From what I read, it’s even colder: -70F, or -94C. This is pretty cold, and most of the ultra-low temperature freezers I see in labs are rated at -86C. However, the usual method for preserving biologicals below that temperature is surprisingly cheap: liquid nitrogen. LN2 has a temperature between -196C and -210C, and…

Since I am neither a school administrator nor an accountant, I know virtually nothing about the implications of offering tuition waivers rather than scholarships. I believe that they are generally drawn from separate funds for accounting purposes, but that’s about the extent of my knowledge on the specifics.

The Washington Post and other sources have reported that the House bill would repeal the $2500 annual deduction for student loan interest, but the Senate bill would not. We will see how reconciliation works that one out.

You are technically correct, which as we know is the best kind of correct. I inaccurately used “minimum wage” instead of “an extremely modest amount of money which in many places is right up against the local minimum wage, even though not yet sinking to the depths of the paltry federal minimum wage, not considering…

If this generally interests you, you might enjoy this review article from 2013. It does a nice job of talking about how the theory of epigenetics was formulated, and how experiments have confirmed the mechanism. :

I can’t imagine pursuing a PhD without a steady supply of cheap beer. When I write the tax code, that’ll be classified as an educational expense.

The dataset the authors used to investigate psychiatric disorders in children of evacuees was the Finnish Hospital Discharge Register for 1970-2012 (which sounds like an amazing, though questionably HIPAA-compliant, resource). They looked for any initial admission to the hospital for “any psychiatric disorder and…

Reconciliation between House and Senate bills is going to be where the rubber meets the road. I imagine we can re-litigate this whole discussion then! Good luck with the loan payments; I’ve been there too, and I feel you.

Agree completely. And, like so many influential ideas, it came from a couple of smart people sitting in a bar saying “well, wouldn’t it be interesting if things were this way?”

Thanks for that; I wasn’t familiar with Dr. De Gruy’s work (my field is not social work, so I’m not up on the latest publications), but I’ll pick up her book.

Good questions.

Interesting points.

Interested in getting a little higher education? If the House version of the new tax code has its way, you will be screwed in a royal manner.

A small correction: the study found that female children of mothers who had been evacuated to Sweden were twice as likely to be hospitalized for a psychiatric illness as their female cousins whose mothers had not evacuated.

Talking about the results of this study may benefit from a little more context: based on my reading of the original paper, here’s what they did.

Let’s also remember herd immunity. Not getting vaccinated doesn’t just increase your risk of bad outcomes, but it also increases the likelihood that you’ll expose people who can’t be vaccinated (the very young, the elderly, the immunocompromised, pregnant women) to those bugs. And while you think you’re healthy enough…

At the school with which I am affiliated, the student female:male ratio in the biomedical engineering department is approximately 1:1, which is really heartening. This has an immediate effect on the kinds of research and projects that are being done by these students. There are several all-female teams of biomedical…

Bone marrow donation is not pleasant, but it saves lives. I would also recommend signing up to be an organ donor, if it’s not against your religious views. Simiarly, if you give birth, please consider donating the umbilical cord as well. These donations are absolutely necessary for this kind of work.

Dr. Abraham was also one of the investigators in a 2017 phase 1 trial* of a novel protocol to treat pediatric sickle cell with stem cells from the umbilical cord blood of completely unrelated donors; the protocol in that study appears to be an extension of his work here. The subjects were nine pediatric patients…

The FDA already has a program that allows access to experimental drugs (the term of art is “investigational products”) : it’s their Expanded Access / Compassionate Use program. It has well-defined requirements and, I have been led to believe, almost always approves applications that adhere to its guidelines.