February 2015

If Corporations Are People, And MD Anderson Is A Corporation, Is MD Anderson A Person? If so, Who and Why Would He Behave So Badly?: The Godfather Rationale By Leonard Zwelling          Yes, I know there was a real Monroe Dunaway Anderson. In the title I am referring to the Cancer Center not the cotton […]

s-CAR-go-T or Send in the Boys to Do a Man’s Work When a Woman Is Involved: One Hundred Million Reasons For The Head of the Division of Pediatrics To Resign By Leonard Zwelling       Obviously, this one is hard to write, but not really.       First, nothing about this surprised me, especially the particularly sudden

How Low Can the Bar Go? By Leonard Zwelling          A rabbi, a priest and an Episcopalian bishop walk into the bar….NO          A clown, a man with a duck on his head and a nun walk into the bar…NO          A midget, a giant and Jimmy Carter walk into the bar…NO          Michael Jackson

Grace, Paul, Marty, Jorma, Jack, and Spencer By Leonard Zwelling (For Boo)          Rarely, there is a moment in time so frozen in memory that it can never melt. One of those moments occurred in April of 1967 in the basement of my ZBT dorm at Duke. The humidity had just crept back into the

A Cut of the Profits Is One Thing, But a Cut of the Charitable Giving…? By Leonard Zwelling          On the front page of the NY Times on February 6 is a story by Nicholas Confessore about Mary Pat Bonner, a woman who raises funds for liberal candidates by funneling money from big donors to

BDS=BS By Leonard Zwelling          While some of us were sleeping, a movement has arisen on college campuses and elsewhere to Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) Israeli goods and even intellectual exchanges among academics.          Here’s the latest tidbit from California: http://www.foxnews.com/us/2015/02/03/pro-palestinian-students-heckle-cal-davis-opponents-with-cries-allahu-akbar/          I guess I have to say it again. Some folks are just

What Would a Rational System for New Anti-Cancer Drug Development Look Like? By Leonard Zwelling          Some of my best friends are clinical investigators and many of them work at the very edge of the clinical-laboratory interface, phase 1 drug development. This is the area of human subjects research that deals with the earliest clinical

The Stupid Bowl: It Scares the Hell Out of ‘Em By Leonard Zwelling          No one watching the annual spectacle of American excess called the Super Bowl can deny it any longer. The most powerful force in the universe is stupidity. Whether it is the “dead kid” commercial, the spilled Coke in the server ad

Measles As Metaphor: My Right To Have What She’s Having By Leonard Zwelling          Believe it or not, this has already been decided by the Supreme Court in 1905. A state can force vaccination (in this case, Jacobson v. Massachusetts, it was small pox) or levy a penalty with some exceptions for which the plaintiff