"The Silicon Valley aristocrats Mark Zuckerberg, Sergey Brin and Yuri Milner have jointly established the most lucrative annual prize in the history of science..."

"... to reward research into curing diseases and extending human life. The newly created Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences Foundation on Wednesday announces the first 11 winners of an award intended to inject excitement into the sometimes lonely, underfunded quests to understand and combat cancer, diabetes, Parkinson's disease and other maladies. Zuckerberg, who founded Facebook; Brin, who co-founded Google; and Milner, a venture capitalist, have dipped into their fortunes to sponsor awards worth $3m each, compared with a Nobel prize's monetary value of $1.1m."

"I had to sit down on the floor for a while. I thought it must be a practical joke or a Nigerian scam," said Cornelia Bargmann, 51, who has pioneered work on neural circuits and behaviour at the Rockefeller University. "The scale of this is so outsized I think it will have a huge impact on the life sciences." Asked how she would spend the money she hesitated. "It's so far outside my normal planning I don't know. Get the car fixed?"...

Titia de Lange, 57, who researches cell biology, genetics and cancer at Rockefeller university, said the award felt surreal. "I'm not used to having a lot of money. I don't really have possessions." Two women from a list of 11 fairly reflected the percentage of women working at that level, she said. "One would like it to be higher of course."

Young women! Enter the sciences. Silicon Valley aristocrats are dying to give you $3 million. The gender balance must be achieved. No sooner is this wonderful, generous prize announced than the criticism rolls in, gently at first, but you know there is a problem. The aristocrats want the honor of handing out honor and they must comply with the ethical structure of the Silicon Valley culture where they reign. There must be women recipients. 11 prizes? 6 should go to women!

So, ladies, get on it. There's big money here! And yet, women are apparently not so motivated by money. Oh, I don't know, get the car fixed. Gotta sit down on the floor. I don't really have possessions....

So funny. It's men who are offering big money as an incentive. But what if monetary incentives are a male thing, working mostly on men? And yet you have to include the women, equally, because even if women don't care so much about actually getting the money, they care immensely about equality and fairness. And everyone's watching. The symbolism counts, not just the effect of motivating improvements in life for the rest of us. What do you want more — cures for diseases or the appearance of gender equity?

Blood donor dogs and cats.

At the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine’s Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital:

To do that, the hospital has its own Animal Blood Bank with a dedicated core [sic] of 12 dogs and 11 cats who serve as regular donors, many of them the animal companions of students or staff members at the UW-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. “We actually have a waiting list of pets to become new donors,” notes Bach.

The typical canine blood donor is a healthy, larger dog — more than 50 pounds — that has been screened for blood borne parasites and diseases that affect the qualities of blood. Importantly, the dog donor possesses a good nature.

“We don’t sedate the dogs,” explains Bach, who says a typical blood draw from a dog takes about 7 to 10 minutes. “Cats are certainly different than dogs. Cats are a little more reclusive and sometimes have a little higher stress level in the hospital. They are sedated.”

Cats also need a more compatible blood-type cross match when they are getting transfusion.

They also do horse and cow transfusions.

Their most recent resident donor horse, Drive Thru, retired this fall after seven years of donating blood and serving as a calming presence and companion for any skittish equine patients at the hospital. In the hospital’s large animal practice, Drive Thru was a star, getting presents and mail from the children of clients and visitors and occasionally popping his head into the waiting room for peppermint candy, his favorite.

The resident cow donors are Maxine and Natalie, "beautiful and pampered Holsteins." How much blood goes into a cow getting a transfusion? 6 to 12 liters.

"Wanted: Harvard seeks 'adventurous woman' to give birth to cloned Neanderthal baby..."

Second photo down in the right-hand column at Drudge right now:



Link goes to the Daily Mail:

Professor George Church of Harvard Medical School... said: ‘Now I need an adventurous female human. It depends on a hell of a lot of things, but I think it can be done.’

So Drudge changed the quote, substituting "female human" for "woman," actually making the scientist seem less creepy.

