(Mis)Adventures of a Malaysian Mudphud in the land of tea and scones
Archive for January, 2008
January 16, 2008 at 12:42 am · Filed under Medicine
Reports here . More about the man here and here. Detailed biography here.
M. Judah Folkman, the legend behind the theory of angiogenesis in the development of cancer, has died. A clinician-scientist par excellence who weathered through the storm of skepticism in the early days of his career, Dr Folkman leaves behind a legacy of using anti-angiogenesis drugs to make cancer a manageable disease, very much like diabetes and ischaemic heart disease. Having read his works, publications, reflections, and memoirs during the ‘Pharmacology of Inflammation and Angiogenesis’ module of my Part II undergraduate course in Pharmacology at Cambridge, I count Dr Folkman as one of my heroes in science and medicine.
May you rest in peace, Dr Folkman.
January 15, 2008 at 11:24 pm · Filed under Medicine
London’s Medical Student Newspaper recently ran a feature interview of Dr Elias Zerhouni, the big guy of that obscenely cash-abundant institution just to the northwest of D.C. Read the full piece of work here.
One thing that caught my eye was the last part of the interview, when Dr Zerhouni was asked of his views on where the future of medicine lies. He replied:
“Well, fasten your seat belt because it’s going to be fun. Medicine is going to change more than ever; firstly its knowledge content is going to improve tremendously. Also, instead of being curative and intervening when patients are sick you are going to have to intervene much before the disease actually strikes. We will be in era of 4 P’s. Predictive medicine,
Personalisation regarding genetic variation,
Pre-emption, the natural consequence of knowledge, and finally
Participatory, the patients will be more involved in their own health care.”
His words really got me very, very excited. Excited that the future holds so much promise!
January 13, 2008 at 10:40 am · Filed under General Interests, News in Science
| |
| OH, East is East, and West is West, and never the twain shall meet, |
Taken from the first line of Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Ballad of the East and West’
An fMRI study on visuo-spatial tasks involving human subjects, published in this January’s issue of ‘Psychological Sciences’ from a group based at MIT, Stanford and SUNY Stony Brook further confirmed this adage of the differences between Easterners and Westerners. The paper was entitled ‘Cultural Influences on Neural Substrates of Attentional Control’. See the news report from MIT’s news office, and a copy of the research paper (if you have personal or institutional subscription to Blackwell Synergy)
In geekspeak:
ABSTRACT—Behavioral research has shown that people from Western cultural contexts perform better on tasks emphasizing independent (absolute) dimensions than on tasks emphasizing interdependent (relative) dimensions, whereas the reverse is true for people from East Asian contexts. We assessed functional magnetic resonance imaging responses during performance of simple visuospatial tasks in which participants made absolute judgments (ignoring visual context) or relative judgments (taking visual context into account). In each group, activation in frontal and parietal brain regions known to be associated with attentional control was greater during culturally nonpreferred judgments than during culturally preferred judgments. Also, within each group, activation differences in these regions correlated strongly with scores on questionnaires measuring individual differences in culture-typical identity. Thus, the cultural background of an individual and the degree to which the individual endorses cultural values moderate activation in brain networks engaged during even simple visual and attentional tasks.
(from the abstract of Hedden et al. 2008)
Or in lay-person talk:
Psychological research has established that American culture, which values the individual, emphasizes the independence of objects from their contexts, while East Asian societies emphasize the collective and the contextual interdependence of objects.
(from the MIT news office)
So, yes, our brains are wired differently, according to the prevailing culture in the environment we grew up in during the developmental plasticity phase of our brains.
January 12, 2008 at 1:21 am · Filed under Inspiration, My Life
“Midway in the journey of our life
I came to myself in a dark wood
For the straight way was lost.”
Translation from the first canto of the first cantica Dante Alighieri’s The Divine Comedy
Much have been going through my head lately. Apart from my work. About life. About what I really want to become in life. A doctor? A scientist? Or, perhaps, both? (and I haven’t even begun to think what field of medicine I would like to specialise in!)
Pondering aloud has begotten me a wide spectrum of response from the people around me.
On one end of the spectrum, one of my hospital colleague is of opinion that the excellence in both fields are mutually exclusive. That to achieve excellence in one requires the sacrifice of the other.
“A great scientist can never be a good clinician, while a doctor who spends much time with his patients will never produce world-changing scientific work. Are you willing to quit medicine? Are you able to imagine yourself stuck for long hours in the lab for the rest of your life?”
(I should have clarified with her what she meant by ‘world-changing scientific work’…)
On the other end of the spectrum, an old friend of mine feels the other way around.
“The thought of finding something new everyday gives you a reason to live. You don’t want to spend the rest of your life doing the same thing, do you? You only live once, you know?
In the USA, each year, about 1000 of 17000 medical students do an MD-PhD, and go on to become great scientists. And some of the clinician scientist that I have worked with are some of the best clinicians in the hospital.”
(No prize for guessing correctly whether this guy is an MD-PhD student)
A crossroad.
Two paths to follow. One filled with hurdles. The other filled with hurdles, and extra hurdles.
I think I will try my best to prove to the lady-colleague of mine that she is wrong. Even if it takes a lifetime to do that. There is truth in words of the MD-PhD friend. Yet, words from both parties have invoked a deep-rooted determination in me.