As a physician who is neither young nor old, I can appreciate the timelessness of this sort of professional grousing: The young who know but cannot do; the old who do but are no longer in the know. Discerning when to utilize technologies (eg devices, drugs, protocols) plays a key mediating role in this dynamic.
Receiving VIP care sounds like an unalloyed good, but it’s more complicated.
Mortality for some conditions is higher on VIP floors because nursing is geared towards hospitality over clinical specialization/acting without deference to patient convenience.
VIPs often want to access new/off-label treatments, which can go quite poorly. VIP get all sorts of inadvisable care (“the best”; “access to experimental treatments”).
I’ve always thought about quality of care as an upside down U shaped curve: if you’re poor it’s bad, but if you’re a VIP it can also be bad. To be clear, the U isn’t symmetric, but weird things happen at the high end.
The ideal state is building a human bond with your caregiver, and in general, it will be returned with appropriate attentiveness. This is just harder when you’re poor or have complex stressors, but it also seems hard for many VIPs.
All of these books are extraordinary in their sheer ability to organize thousands of small details into thematic narratives of how life operates.
They also reveal how hard we humans try to narrate life into tidy, comprehensible themes.
These books are all of an era (2005-2015), and there are probably newer ones. That said, they are a great guide for non biologists into how experts think things work.
My neuroscience professors referred to Principles of Neuroscience as "the Bible" as well. I think that's testament to how good these recommendations are.
I appreciate that some Nobel selections, like this one, are for core biological discoveries rather than hot topics.
How our bodies perceive / interface with the world is fundamental to our human experience: Pain, temperature, positioning. And that these perceptions can be significantly modulated by how our bodies process them (eg pain).
Not only is their actual body of work impressive, as it cuts across so many methodologies to get a glimpse at “how things work,” their discoveries opened up fields for others.
Hard disagree. These are for lack of better word standard discoveries that the high intensity labs discover with pretty much standard methodologies and no Innovations worthy of a Nobel. Of course we have receptors for heat and touch, and of course someone eventually found them. What’s original in that process? This is not RNAi, or CRISPR, or GFP. One of the more underwhelming Nobels in recent times. Somehow worse than superresolution.
If you throw a vase in the air it will fall down and shatter: like, duh it’s gravity. But how many years to figure the equations? To tie the how/why to the obvious?
Don’t trivialize their work because your work didn’t receive a Nobel. K thanks.
These discoveries could be game changers for prosthetics, brain computer interfaces, augmented reality, etc.
I’m trivializing their research based on their inherent triviality. Any new gene could be game changers for a plethora of ailments. The correct gravity comparison would be trying to celebrate someone finding the value of g in Oxford when the original measurement was in London.
I didn’t say I am sour I didn’t get one. When did a film critic need an Oscar before he could criticize moviemakers?
I've no background in the field but tend to agree. "Humans have thousands of different kinds of sensor mechanisms, and here are two of them" - seems like an award that could be given repeatedly, no?
The criteria for winning the prize depend more on the outcome of the research (importance) than its process (originality):
"The said interest shall be divided into five equal parts, which shall be apportioned as follows: /- – -/ one part to the person who shall have made the most important discovery within the domain of physiology or medicine …” (Excerpt from the will of Alfred Nobel)".
Again, why are these genes more important than say, GM-CSF? That gene has 10 times more therapeutic importance than these genes. I can name 500 genes more important for any practical purpose than these genes. That’s the reason none of the early scientists were scrambling to discover them.
>I can name 500 genes more important for any practical purpose than these genes.
The arrogance of this statement is astrounding. Perhaps you didn't mean it to come off that way?
First of all, these are important genes - extremely important genes, because they are a large part of the basis of that whole "response to stimulus" thing that people are pretty fond of associating with life.
That said, regardless of their actual importance, it's pretty remarkable for anyone to say any gene is important or not important considering how little we actually know about biological processes. I see all the time people doing "omics" work and wanting to jump to conclusion because of data, but data-only makes a relatively blind conclusion. There's still far far more unknown than known, and these genes are fundamental genes for starting to actually build a functional model of human biology. They are boilerplate genes.
Wait what exactly are you saying. In one paragraph you’re saying that these genes are unquestionably important. Then next paragraph you’re saying no gene can be told as important. Pick a side?
You seem to be a biologist, is it truly heresy that there are 500 other genes that are more important than the temperature receptors? I’m talking practical therapeutic use.
Something as fundamental as heat and pressure are not important? I don't have a biology background, but learning that we just discovered these genes gave me the impression that we're still living in the stone age. Kudos to the award recipients for discovering the genes responsible.
It's probably that much harder to find these genes responsible for such basic sensory abilities that so much work must have gone into them if not for their lack therapeutic importance as you suggest, but also for the prestige scientists knew they would receive if they did discover them first.
You are absolutely right that it’s dumb that it took so long for us to have discovered these receptors so late. Consider for a second though that this might be a symptom of a fundamental myopia in the way biological science itself has progressed? That perhaps we have been congratulating people for the wrong thing - discovering expected genes instead of finding new ways to do everything faster or finding things that are completely unexpected. As much as heat and pressure sound like fundamental senses (they are), they aren’t very high on the priority list of basically anyone trying to do biology with applications in mind. Heat receptors don’t cure cancer or cystic fibrosis. Or Covid.
TRP channels were first cloned over 20 years ago, and are indeed medically relevant for nociception and pain. The piezos are equally relevant; knockouts are embryonically lethal, and the function of mechanosenstation in somatosenation and in general continue to be elucidated. For instance, it was only a few years that they were identified as being required for the baroreceptor reflex.
An important 2012 study found that higher patient satisfaction is correlated with higher costs and death. This is not counter intuitive if one has practiced medicine. Point being that healthcare isn’t a classic consumer product and social experiments like patient/provider concordance have complex effects.
Reduced power and cost requirements are critical for this technology to be viable for low middle income country (LMIC) settings, particularly in rural areas. In many sub-Saharan countries, there are A handful in the country and use is complicated by unstable grids. High impact tech if use cases for these settings are sharpened.
Bruce chaired my PhD committee- he was a gentle and thoughtful person.
An observation about his approach to science, which I thought was distinctive: he was interested in a big, fuzzy relationship- health and stress. Over the course of his career, his lab wrote hundreds of small, credible papers to fill out and explore this relationship. Few were in the big journals, but over time, a sort of broadly understood relationship emerged and many other labs also participated in developing this concept. Now it’s just sort of something we understand- it’s a robust concept.
His approach always struck as significantly different from the one or two big nature/science papers that claims to discover or demonstrate a fundamental relationship. These tour de force papers can be vital, and they can also mislead an entire field.
I appreciated Bruce’s approach, especially because the incentive structure that permeated my graduate experience was “go big or go home”. There are entire classes of Scientific insight that won’t be revealed if this is this approach dominates.
Reminds me of Norman Borlaug. While rightfully somewhat famous for his dwarf wheat and preventing famine he operated through a lot of "boring" experimental iterations. Although he did challenge ideas about seeds needing rest periods.