He told German magazine Der Spiegel: ‘Neanderthals might think differently than we do. They could even be more intelligent than us.'

Clue to creepy scientists: When you've got a proposal for an edgy medical experiment on human beings — especially when it implies a dream of an improved species — don't use Germans to get your message out.

In fairness to Church... I'm going to assume he's just horsing around, cogitating about what is possible, and that he's certainly not currently seeking that adventurous female human.

Belgian doctors give suicide injections to 45-year-twins who were going blind.

Marc and Eddy Verbessem, who were deaf, decided they didn't want to live anymore, and the doctors fulfilled their death wish.

Euthanasia is legal under Belgian law if those making the decision can make their wishes clear and are suffering unbearable pain, according to a doctor's judgement....

Mr Dufour, the doctor who presided over the euthanasia, told RTL television news that the twins had taken the decision in 'full conscience.' He said they were 'very happy' and it had was a 'relief' to see the end of their suffering.

'They had a cup of coffee in the hall, it went well and a rich conversation,' Mr Dufour said. 'Then the separation from their parents and brother was very serene and beautiful. At the last there was a little wave of their hands and then they were gone.'

This is a shocking story. We're told the men were "terrified" of being institutionalized once they went blind. But they hadn't gone blind yet, and they hadn't attempted to learn how to live independently while blind and deaf. Why not at least wait until they actually became blind? Why advance-euthanize? And what kind of a society facilitates death for the disabled while scaring them with the loss of their freedom? When are the blind institutionalized?

Where was the "unbearable pain"? There was no physical pain, only mental anguish, accepted as pain. And the anguish seems to have been premised on a fear of institutionalization. Why were they threatened by that? If their fear was reasonable, something is wrong with the treatment of the disabled in Belgium. If their fear was unreasonable, their decision should not have been enough even in a system that authorizes physician assisted suicide.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo (who is a doctor) offers a passage from Robert Jay Lifton's book "The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide."

"Anesthesia awareness is an intrapersonal event..."

"No one else sees it. No one else knows it. You’re the only one."

The Clinton clot plot thickens... or thins... with anti-coagulants.

So we were just talking about the oddities of the Clinton clot story. We noted that no sooner was it said that Hillary Clinton would testify, as Secretary of State, on the Benghazi attack, than there came an announcement that Hillary Clinton had entered the hospital with a blood clot. The coincidence raised suspicions of an effort to engineer an evasion of this testimony.

And we weren't told where the clot was, which is a crucial bit of information when assessing how serious this health scare is. Clinton had recently suffered a head injury, which makes one think the new problem would also be located in the head, but she'd also had a blood clot in her leg years ago, which makes that alternative seem plausible. If the clot were in the leg, withholding that information suggests a strategic choice to incline the public to view the problem as  more serious than it really was.

Later, Clinton's doctors released a statement saying that the clot was in a vein inside her skull, and that she's "making excellent progress" and likely to "make a full recovery." The Washington Post repeats the information that she's being treated with anticoagulants. You may remember that the analysis I discussed at that first link contained the assertion that "anticoagulation is never given to persons with clots around the brain." But that WaPo story says: "The conventional treatment is an anticoagulant drug for at least six months."

I know some of my readers are doctors. Can you help us out with that inconsistency about the anticoagulants? [ADDED: Here's what Dr. Pogo says. And here's some useful detail. I think the crucial distinction is whether the clot is in the brain or in the space between the brain and the skull.]

And, by the way, I've gotten some pushback in email and on the web, saying that it was "shameful" and "appalling" for me to tie Clinton's health problems to a possible intent to avoid testifying about Benghazi. Let me tell you that a core motivation to my blogging — and I've been going at this for 9 years now — is to stand tough against people who try to cut off debate with this kind of shaming. So I'm glad that this performance of outrage was directed at me. I know it when I see it, and it fires me up. You want silence? You want backing down? You want me not to dare say a thing like that? That's how you want to control political debate in the United States? Thanks for reminding me once again how deeply I hate that and for giving me an (easy) opportunity to model courage for the more timid people out there who are cowed by the fear of shaming.

