Research Translation Podcast

In college our physics teacher, Professor McGinnis, held an annual competition. Using a container made only of glue and toothpicks, we had to keep an egg from cracking when dropped out of the classroom’s first-story window. My team built a geometric lattice, buttressed with layers of internal protection. It was beautiful. For our (mandatory) test run, we dropped it empty, to be sure the container...

Below is a summary of the audio transcript, written by Gemini AI with some heavy editing by me. Let me know if you like or hate these, I’m still experimenting! “STROLLERS THAT KILL! At eleven.” RT is reader-supported. To help, PLEASE become a paid subscriber. For the price of a cappucino once a month, you’ll keep us afloat. This is one of my all-time favorite teasers for the evening news. These da...

Below is a summary of the transcribed audio, brought to you by Gemini. I’m trying different AI options for these summaries, please feel free to let me know which ones you like. For an additional note answering one subscriber’s excellent question about statins, check out the audio. Enjoy! RT is 100% subscriber-supported. To help us endure and expand, become a paid subscriber! The New England Journa...

Today’s episode explains the broader theme that ran through our episode from earlier this week. I wasn’t sure if I was clear enough, so here it is. Since it was just a quick audio I had ChatGPT turn the transcript into a written piece for the many written word addicts in our group (respect!). Naturally, I couldn’t help but heavily edit. RT is 100% reader-supported, and we want to keep doing it. Yo...

Apologies to my paid subscribers, who are getting this for the second time. I sent it out as a paid-only post, which was a mistake. I will be having paid subscriber-only content fairly soon, but I do try to make most of my content available to everyone, so I’m re-sending to all. Sorry for the inbox clutter! In third grade Marc Diaz explained to me, very earnestly, that if one’s hand was larger tha...

In third grade Marc Diaz explained to me, very earnestly, that if one’s hand was larger than their face, that person was technically deformed. Concerned, I held my palm to my face, carefully comparing. At which point he cracked the back of my hand with his own palm, sending my hand into my face and me toppling backwards out of my chair. Good one, I thought, ready to line it up on the next sucker....

Jeffrey Flier, former dean of Harvard Medical School, recently accused the New England Journal of Medicine of editorial failure. Flier and others were responding to an essay from the Journal ’s new Voices section about Jason Arday, a Cambridge professor who committed suicide after being outed for academic work and a life story littered with fabrications. The essay, which began “They are trying to...

Once again the audio this week is for people who enjoy a bit more wonkiness. Below is what ChatGPT wrote when I pasted in the transcript and asked for a piece emulating my voice. And as always, I still couldn’t stop myself from editing pretty heavily. Enjoy! RT is fully reader-supported. To help me keep doing it, please become a paid subscriber. Just when I thought I was out, they pulled me back i...

Today’s post, for efficiency reasons, is another freestyle audio. For my devoted readers who are strongly allergic to audio, I’ve asked ChatGPT to write a short summary piece in my style, which I’ve lightly edited. That’s what you see below. Enjoy! RT is totally reader-supported. To support its survival, please chip in by becoming a paid subscriber. I am sorry to report that coffee is strongly ass...

This week is the culmination of months of research and data review, so it’s longer than usual. Obviously, the big question we all should be asking about the new AHA guideline is, what changed? With no new trials, what led the committee to believe more young and healthy people need to take pills for cholesterol? It took some digging but it turns out, like Prego sauce, it’s in there. Enjoy. The Epic...

In the coming episodes I’ll be explaining the AHA’s rationale for their new guidelines, which call for aggressive expansion in cholesterol testing and treatment. Obviously, that means walking through the data that form the basis for any claim that cholesterol is currently under-treated. But to understand the atmosphere the guideline writers were working in, I think it’s also important to see how t...

When I do a public-facing summary and critical appraisal of a study I typically do it verbally and free-form. No script, no notes. After years of journal clubbing and presenting lectures and talks, that’s how I feel most comfortable. I’m trying something new this week and I'd like your feedback. I write my own material, though ever since I lost the world’s best editor (my mom) I use AI for copy ed...

I originally posted this in 2024 and there have been major, relevant study publications since then. I hate seeing my material out of date, so I’ve added the findings into this new updated version, and tried to polish things. It’s a big piece to take in, more like a chapter than my bite-size weekly, so be prepared. Also, apologies if it’s a repeat for you, I’ll be back with new material next week....

