1. The medical testing company Theranos didn't need any more bad news - so it is odd that they went out of their way to find some. Starting on July 21st, we had been trying to put our scientist Dr. Julianna LeMieux in touch with someone - anyone - from the science part of the company, especially after “one of the top 10 medical and technological innovations in 2013” fell from grace so far in so short a time. What was once a "disruptive" company promising to do tests for 10 percent of what legacy labs charged turned out to be a lot of smoke and mirrors.
But things go wrong so we wanted to give scientists advising them a chance to defend the company. Instead, all we got was interference from a PR company who stalled us for months claiming we would get to talk to someone 'next week.'
Eventually, their unwillingness to talk to anyone they weren't paying for spin control became the story, and Biospace covered our work here.
2. In New York Lifestyles Magazine, our Director of Medicine Dr. Jamie Wells debunks some common medical myths - everything from spinach being some kind of superfood (though that would apply to all food anyway) to drinking 8 glasses of water per day.
Why will doctors be so happy to know she's doing that? Because in the modern world of the Internet, where charlatans like Joe Mercola, D.O., or Jenny McCarthy, aided by politically-motivated anti-science sites like Sourcewatch, can get an irrational level of attention, and that means doctors spend an inordinate amount of time debunking these myths during patient visits also.
3. In USA Today, Drs. Alex Berezow and Julianna LeMieux wonder about the motivation of Facebook CEO Jeff Zuckerberg and his 'curing all disease' War/Manhattan Project/Moonshot - with total funding equal to about 2% of what researchers get each year. Is he like Rockefeller or Carnegie or just an opportunist who thinks disease is an engineering problem scientists are too stupid to fix?
