December 2016

Settlements: My Take By Leonard Zwelling Much has been made of the United States’ position to allow the UN Security Council vote against the Israeli settlements in the West Bank to stand. Usually the Americans would have vetoed such a resolution, but the US abstained allowing its passage. Now Secretary of State John Kerry has […]

A New Web Site: MD Anderson Blogs, Healthcare Reform And Politics: My Takes By Leonard Zwelling Although I will continue to post blogs on lenzwelling.blogspot.com, you will soon be directed to the new web site, www.lenzwelling.com. This will have the blogs as well as pictures, my references and cv, and soon ways to buy the

The Real MD Anderson: It’s Not About The Money By Leonard Zwelling I arrived in Houston a reluctant recruit, following my wife to her dream job at MD Anderson. I soon learned I had also landed a dream job of my own. I was recruited to do translational research, biochemistry with clinical relevance. My Division

Meddling In Governance By Leonard Zwelling In a chilling op-ed piece in the NY Times on Saturday, December 17, Ariel Dorfman, a famous playwright and emeritus professor at Duke, describes how the United States in general and the CIA, in particular, interfered in the elections and governance of countries all over the world, from his

EMR=BAD By Leonard Zwelling          A close friend recently forwarded me an article and editorial from the Annals of Internal Medicine (165:753 and 818, 2016). The article describes the results of a series of time-motion studies examining the actual time doctors spend with patients vs. the time they spend with the electronic medical record (EMR)

The Manchurian Presidents By Leonard Zwelling          One of the great political thriller films of all time is 1962’s The Manchurian Candidate. It was directed by John Frankenheimer from a book by Richard Condon published three years before. The black-and-white film (not the awful remake with Denzel Washington of a few years back) stars Frank

Hospital expenses Regarding “MD Anderson battles $111m deficit” (Page A1, Thursday), that a nonprofit like MD Anderson should have both an $111 million deficit and a $2.8 billion cash reserve is mysterious enough given the institution’s tax-exempt status as an agency of the state of Texas. The article and the MD Anderson spokesman suggest that

It’s Beyond Belief: DePinho Gets $208,000 Bonus; Grad Students Can’t Get Cake By Leonard Zwelling https://www.texastribune.org/2016/12/12/ut-system-administrators-receive-more-2-million-bo/          And I thought I could not be surprised any longer. Silly me!          The Texas Tribune reported on December 12 that over $2 M in bonuses were distributed to top administrators in the UT System by the Board

Not John Glenn By Leonard Zwelling http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/08/us/john-glenn-dies.html?_r=0          It is very difficult to convey to those under fifty what John Glenn meant to Americans of my age. In fact, even after his death, his courage, his bravery, his accomplishments and his “right stuff” continue to awe and inspire.          The details of his extraordinary life

The Fallacy Of Turning A University Into A Drug Company By Leonard Zwelling http://www.wsj.com/articles/big-pharma-short-on-blockbusters-outsources-the-science-1481042583?mod=djemalertNEWS          We need to get back to first principles.          Academic research is research for research’s sake. You cannot justify the pursuit of enzymology in deep-sea bacteria any other way. Why we cannot seem to get comfortable with the notion that