As more drugs come to market and pharma’s business model shifts from selling drugs directly to fostering earlier engagement, companies are looking for highly skilled scientifically- and clinically-trained candidates. Could this be an outlet for the overflowing pool of PhD (and MD) graduates produced every year? Read more
Another year, another round of approvals, mixed reviews and high-profile failures. We look back on which medicines made the headlines. Read more
Misha Angrist is the author of Here is a Human Being: At the Dawn of Personal Genomics (HarperCollins), now out in paperback. He teaches at Duke University and blogs at blogs.plos.org/genomeboy.
Us…and Them
And after all we’re only ordinary men.
Roger Waters
As a graduate student, I studied the genetics of Hirschsprung disease, a congenital disorder of the nervous system in the gut (and, as I describe in my book, a disease that would affect my own family many years later). Among the things I found to be most gratifying (and yes, occasionally frustrating) in my doctoral studies were the interactions with Hirschsprung patients and families. We students had pledged our fealty to Science writ large, yes, but we weren’t studying roundworms or fruit flies. Our “subjects” (a descriptor of research participants that, in my opinion, is condescending and should be retired ASAP) were thinking feeling human beings. If we found a highly penetrant mutation in their DNA, it had the potential to alter their reproductive decisions and their lives. It meant something to them.
But even if it didn’t, shouldn’t life scientists-in-training, especially those whose model organism is Homo sapiens, have some sort of mandatory exposure to, you know, life? Should there not be some inevitable, meaningful exchange between researcher and researchee?
