BACK of the BOOK
Heard in the Blogosphere
ASH
@ASH_hematology
Today, @SenatorTimScott & @SenBooker introduced a
bill authorizing grants that will improve data collections &
access to care for people with #SickleCell disease.
Alexis Thompson, MD, MPH,
2018 ASH president
@DrAlexisThompsn
Once again so proud that @ASH_hematology
has taken a leadership role in advocating on this
important issue. Kudos also to the @ConquerSCD
coalition @SCDAAorg and others working to unify
and amplify SCD voices to improve outcomes
through research and treatment.
Remedying the Shortage of Health-Care
Providers?
“Why has so little attention been paid to the number and quality
of health-care providers? Physician education, licensing, and
credentialing are determined by an alphabet soup of organizations
that change at a glacial pace. Their roles and interactions are difficult
to delineate, … and this complexity makes change difficult. … While
insurance and health expenditures continue to grab the headlines, let’s
not ignore the vital role of health providers in the health-care equation.
We need more providers who are better suited to the challenges and
opportunities of tomorrow’s world, and there is no legitimate reason
why we shouldn’t start getting them today.”
—Jeffrey S. Flier, MD, on solutions for the looming health-care provider shortage, in The Boston Globe
Protect the “Petri Dish Warriors”
Jordan Gauthier, MD, MSc
@drjgauthier
I cannot help but wonder: Considering my background –
lower-middle class boy raised by a single mother – would I
have become a physician, had I been born in the US? I doubt
I would have ever been able to afford medical school.
Mike Thompson, MD, PhD
@mtmdphd
It’s a crazy world we live in when I need to start a new
Evernote file on “Post Truth” for social media. #scicomm
Anita J. Kumar, MD
@anitajkumarMD
Good friend is told she needs to urgently be induced today
(baby is okay). First response is “You have to give me 4 hours
to go close all my EPIC charts!” #SumsUpMedicine
Chadi Nabhan, MD, MBA
@chadinabhan
Could Alexa write, edit, revise, or
review manuscripts? Asking for a
friend? ...
Follow ASH and ASH Clinical News on:
@ASH_Hematology, @BloodJournal,
@BloodAdvances, and @ASHClinicalNews
Facebook.com/AmericanSocietyofHematology
@ASH_Hematology
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ASH Clinical News
“Basic science may not make a great meme, but curiosity-driven
research helps us understand how nature works at the most
fundamental level. … Research often is hard to explain to those not
directly exposed to it. It’s self-driven, has a lot of failures, takes long
periods of time and has a certain randomness to it. People want to
know what will happen if they fund a specific line of research, and the
honest answer is that we don’t know. … Research funding faces an
uphill battle because it’s not easy to invest in something you can’t see
or hold in your hands. But that’s exactly what we must do if we are to
find cures for diseases such as breast cancer and Alzheimer’s.”
—Rebecca Blank and Brad Schwartz, MD, call for increasing research funding in the U.S. budget, in The Hill
Pulling Peer Review out of
the 17th Century?
The technology that drives science forward is
forever accelerating, and some scientists are
concerned that the peer review system is hav-
ing trouble keeping pace. On NPR’s “Weekend
Edition,” investigators discussed the potential
drawbacks and advantages to modernizing the
peer review system.
“What we want to see happen next is to allow
the scientists who are reading papers [as part
of their normal work] to review them. … The
fact that people are going to be reviewing
and assessing the work ... should provide a
very strong incentive back to authors to try to
produce work that’s actually reproducible and
durable, rather than work that is just flashy
and gets into the right journal.”
—Michael Eisen, PhD, a Howard Hughes Medical Institute
(HHMI) investigator at University of California, Berkeley
“[By the time a study is ready to publish], peer
review is not going to help. It doesn’t matter
how transparent the peer review is, we’re not
going to be able to solve [a study design’s
fundamental] problem.”
—Michael Lauer, MD, deputy director for Extramural
Research at the National Institutes of Health
“To me, [the fact that scientists are judged by
which journal publishes their work] is one of
the very biggest problems in the system today,
and it drives a lot of [unwanted] behavior. ...
Science moves slower because research isn’t
available immediately.”
— Erin O’Shea, PhD, president of HHMI
“There’s a worry that the Wild West version [of
preprint publishing, where] everyone posts what
they like, will lead to a lot more garbage out there
that people can’t make out what to make of it.
… For a while we’ll see a parallel track where the
journals still provide some imprint of thorough
review, statistical review, methodological review,
[and preprints will] allow the community to share
more with each other much more rapidly.”
—Theodora Bloom, PhD, executive editor of The BMJ
April 2018