The Oncology Think Tank in Scientific American:
“Everyone here has the sense that right now is one of those moments when we are influencing the future.” —Steve Jobs
Every year, cancer kills approximately 10 million people worldwide. Of those who die, two thirds do so because they were diagnosed with advanced disease. A new paradigm in the approach to cancer is overdue. COVID-19 has already altered conversations and expectations within the medical community and is forcing a rethinking of many public health issues.
To contemplate a transformative approach for the postpandemic cancer landscape, The Oncology Think Tank (TOTT) was created in June 2020, bringing together a diverse group of thought leaders, researchers and oncologists from academia and industry. Meetings were held remotely, at least once a week and sometimes twice weekly for four months. The burden of TOTT was to formulate a fresh, compassionate, patient-centric, effective and radically different vision for health care’s approach to cancer. This opinion paper will focus on what TOTT believes is the best way forward with a goal of reducing the number of patients who are diagnosed with, or develop, advanced stage cancers and die.
More here.
Dear Reader,
What happens to the job market when the government raises the minimum wage? For decades, higher education in the United States has taught economics students to answer this question by reasoning from first principles. When the price of something rises, people tend to buy less of it. Therefore, if the price of labour rises, businesses will choose to ‘buy’ less of it – meaning they’ll hire fewer people. Students learn that a higher minimum wage means fewer jobs.
When it comes to protecting animal species, you would think that conservation biologists, environmental advocates, and animal-loving members of the public are all on the same page. However, in Why Sharks Matter, marine biologist David Shiffman shows that this is not always the case. Though there are plenty of books marvelling at sharks, this, to my knowledge, is the first one to provide an informed and informative look at shark conservation. Frank, frequently opinionated, and full of refreshingly counterintuitive ideas, Why Sharks Matter is an eye-opener that delivered far more than I expected based on the title.
Michoacán, where about four in five of all avocados 
Saurabh Netravalkar finds it hard to log off Slack. But a few weeks ago, the Oracle software engineer shipped his final code and set an out-of-office note on the messaging app to focus on a more personal goal: playing for the United States’ underdog cricket team at the T20 World Cup. “If there is anything urgent, my manager should be able to reach me,” he said in an interview with The Washington Post. “But I’m completely focused on the World Cup.”
Six years ago, Dr. Elizabeth Comen, a breast cancer specialist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Hospital in Manhattan, held the hand of a patient who was hours from death. As Dr. Comen leaned in for a final goodbye, she pressed her cheek to her patient’s damp face. “Then she said it,” Dr. Comen recalled. “‘I’m so sorry for sweating on you.’” In her two decades as a physician, Dr. Comen has found that women are constantly apologizing to her: for sweating, for asking follow-up questions, for failing to detect their own cancers sooner.
I
The first time Sigmund Freud wrote of destroying his papers he was twenty-one years old. He was writing to Eduard Silberstein, an intimate friend of his youth and the sole other member of the Academia Castellana, a make-believe Spanish literary society anchored in Cervantes trivia, which served them as a secret forum for airing playful fantasies and precocious world-weariness. Freud invited Silberstein to help expunge the record of their relations by conjuring up a pleasant winter evening in which they could come together to burn their archives “in a solemn auto-da-fé”. The next occasion was eight years later, in a letter to his then fiancée Martha Bernays, during what he described as a “bad, barren month”, waiting for money from a chemist to finance further research into cocaine, doing almost nothing except browsing through Russian history and toying with two rabbits who continually nibbled turnips and messed up his floor. His only real accomplishment, he told Martha then, was to have nearly completed his intention of doing something that would dismay various unborn, unfortunate people – namely his future biographers. He’d destroyed all his notes from the past fourteen years, along with correspondence and the original manuscripts of his scientific papers. In 1907, he once again burned a huge trove of private documents. Finally, in 1938, just before escaping Nazified Vienna, he delegated to his daughter Anna the task of overseeing another bonfire of his letters, which she undertook together with his disciple Marie Bonaparte.
When my daughter was born last year, I was fifty-three years old. I’d wanted a child so badly for so long, and her arrival may well be the most wonderful thing ever to happen to me. And yet I cannot picture her first breath, though I witnessed it from inches away. I also cannot picture her right now, as I type these words. Or my wife. Or my parents. Or my friends. Or my daughter’s nursery at home. Indeed, I have no real idea what the verb “to picture” is supposed to mean.
Put slightly differently, my point in appending a reading of “Le Colonel Chabert” to my account of Géricault was to suggest that what we find in the painter’s career is ultimately the defeat of drama and expression in the Diderotian/Davidian sense of both, which is also to say, in the terms developed in my essay, at least a partial loss of world as representable by painting. Nor does French painting following Géricault’s death undo that defeat and that loss. As I remark in “Géricault’s Romanticism,” the two major figures that dominate the scene in the second half of the 1820s and 1830s, Ingres and Delacroix, found ways of bypassing or disabling the issue of theatricality by shifting the imaginative center of their art altogether elsewhere, toward what I think of as a “stylistic” or, better, “esthetic” register (GR, 58–60). By so doing both artists secured long and productive careers, ones, however, that from my point of view remained somewhat askew to the dominant thrust or dialectic of the central current of French nineteenth-century painting.
The contemporary world of botany that Schlanger explores in “The Light Eaters” is still divided over the matter of how plants sense the world and whether they can be said to communicate. But, in the past twenty years, the idea that plants communicate has gained broader acceptance. Research in recent decades has shown garden-variety lima beans protecting themselves by synthesizing and releasing chemicals to summon the predators of the insects that eat them; lab-grown pea shoots navigating mazes and responding to the sound of running water; and a chameleonic vine in the jungles of Chile mimicking the shape and color of nearby plants by a mechanism that’s not yet understood.