ADDED: Here's something I would dearly love to do with this blog: I want to make it so that emotive, intimidating outrage like that backfires. I want people to learn that they can't get away with empty assertions like "I am aghast" or "You are despicable." You have to give reasons for what you think. Even if you really feel those feelings. And, of course, many of these hack writers don't actually feel the feelings they scribble about. They just don't want to have to talk about the actual issue. They want to make it something that everyone feels they'd better not talk about. But that should be a loud signal: We need to talk about it!

And let's get back to basics: What we need to talk about is Benghazi.

"Antidepressants to treat grief?"

"Psychiatry panelists with ties to drug industry say yes."

"Cannabis makes pain more bearable rather than actually reducing it..."

"Using brain imaging, researchers found that the psychoactive ingredient in cannabis reduced activity in a part of the brain linked to emotional aspects of pain."

"Virus rebuilds heart's own pacemaker in animal tests."

"They used a virus to infect heart muscle cells with a gene, called Tbx18, which is normally active when pacemaker cells are formed during normal development in an embryo."

"[W]hen does regulating a person’s habits in the name of good health become our moral and social duty?"

Asks David B. Agus, a USC medicine and engineering professor, in an op-ed that's #1 on the NYT "most emailed" list:

The answer, I suggest, is a two-parter: first, when the scientific data clearly and overwhelmingly demonstrate that one behavior or another can substantially reduce — or, conversely, raise — a person’s risk of disease; and second, when all of us are stuck paying for one another’s medical bills (which is what we do now, by way of Medicare, Medicaid and other taxpayer-financed health care programs).

Get ready. It's coming.

"We're all adults here, it's time we take our freedom back."

Fabulous slogan from ad — viewable at the link — for blu eCigs.

Most living Americans had never before seen a cigarette advertised on television - they were banned in 1971.

But the electronic cigarettes fall outside that law, since they contain no tobacco. That is just one way they fall into what one anti-smoking campaigner calls a regulatory "no man's land."...

Unless they make a therapeutic claim, for example that they can help people quit smoking, they fall in the cracks between federal tobacco regulations and rules covering drug devices like insulin pumps...

In the new commercial, Lorillard appears to have reached into the bag of advertising tricks that got previous generations of Americans hooked on cigarettes, tobacco industry critics say.

"It feels like what they're trying to do is re-establish a norm that smoking is okay, that smoking is glamorous and acceptable," says Cynthia Hallett, executive director of Americans for Non-Smokers' Rights.

Step back, nanny.

I'm waiting for the day when there will be legal THC-delivering eCigs. And here I am smoking a blu eCig. I've never been a tobacco smoker. So I think these things might be nice for people who want to play-smoke and have a bit of nicotine — which is a stimulant and a relaxant.

Nicotine appears to enhance concentration and memory... It also appears to enhance alertness.... Arousal is increased...  Pain is reduced... Anxiety is reduced...

Research suggests that, when smokers wish to achieve a stimulating effect, they take short quick puffs, which produce a low level of blood nicotine. This stimulates nerve transmission. When they wish to relax, they take deep puffs, which produce a high level of blood nicotine, which depresses the passage of nerve impulses, producing a mild sedative effect.

Anyway, watch the ad at the first link. When I showed it to Meade — who, like me, loved the "take our freedom back" slogan — he said that was the key to understanding the famous "smoking guy" ad for Herman Cain.

"I want to become a doctor... because I want to save people."

"And when I do, I won't take any money from them."

G-Shot.

It might work.

"We always think that there is going to be a facial identity crisis. That’s the worry of people with normal faces."

"We think how we’d feel if this happened to us... But for people with disfigurements — these people have lived lives concealed from society. That’s a very different and difficult recovery."

"You’re throwing me out! You’re sending me out to a doghouse! Why not put me in a manicomio?"

