doctors.

“There are almost never technical solutions to social problems.” This is a quote from computer security guru Bruce Schneier,  in a Nature  article about fraud and the review of scientific papers. But I  think it has a much broader generalisability throughout academic life and education. [link]

So the English NHS is to stop paying GPs to diagnose dementia. The NHS supremo is quoted as saying,  ‘I think it’s too early for hindsight. We need to look at the dementia diagnosis rate through the year before we do that. It is not driven by patient preference, but by different levels of focus on this topic. ‘ Well forget hindsight,  a little foresight would have helped.