The US Health Disadvantage: Part One

by Kirsten Hartil

The United States is the seventh-richest country in the world based on gross domestic product (GDP) per capita. It spends more money on health care than any other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) country (17.6 percent of GDP, compared with the OECD median of 9.5 percent). Yet, according to an Institute of Medicine (IOM) report, Americans die sooner and experience more illness than residents in comparable high-income countries.

The report U.S. Health in International Perspective: Shorter Lives, Poorer Health draws on datasets from organizations including the OECD, WHO and UNICEF and commissioned studies. It compares mortality and health outcomes for the United States with 16 peer countries, (Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the Netherlands and the United Kingdom.)

The report, while acknowledging limitations, including a lack of harmonization of datasets across countries, convincingly demonstrates that the United States is experiencing a significant health disadvantage. It describes the major causes of death that contribute to the years of life lost (YLL), an estimate of the average years a person would have lived if he or she had not died prematurely, and discusses behavioral, social, environmental and political factors that may contribute to this disadvantage.

Casting a wider NET-work

By Lindsey Costantini and Diana Athonvarangkul

Have you ever walked into a room of scientists and wondered how you could start up a conversation with that world-renowned scientist? At conferences, do you wish to drum up a repartee with a speaker but don’t know how to begin? Here, we provide a brief introduction to the importance of starting the conversation, developing your own network and tips on how to improve your scientific-socializing.

Networking is a critical skill for students and post-docs to develop as part of our scientific training. Creating a network involves more than e-mailing another lab to ask for troubleshooting tips, finding a roommate for the national conference or applying for a job. By having an established and solid professional network, you will be able to effectively reach out for advice, collaborations, and life-changing opportunities. Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that you should reciprocate your good deeds to those in your network as well.

A Perspective on Understanding Tourette Syndrome

by Lindy Zhang

I was studying my anatomy notes during a long subway ride, when I noticed a man hovering directly over me. He was neither touching nor bothering me, but he stood awfully close, enough to make me feel uncomfortable. I tried to ignore him and returned to my rudimentary sketches of anatomical structures. As the train approached my stop, I packed up and waited patiently at the train doorway. The subway stalled in the middle of the tunnel due to train traffic. At this point, the man now stood across from me, looking out the opposite door window. Suddenly, a train passed us on the opposite track and he started to wave his hand intensely. His wrist became rubber and his hand flopped back and forth. He waved at the passing train and looked at it intensely. The passenger standing next to him remained unfazed by the situation. The passing train left our sight and the man finished waving. He stared out the window and waited. He made small, sharp movements with his hands and head, always in repetition, and then stared out the window again. Five minutes later, another train swooshed by our stalled train and the man waved again. Repeat. The man started pacing from door to door, unaware of anything else. He stopped by the window, turned around, walked to the other window, looked out, and repeated again. 86th Street, transfer to the downtown 6 train. I got off and the man continued on his way.

Bedtime Stories, Gastric-brooding Frogs, and Jurassic Park

by Arthee E. Jahangir

“Gone” by Isabella Kirkland (painting)

Several weeks ago, I had an impromptu slumber party with two of my younger cousins, girls ages 7 and 9. I showed up to their home in Washington, DC well past midnight after a full day of museum visits and monument sightseeing. When I arrived, I expected them to be asleep or at least dwindling away into dreamland. I was mistaken—they were hyper as ever and wouldn’t let me out of their sight until I was between them, snuggled under the covers with the lights out. Even then, the chitchatting wouldn’t cease, which I guess is normal at a girl’s sleepover. While we were making big plans for the next day (morning run, tennis, and Just Dance for Wii), the eldest of the two sisters randomly asks, “So, can you make a human from HeLa cells?” Yes, she is only nine years old.

The girls had previously visited my home in New Jersey and found my dad’s copy of “The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.” The idea of immortalizing human cells and growing them in a Petri dish both fascinated them and freaked them out. “No, you can’t make a human from HeLa cells, but a sheep has been made from cells,” I replied. Questions and exclamations from the both of them ensued for a period of time. I realized that I wasn’t going to sleep anytime soon, so as their awesome, older cousin/female scientist from the Big Apple, I told them a bedtime story—the story of Dolly the Sheep.

The Art and Science of Connection

By Douglas J. Opler, MD

One afternoon, as a resident on the consultation psychiatry service, I walked into a patient’s room. On her bed was a worn paperback copy of The Gospel of Thomas. I had
come to help the medicine team determine whether she had capacity to refuse treatment of her hyperkalemia, not intending to engage in a historical or theological discourse on apocryphal Biblical texts. Should I ask her about the book and allow myself to be sidetracked from the all-important task of recording her knowledge of the risks and benefits of treatment, her understanding of the alternatives to oral kayexalate, and her cognitive testing scores? Should I be seeking to understand everything about her, or was the book a diversion: a trap that would only make me late for rounds? How comprehensive could my interview be? No one can know everything, and so fields of knowledge and medical practice must be finite. However, ostensibly disparate fields of knowledge are linked and the borders between disciplines are, in large part, artificially, practically, and historically established. It is in the context of this paradox that the psychiatrist works.