“Sandy,” I called over my shoulder. “Back in two!” I pressed the metal square on the ER’s back wall and strode into the hall toward the lounge, where lunch awaited. Behind me I heard a grunt. A well-dressed man lay face down, a pool of blood spreading from his midsection. He wore a hospital bracelet. Sticking my foot between the closing doors, I called back into the ER. “Sandy, check that—crash ca...

A friend of mine has a cholesterol of 258. Recently, when his new doctor saw this for the first time, she flipped. In addition to scolding him for not being on drugs, visibly shaken, she threatened to send him to the ER. For what, exactly, I cannot say. Emergency cholesterol-ectomy? Waterboarding? I found the story amazing, and emblematic of our cholesterol obsession, in which the molecule matters...

As a long time critic of Tamiflu and its brethren , I have often heard defenders make the following last ditch plea to justify its use: “What about people in the ICU with the flu?? Without it they could die!.” The unspoken insanity behind this claim is a powerful, almost gravity-like bias in medical culture: the urge to intervene. At the bedside of a critically ill patient, doing something simply...

Last month the Journal of Studies on Alcohol and Drugs (‘JSAD’) published a large data review comparing mortality rates in light-to-moderate drinkers with mortality among people who don’t drink alcohol. The NY Times and others gleefully picked up the story, trumpeting the most provocative finding: Up to 1 in 25 moderate drinkers will die because of their alcohol intake. SAD! As always, the study d...

What you see below is not grape soda. It is urine from a human being—Purple Urinary Bag Syndrome, as it’s called, is quite something to behold. But it is brief, and happens when bacteria interact with the plastic of a urinary bag. Treating the underlying infection (typically mild, if there is one) is all that’s required. The color is a distraction. At the Royal Psychiatric Clinic in Munich, German...

In part 2 of this series I described a trial in which researchers developed a novel vaccine for Alzheimer’s patients, designed to rid the brain of amyloid. The vaccine worked, clearing amyloid—but their dementia progressed, unabated. This was, in other words, a full debunking of any notion that amyloid plaques are the cause of Alzheimer’s and that removing them can cure the disease. Interestingly,...

Over the first three parts in this series we followed the rise and fall of the Amyloid Hypothesis. The plaques failed. The idea of toxic precursors failed. The most influential oligomer paper in the field was ultimately retracted. By any ordinary standard of scientific reasoning, this should have marked the end of amyloid as a central explanation for Alzheimer’s Disease. Instead, something remarka...

Neuroscientists are not famous for being dumb. So when the following timeline unfolded, they should have understood exactly what it meant: First, autopsy studies in 1991 and 1992 found that amyloid plaques—supposedly the cause of Alzheimer’s, as the centerpiece of the Amyloid Hypothesis—did not scale with the disease. Then, in 2001 and 2002 , researchers published data showing that an Alzheimer’s...

Last week we reviewed two seminal studies from the 1990s, both showing mathematically that amyloid plaques are, at best, an inconsistent bystander in Alzheimer’s Disease. Plainly, they are not the driving cause. Hardcore believers may have ignored or rationalized the findings from these small but pivotal autopsy studies. A decade later however, there would be no refuge and no rescue when two trial...

Note: If you haven’t, please read Jeanne Lenzer’s recent piece, “ The Campaign to Turn Healthy People into Alzheimer’s Patients .” Jeanne is a brilliant and ferocious journalist, and her piece prompted me to dig into the research history behind it. The next few weeks will be like the Cholesterol Mistake Series : short pieces describing precisely how Alzheimer’s research has been misinterpreted and...

Cancer screening has always hidden its dark side. Behind the simple messaging and pink ribbons is a long history of complicated truths, failed trials, and titanic spending. Now, with a novel blood test flooding the market and media misrepresenting new data, it’s a good time to clarify the simplest truth of all about cancer screening: the balance sheet. To read it correctly, however, you must first...

Dr. Katz, the attending ER doctor, walked ahead of me as we left the bedside of a woman with abdominal pain and vomiting. “What’s the most common reason for emergency surgical admission to the hospital?” Wanting to impress him, I stumbled. “Um, appendicitis?” “In the top three, but no.” Dr. Katz sat down and began typing. I tried again. “Gall bladder?” He didn’t look up. “Also top three—one left.”...