Plasma Pool

Last week, a research team from Stanford University School of Medicine and the Veterans Affairs Palo Alto Health Care System published an essay in the New England Journal of Medicine suggesting that new drugs be labeled not only with what we know about them (which they now are), but also with an accounting of what we don’t know.

The Stanford researchers’ effort to clarify the ambiguity surrounding the comparative effectiveness of recently approved drugs is laudable. But their proposal that the FDA begin labeling drugs with measures of this comparative effectiveness both ignores the realities of how pharmaceutical innovation happens today and endorses a flawed decisionmaking model that could foster false security in patients and undermine their medical caregivers—the professionals who are trained to help each particular patient discriminate among drugs of the same class in a way a label cannot. Doctors can and do disagree about what constitutes a statistically significant difference between two drugs. Giving patients a nudge in the direction of involving themselves in that decision—and the confidence to do so—without properly equipping them to make informed decisions will diminish rather than improve the overall quality of patient care.

Shortly after Caroline Kennedy withdrew her name from consideration for the vacancy in the U.S. Senate created by Sen. Hillary Clinton’s resignation, Nate Silver published a brief and provocative piece entitled “Did Caroline Ever Really Want It?” in which he analyzes Kennedy’s withdrawal in a simple and radical way: as though she were a person.

The thoroughly discredited “birther” movement maintains, contrary to all available material evidence, not only that President Barack Obama is not a native-born U.S. citizen, but that we’ve all been duped into believing that he is by an international conspiracy.

So why does Google see the birthers as a new market?

Though fundamentally irrational, religion both acts as a moralizing force for the non-rational and reinforces the morality of those who came to their beliefs through rigorous discourse and reflection by providing symbols and figures who set powerful and useful examples often lacking in a modern pluralistic society. Religion can both inculcate us with the basic moral rules of idealized polite society (such as being a good Samaritan) and, for the rational contemplative, provide entire philosophies for progressive social change. Take that of Jesus Christ, whose emphasis on charity is undeniable and yet today goes largely unspoken in American public discourse. Religion, in acting as both a source of simple but crucial rules for societal interaction and a (potential; today largely untapped) source of progressive philosophical inspiration, also provides the devout literalist Christian and the rational Christian—provides the strictly faithful and the scientifically faithful—with a common popular vocabulary with which to articulate mutual hopes, fears, dreams, and desires.

U.S. Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor has been roundly accused of judicial bias in matters of race. Comparative analyses of “judicial bias,” even ones that give somewhat reliable comparative measures of various jurists’ work, operate by postulating a spectral fixed point of neutrality against which the scrutinized is measured. But where is this point? What constitutes it? What allows us to say that the contingent result of Sotomayor’s intellectual collaborations with dozens of individuals, absent Sotomayor’s views as such, constitutes a universal norm? Why should we presume that the average of the biases of multiple others represents a default lack of bias?