The "grannypod" (or MedCottage) — a $125,000 outbuilding, "essentially a portable hospital room."

(Manicomio means madhouse.)

"I see a cure as a dynamic process, in which multiple doctors, professionals, artists, scientists and others join as a society..."

"... to converse, support each other, be open to various contributions and shape solutions that merge humanity, technology, technique, philosophy and art. Creativity and 'normal life' become part of the process and bring 'diseased' people back to life."

"NYU loses years of scientific research and thousands of mice to Hurricane Sandy."

"Many precious reagents -- special enzymes, antibodies, DNA strands -- generated by scientists and stored at -80 degrees and -20 degrees were likely destroyed...."

Scientists are in a desperate frenzy to save what they can and transfer what can be moved to other areas of the hospital....

Even more alarming, thousands of mice that are used by scientists for cancer research and other experiments, drowned during a flood....

"For neuroscientific findings of fetal pain to serve as a basis for permitting states to prohibit abortion prior to viability..."

".... they must tell us something about the nature of a fetus that makes the state’s interest in protecting it more compelling than its interest in protecting a woman’s right to make basic decisions about her own body. As pain sentience does not serve as a basis for legal prohibitions in general (or else mousetraps and deer hunting would be prohibited), the statutes’ real purpose is to use potential evidence of pain sentience in fetuses to indicate the presence of something far more compelling — namely, personhood."

From a NYT philosophy blog item written by William Egginton, a Humanities Professor the Johns Hopkins University.

The states are already allowed to prohibit abortion after viability (with exceptions for the life and health of the mother), but not because viability establishes that the fetus has turned into a person. In fact, the Supreme Court has never made much sense over why viability is the line. (I've taught the abortion cases many times, and the best I can say is that viability was chosen for the line because the Court wanted a place to draw a line and viability was a concept that existed within medicine.) The question of when the unborn is considered a "person" is reserved for the woman to answer for herself. That's the heart of the right that the Court has articulated. It was clearly stated in terms of autonomy to define life in Planned Parenthood v. Casey, when the Court revised Roe in the process of deciding not to overrule it:

At the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life. Beliefs about these matters could not define the attributes of personhood were they formed under compulsion of the State.

It's interesting for Egginton to offer some philosophical analysis (and for neuroscientists to provide the information they have), but under Roe/Casey, it's for the individual pregnant woman to use that material as she sees fit in arriving at her own answer to the mystery of the value of the unborn entity. Pre-viability, anyway.

"[M]en who had voted for the losing presidential candidate... suffered a big drop in their testosterone after hearing of his defeat."

Some study found, and Victoria Bassetti riffs on that finding in the opinion pages of The New York Times (under caricatures of high and low masculinity):

Is it possible voting makes male voters too vulnerable? Could the unpleasant feelings male voters experience when their candidates lose discourage them from revisiting the polls? No wonder they stop voting. It hurts too much....

Perhaps the pharmaceutical industry will come up with a little blue pill to make people voters. But until then, we may need to man up and face facts. For all our idealism about voting and democracy, we have created a needlessly complex and burdensome voting system. We can’t fix the hormonal fallout from voting, but biology provides another reason we should think about making voting simpler and easier.

Oh, boring. This turns into one more NYT article about how voter ID laws and such are bad. I'd like to see more on this topic of men's hormones and political decisionmaking. If there is this deep, physical need to be on the winning side, then those who want the men's votes need to work on the illusion that their candidate is likely to win. You know, skew the polls, get the media to pump up your guy, portray him as unbeatable, popular, etc.

But don't go too far. If you make men overconfident that your guy is a huge winner, and then there's a debate and he looks way different from what he was pumped up to look like, he's all deflated, and he seems tired and listless, and the other candidate stands up straight and delivers strong points, these men will have to switch sides to preserve their manhood.

Related: "Vote like your manhood depends on it... because it kinda does."

The insulated tent cabins are killing people.

Deer mice — carrying hantavirus — nest between the double walls. 2 have already died, and 10,000 are at risk.