Part II: Building Biotech in NYC- Shortcomings and Prospects of Establishing a Bioscience Hub

The U.S. bioscience industry outpaces the overall national private sector

By Danielle Pasquel

New York City aspires to become one of the leading bioscience clusters rivaling the San Francisco Bay and Cambridge/Boston areas, but falls short because it lacks sufficient infrastructure to foster technology development and translation into start-up companies. NYC has all the raw resources: the world’s highest concentration of academic research institutions, which collectively pump out more bioscience PhDs than any other US city, ranks #3 in the nation for NIH funding, and contains an abundance of venture capital. And yet, commercial bioscience activity is relatively slow-paced.  Why is translating basic research into start-up companies so challenging in NYC? What city- and state-level measures are being taken to energize the bioscience industry?

HIV and Tuberculosis: A Dual Epidemic in the Dominican Republic

by Jorien Gemma Breur

He was a young man, 33 years old. When I entered the emergency room, he was there, gravely ill and struggling to breathe. Although he was surrounded by family, he looked afraid. His family confided in me that they could barely recognize him as he had become so desperately thin in the past couple of weeks.

The Caribbean region, after sub-Saharan Africa, has the highest HIV prevalence in the world, with the Dominican Republic (DR) and Haiti accounting for nearly three-quarters of HIV cases in this area (1). Many of the estimated 800,000 Haitians living in DR, including about 280,000 undocumented Dominican-born persons of Haitian descent, are affected by the HIV epidemic (2). In the DR there are an estimated 62,000 HIV-positive individuals, a prevalence of 0.8% in the adult population (1).  La Romana is located in one of the most affected regions due to the high number of disenfranchised Haitian immigrants, poverty, and the prolific tourism industry.

Part I: Building Biotech in NYC- But the Rent is Too Damn High!

by Keisha Thomas

Biotechnology in New York is seemingly primed to explode within a few years. A glaring testament to this is the establishment of the Technion-Cornell Innovation Institute, or simply “Cornell NYC Tech.” In December 2011, the Cornell-Technion partnership won a bidding war to establish a multi-billion dollar high tech college/technology incubator on Roosevelt Island, scheduled to open in 2017. For now, Cornell Tech, which has already welcomed its first “beta” class of eight full-time students pursuing a one-year Cornell Master of Engineering degree in computer science, is housed in Chelsea, in a space generously donated by Google. Students not only take technical classes, but also take business classes and engage in projects with companies, organizations, and other groups involved in the tech industry.  The graduate programs are designed to produce individuals that have both the technological expertise and business knowhow that go hand in hand in the entrepreneurial tech world. It isn’t a secret that graduate programs in the STEM fields create tons of “science geeks” and “computer nerds,” who, although brilliant and capable within their own niche, tend to have inadequate “people skills” necessary for navigating through industry.

The Secret Science Club Lecture Series: Where cocktails have nerdy names and scientists are rock stars

by Rabab Charafeddine

Before attending my first Secret Science Club lecture, which took place at a bar in Brooklyn, I imagined the room to be full of scientists and experts in the night’s topic, fueled by alcohol, excitedly dissecting the direction of the field. I was pleasantly proven wrong.

As we walked towards the Bell House on a frigid Tuesday evening, half an hour before the talk, we saw that the line of people waiting to get in already stretched down the sidewalk. When we finally entered what resembled a concert hall, a far cry from the small room I was expecting, there were no longer any free seats available and the place was filled with at least a few hundred people. They were all there to sip on Cosmological Constant, the cocktail of the evening and, of course, to watch esteemed astrophysicist Dr. Jeremiah Ostriker talk about how invisible dark energy and dark matter control the architecture of the universe.

How Passion and Dedication, Fascism and Gender Stereotypes Helped Rita Levi-Montalcini Win a Nobel Prize

by Kirsten Hartil

Dr. Rita Levi-Montalicini, who won the Nobel Prize for Physiology or Medicine along with Stanley Cohen in 1986, for discovering nerve growth factor (NGF), died on December 30^th 2012 at the age of 103. She was renowned not just for her contributions to the field of neurobiology, but also for her dedication to humanitarian causes, establishing the Rita Levi-Montalcini Foundation committed to the education of African girls and young women. In addition to overcoming the normal trials and tribulations faced by many successful scientific researchers, her story also involved overcoming both the fascism and sexual stereotypes prevalent during the 1900s. She writes in her autobiography – In Praise of Imperfection – that “If I had not been discriminated against or had not suffered persecution, I would never have received the Nobel Prize.”