Recently in Bangladesh I had breakfast with a Harvard professor of economics who told me: “Economists pay no attention to what people say, only to what they do.” Now I […]
Latest articles
Tom Nolan: Is Tamiflu useful in children or not?
Why did the operator at the National Pandemic Flu Service give the child Tamiflu? The cynics will say because the algorithm told him to, but the real answer, according to […]
Richard Smith asks “Am I going to hell?”
The other night, as is my wont, I imagined myself dying, and I wondered as I came near the end whether I would suddenly fear that I might be going […]
Joe Collier on tackling breaches in the personal professional divide
How best to set the ways we communicate with each other, and so to establish our “rules of engagement”, can be difficult’. Moreover, any “rules” we establish may vary over […]
Helen Macdonald on the calm, waves of flu, vaccines, and other stories
Calm settled over swine flu coverage this week as the northern hemisphere headed into the summer holidays; but much remains uncertain. Stories tracking the Health Protection Agency’s weekly flu figures […]
Grace Tan asks: “Are medical students being discouraged from attending scientific conferences?”
One of the top five reasons given by medical students for not regularly attending meetings is “discouraged to attend by department and university,” a survey by the American Association of […]
Julian Sheather on fat and human freedom
It was the White Queen who told Alice that she had at times thought six contradictory things before breakfast. We humans have a remarkable tolerance for incompatibility, happily living with […]
Tom Nolan: How much flu is out there?
Measuring the tip of the iceberg The Health Protection Agency estimates that there were 110,000 new cases of swine flu in England last week,10,000 more than the week before. But […]
James Raftery: Bypassing NICE for the sake of innovation?
Recent reports that NICE was to be bypassed by drugs which were “innovative,” with funding from a new separate budget, sent me in search of the source report – the […]
Anna Donald’s last blog
Anna Donald died on 1 February 2009. The blog below was found on her computer posthumously. At a memorial service for her at UCL on 26 April 2009, a six […]