The lack of a unified healthcare operating system is an urgent issue facing the healthcare sector. Dr. Tam's recent report, "A Vision to Transform Canada’s Public Health System" (The Chief …, 2021) discusses how, "the national data landscape is fragmented across jurisdictions, governmental organizations, and community-level data owners” (p. 58, para. 2). Moreover, in a statement of the report, Dr. Tam says, "Our pandemic response was hindered in part, by significant gaps in our public health surveillance and data systems" (Public Health Agency of Canada (PHAC), 2021). These gaps in our healthcare systems are dangerous. If I were to hazard a guess - based on my experience working as a public health case/outbreak investigator from November 2020 to present in a long-term care/retirement home team – I would say we are currently 80% inefficient. I would even argue that it could be declared a logistical emergency (a type of internal crisis, a ‘code brown’).
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Reverend Robert Walker Skating on Duddingston loch. Sir Henry Raeburn.
In Search of Scientific Truth
Does objective truth exist? Can humans ever uncover it? With a focus on my recent publication on oxygen-sensing proteins, concepts of Truth — qualitative and quantitative, discrete and continuous — are explored and critiqued.
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Les batteurs de pieux. Maximilien Luce.
Hierarchical Science and a Historical Hatred of Labour
From Plato to Salk, scientific institutions revel in the people that think rather than the people that do. So it shouldn’t be a surprise that contemporary science is incredibly hierarchical; the trainees, technicians, and postdocs that perform valuable work are left destitute and anonymous while accolades and a living wage are lavished on the principal investigators who sit on top of the pyramid.
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Port de Montréal. Adrien Hébert.
The Curious Case of Reverse Translation: The Divide Between Nature and Society
The central dogma is a fundamental principle taught to all students of biology. The notion that the information stored in a protein sequence cannot serve as a template for a complementary nucleic acid strand still stands. Here, we consider the curious case of in silico reverse translation software designed by humans. Does this violate the central dogma? A discussion of society and nature is necessary to address the question.
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The Savior of the World. El Greco.
Big Pharma, the Parasite
Society’s relationship with big pharma is love-hate. We despise how expensive new, life-saving drugs are, but we bite the bullet because the profit motive promotes the pharmaceutical industry to innovate like no other. That is a myth. Scientists working at universities and in the non-profit sector do the hard work. They lay the biological groundwork for pharma to swoop in at the last second and patent cures. Pharma is parasitic. Scientists can and should be in charge of nationalized pharmaceutical strategy because the current system is broken.
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