Who Should Have Access to Your DNA? Eric Topol .

Prince Charles ‘silenced’ professor over row on complementary medicine. Edzard Ernst No surprises here.

Draw-me! Audrey Watters on the parallels between MOOCS and correspondence courses on ‘How to draw’ and how to code (only this time, from the 1970s, for the latter)

Speaking out against the GMC. A turning point for medical regulation Authors: Hilarie Williams, Christoph Lees . I am not so optimistic. There are far too few predators for regulators.

Culture lost. More on the mess of postgraduate medical training in the UK.

Arizona State University is indistinguishable from Amazon. Sort of Club 18–30, seems to me.

But lecture capture has always riled me. The thought of filming a 3 hour lecture then slapping it onto a virtual learning system and expecting students to watch this in their own time seems more like a punishment than a good idea.

  Bex Ferriday via Stephen Downes. [link to this post]

The continuing mess of funding for students to receive higher education. The only certainty is that nobody will sort this out for the long term and that all suggestions will be for short term political gain.

More on the battle between about and capital (from Yochai Bencher). Just watch if you think the NHS and Higher Ed is immune.

Philip Greenspun and academic deceit: “Economists, who get paid to teach at colleges, experiment with ways to get more young people from poorer-than-average families to become customers of colleges.”

More on MOOCs and unbundling. We are still at the beginning.

“We may not have GPs in ten years’ time; healthcare will have changed that much. What we do, who does it and where… all up for grabs.” Roy Lilley has some harsh and sympathetic words to say about UK general practice. I am not convinced by the detective metaphors but he is surely right to focus on the mismatch between what many are projecting primary care is about, and the realities. It is this divergence that students and young doctors are picking up on. I do not think the problem is that young doctors need more ‘education’ about primary care. By contrast, primary care is being demolished by our political masters. The idea of a personal physician is something to value, it is just that modern primary care can’t deliver this at the same time as doing all the others jobs that government has dumped on it. [link to this post]

Access to skincancer909 Well, when was the exam?

 

Students please repeat after me: “Attention is so central to our ability to think”. The ever sensible Daniel Willingham in an article in the NYT. He goes on to say, ‘People’s performance on basic laboratory tests of attention gets worse if a cellphone is merely visible nearby’. [link to this post]

Worth a view if you want to know a little bit more about where the UK may be going.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ofuhlR4LAgQ

The Soul of the Research University, by Nicholas Lemann. This is one of the best (brief) histories of the modern research university and the conflicts that arise between teaching and research, and between the Ivory Tower, and training for that little bit of the world that is outside Higher Education. Nice summaries of Newman, Flexner, Clark Kerr etc. The author is a professor of journalism, and a former Dean at Columbia. It shows.

Pharma:We need to talk about Kevin…. oops I mean Pharma [link]. Depressing and dismal, if not shameful.

More dismal reading: The major scientific discoveries of the 20th Century would not have happened under today’s rules, they would not get funding now. [link]

Why good people leave science [link]

Rescuing US biomedical research from its systemic flaws. Bruce Alberts et al.here and a comment from an economic perspective (Malthus all over again). As the author says ‘Get it? It’s as if the Pope and three leading cardinals held a press conference predicting the collapse of the Catholic church. These people know what they are talking about and we need to listen.’

The Heart of research is Sick, by Peter Lawrence, and The mismeasurement of science, by Peter Lawrence in which he recalls the classic Leo Szilard parable about how to kill genuine discovery. Can you imagine Szilard in the academy?

It’s that time of year isn’t it?

Students are the coin of the realm.

David Patterson.

There is a moving and well written Perspective in this week’s NEJM, written by an Australian physician, Ranjana Srivastava. It is about the premature death of a close colleague. It contains an interesting account of a conversation with a medical student. The student tells the author how deeply she misses the deceased colleague. 

“The other students are saying I must get over it or I’ll never become a real doctor. They say real doctors don’t cry. This has forced me to think about what specialty I might pursue where I don’t have to deal with loss.” I stare at her incredulously. Fighting back tears, she ventures, “Do you think I should see a psychiatrist?”

“What for?”

“To learn how to experience loss properly. I really want to be a good doctor,” she says. “I want to be strong to help others.”

My incredulity is replaced by alarm that we impart such pernicious messages to impressionable future doctors.

Amen. [link for this post]