Biomedical Science Quotes

Though biomedical science has vastly increased mankind’s average life expectancy, the maximum has not changed in verifiable recorded history.

My own experience of over 60 years in biomedical research amply demonstrated that without the use of animals and of human beings, it would have been impossible to acquire the important knowledge needed to prevent much suffering and premature death not only among humans but also among [other] animals.

Students who attend what they considered to be their first-choice school were less likely to persist in a biomedical or behavioral science major,” they write. You think you want to go to the fanciest school you can. You don’t.

In the past, [medicalization]has been portrayed as something that doctors inflict on a passive and un-suspecting world - an expansion of the Medical Empire. But in reality, it seems that these reductionist bio-medical stories can appeal to us all, because complex problems often have depressingly-complex causes, and the solutions can be taxing, and unsatisfactory.

At the same time we see the phenomenon of successful women adopting the standards of men with a vengeance. Will women's march to power ascendancy, won against all odds, mean that they too will choose to flaunt their preferences for red meat, animal skin, sport hunting, and even bullfighting? As women are swelling the ranks of biomedical science, many have adopted the practice of animal experimentation. Will animal exploitation become the ultimate symbol of equality with the white male?

Eva walked along the wall that held all of Michael's books. Shelves of science texts - physics, astronomy, a full set of Darwin's writings, new works in biomedical genetics - these were at the bottom, and books on philosophy and religion at the top. A row of poetry books caught her eye. Rumi, Whitman, Neruda - impossible to comprehend what he might be looking for in the poets' works he collected. Love possibly, but not love the way she understood it. She couldn't wait until she would no longer have to study, but Michael - he loved to study even when he wasn't a student.

A survey21 of beliefs about the causes of illness across cultures shows that the three most common explanations are biomedical (referring to physical causes of disease), interpersonal (illness is caused by witchcraft, related to envy and conflict), and moral (illness is caused by one’s own past actions, particularly violations of food and sexual taboos).

He agreed that BiDil should be approved without regard to race, noting that American cardiologists “jumped on the statin drugs” once the Scandinavian Simvastatin Survival Study showed they were effective. “Would you restrict the results of the Scandinavian trial to Scandinavian people?” he asked. “I don’t think so.”17 Dr. Curry’s colleague Charles Rotimi, from Howard University’s National Human Genome Center, echoed this position. Rotimi warned that upholding an unproven biological explanation for health disparities would steer biomedical research in a dangerous direction. “It would be tragic not to approve [BiDil],” Rotimi said, “and it would be even more tragic just to approve it for African Americans.” 18

Equally as intriguing as the concept of personalized medicine is the proposal to develop the first drugs based on race. Think of the paradox: a classification system constructed centuries ago to enslave people became the portal for the most cutting-edge biomedical advance of the twenty-first century. Predicting drug response based on a patient’s race rather than on genetic traits, says Lawrence Lesco of the FDA’s Center for Drug Evaluation Research, is “like telling time with a sundial instead of looking at a Rolex watch.

The Genetics of Asthma lab is one of countless research projects at universities and biotech firms around the country hunting for the genes that are responsible for health disparities in America. They are supplementing a large body of published studies that claim to show that racial gaps in disease prevalence or mortality are caused by genetic differences. In addition to asthma, disparities in infant mortality, diabetes, cancer, and hypertension have all been attributed in the scientific literature to genetic vulnerability that varies according to race. Most of these studies never even examined the genotypes of research subjects, as Burchard’s lab does; they just infer a genetic source of racial differences when they fail to find another explanation. As interest in health disparities converges with the genomic science of race, a new brand of racial stereotyping is gaining hold in biomedical research.

Our focus, however, should not be on the differences among our sectors, but rather on supporting and promoting the entire innovation economy — from tech to bio to clean energy to health care and beyond. In fact, in its recent Impact 2020 report, the Massachusetts Biotechnology Council highlighted the interrelationship of these vital sectors working together, combining cutting-edge biomedical research with new information technology tools for capturing and integrating data, conducting sophisticated analytics, and enhancing personal connectivity. Massachusetts is a national and world leader in the growing field of life science information technology.

