I bet you never knew that the guy who developed the lobotomy (also known as the leucotomy), was given a Nobel prize in medicine.
Also, I find that the descriptors of the Nobel Prizes over the years have become significantly less colorful:
1901: "for his work on serum therapy, especially its application against diphtheria, by which he has opened a new road in the domain of medical science and thereby placed in the hands of the physician a victorious weapon against illness and deaths"
2007: "for their discoveries of principles for introducing specific gene modifications in mice by the use of embryonic stem cells"
Wednesday, January 23, 2008
What does one do when given huge amounts of free-time doing a rotation at a psychiatric institute?
Blogging of course!
Here is a jem from the New York Times as Maureen Dowd laments that President Bush ("W." to her--a rather unprofessional expression of contempt, if you ask me) had to go to Saudi Arabia basically to beg for lower oil prices:
"Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction."
Correction: if we didn't have the war in Iraq, I'm sure we would still be addicted to foreign oil. The idea that with a diversion of war spending from Iraq to the area of energy research could make us less dependent on foreign capital is ridiculous. Without trying to drill for all our oil on our own soil, the transformation of the U.S. economy into one that is not dependent on foreign sources would not only cost a cosmic amount of money, but most likely would take longer than the duration of any administration. And the solution is not as simple as hybrids, ethanol, wind energy, and more-efficient light bulbs. Unfortunately, I just heard that drought in the South threatens to shut down many of their nuclear power plants that rely on massive amounts of water for their cooling systems.
Other great stuff from today:
In the hospital library, this aptly-titled book. I don't think you can find a more authoritative-sounding name than "Lord Brain".
Here is a jem from the New York Times as Maureen Dowd laments that President Bush ("W." to her--a rather unprofessional expression of contempt, if you ask me) had to go to Saudi Arabia basically to beg for lower oil prices:
"Maybe if the president had spent the trillion he squandered on his Iraq odyssey on energy research, we might have broken the oil addiction."
Correction: if we didn't have the war in Iraq, I'm sure we would still be addicted to foreign oil. The idea that with a diversion of war spending from Iraq to the area of energy research could make us less dependent on foreign capital is ridiculous. Without trying to drill for all our oil on our own soil, the transformation of the U.S. economy into one that is not dependent on foreign sources would not only cost a cosmic amount of money, but most likely would take longer than the duration of any administration. And the solution is not as simple as hybrids, ethanol, wind energy, and more-efficient light bulbs. Unfortunately, I just heard that drought in the South threatens to shut down many of their nuclear power plants that rely on massive amounts of water for their cooling systems.
Other great stuff from today:
In the hospital library, this aptly-titled book. I don't think you can find a more authoritative-sounding name than "Lord Brain".
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