I write about science as a mixed bag — in other words, I try to note its limits as well as its successes. Science and a modern sense of the rational have been around for more than three centuries, and by now it seems these ways of thinking would have triumphed, displacing all the old [...]

It’s nice to see medical students getting something out of my work, as in this  Adjacent Possible Medicine blog post

There’s always plenty of bad news to worry about. All you have to do is read the front page of your local paper or listen to a few excruciating minutes of the daily digest of disaster we call television news to fall into a sort of black funk about the fate of the world. So [...]

OK: It’s 1921, World War I has just ended, and people are still hungry all over Europe. What do you do? Use biplanes to round up caribou herds and machine-gun them, of course!  This is just one of several historical hunger-fighting ideas from the archives of Popular Science.

I’ve been doing so much driving recently that I’ve developed a love of audiobooks. Just heard today that my latest — The Alchemy of Air — is now available on audio here. This is good news for the farmers who’ve been asking me for something to listen to in their tractor cabs (seriously, if you [...]

I’m posting the text of a speech I gave recently at OHSU, “Genius or Crackpot: Linus Pauling’s Medical Odyssey.”  It covers Pauling’s initial work with Vitamin C, with a good bit of context from his earlier career. Genius or crank? You decide.

This editorial by the Portland Oregonian newspaper, which somehow relates advice on water’s role in weight loss to one of my earlier books, on drug development.  Plus they manage to link a current interest — global food and water issues — to one of my older ones.  Synchronicity, or . . . OK, then, just [...]

I shared dinner recently with a group including a smartly dressed soon-to-be law student. The conversation turned, as if often seems to do at dinner parties these days,  to the merits of organic food. She started complaining about some of her school friends. They were so much into the whole/ organic/local food thing that she [...]

A beautiful photo collection of people reading around the world.

OK — while debate continues over just how fast the oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill is dispersing, some thoughts on perspective. Compare the Deepwater spill to these figures, based on a number of sources and used in an exhibit by the Smithsonian. Deepwater is estimated to have released somewhere around 210 million gallons into [...]