We define empirical research in biomedical ethics as the application of research methods in the social sciences to the direct examination of issues in biomedical ethics

Benefit-sharing and equal access to advances in biomedical science are now urgent and universal issues’ [italics added].

It is one of the sad facts of biomedical science that the road to scientific progress is littered with the bodies of both humans and animals. The modern era of human experimentation began with the Nazis. Doctors and scientists performed horrific experiments on people held in concentration camps, and all of this was justified in the name of scientific progress.

Which was briefly reassuring, until some biomedical statistician from the University of fucking Buzzkill went on record about the myth of the perfect failsafe,

Donald Seldin, a distinguished physician-scientist, in his widely publicized address titled “The Boundaries of Medicine”: Medicine is a very narrow discipline. Its goals may be defined as the relief of pain, the prevention of disability, and the postponement of death by the application . . . of medical science to individual patients. . . . A heritage which invests medicine with the priestly function of the counselor and comforter of the sick . . . has resulted [in] a tendency to construe all sorts of human problems as medical problems. This medicalization of human experience leads to enormous . . . frustration and disillusionment when medical intervention fails to eventuate in tranquility . . . and happiness. Human problems . . . are medical problems and medical illnesses only when they can be approached by the theories and techniques of biomedical science.

The idea of race was in retreat in the second half of the 20th century in the aftermath of the defeat of Nazism and discoveries in the science of genetics, although the 21st century has seen (unconvincing) attempts to revive the notion. Nowadays, there is a tendency to regard intercommunal hostilities as stemming from issues of cultural rather than racial difference, except on the very far right and among some who (misleadingly) base their assertions on recent biomedical research.

Pearl combines aspects of structural equations models and path diagrams. In this approach, assumptions underlying causal statements are coded as missing links in the path diagrams. Mathematical methods are then used to infer, from these path diagrams, which causal effects can be inferred from the data, and which cannot. Pearl's work is interesting, and many researchers find his arguments that path diagrams are a natural and convenient way to express assumptions about causal structures appealing. In our own work, perhaps influenced by the type of examples arising in social and medical sciences, we have not found this approach to aid drawing of causal inferences, and we do not discuss it further in this text.

First, there is a knowledge gap: the average doctor does not know as much about women’s bodies and the health problems that afflict them. It starts at the most basic level of biomedical research, where investigators overwhelmingly use male cells and animals in preclinical studies.

Stopping in the 1970s, "Hybridity" as the fifth and final chapter is less of an end point than a certain realization of the artifice, plasticity, and technology that Wells and Loeb envisioned as the future of the human relationship to living matter as well as of the "catastrophic" situation that Georges Canghuilhem (following Kurt Goldstein) saw in life subjected to the milieu of the laboratory.

However, I have a stronger hunch that the greatest part of the important biomedical research waiting to be done is in the class of basic science. There is an abundance of interesting fact relating to all our major diseases, and more items of information are coming in steadily from all quarters in biology. The new mass of knowledge is still formless, in complete, lacking the essential threads of connection, displaying misleading signals at every turn, riddled with blind alleys. There are fascinating ideas all over the place, irresistible experiments beyond numbering, all sorts of new ways into the maze of problems. But every next move is unpredictable, every outcome uncertain. It is a puzzling time, but a very good time. I do not know how you lay out orderly plans for this kind of activity, but I suppose you could find out by looking through the disorderly records of the past hundred years. Somehow, the atmosphere has to be set so that a disquieting sense of being wrong is the normal attitude of the investigators. It has to be taken for granted that the only way in is by riding the unencumbered human imagination, with the special rigor required for recognizing that something can be highly improbable, maybe almost impossible, and at the same time true. Locally, a good way to tell how the work is going is to listen in the corridors. If you hear the word, "Impossible!" spoken as an expletive, followed by laughter, you will know that someone's orderly research plan is coming along nicely.