March 2019

Mueller’s Report: What It Really Means By Leonard Zwelling Democrats were salivating. They couldn’t wait until the report from special prosecutor Robert Mueller III was made public and President Trump was shown to be a Russian agent. Not so fast. Last weekend, the report was delivered to the Attorney General William Barr who wrote a […]

Jexodus, The Golan, AIPAC And Trump: It’s A Confusing Time To Be Jewish By Leonard Zwelling “Jexodus.” You may not have heard of this one. It’s a movement that has already been rebranded the ExodusMovement.com to move Jews, traditionally Democratic voters, to support the Republican party. One of its leaders is Elizabeth Pipko a 23-year

What Do We Really Know? By Leonard Zwelling The March 7, 2019 issue of The New England Journal Of Medicine makes it quite clear that we, as humans, can act before we know what the heck we are doing. The first issue the journal touched upon is the need for sleep in young doctors or

Fake News By Leonard Zwelling Let me say this at the top. I watch a lot of TV news programming. I watch the NBC Nightly News every day. I watch MSNBC often and CNN on occasion, too. I do not watch Fox as I find what that network has done since its inception and since

Therapeutic Poop By Leonard Zwelling The front page of the New York Times on March 4 gave a good description of the pending battle lines over the therapeutic use of human excrement. “Battle Erupts Over Treatment That Once Repelled: F.D.A Ruling Will Pick Who Prospers From Fecal Transplants” Readers of this blog know that the

Theranos: Bad Blood, The Drop-Out and The Inventor By Leonard Zwelling You are going to hear a lot about Theranos in the next months. Theranos was the go-go start-up from Silicon Valley begun by a Stanford drop-out, Elizabeth Holmes (who attended St. John’s here in Houston). Her idea was a simple and good one. She

The Rules Are For Others By Leonard Zwelling This is already in the running for my favorite story of the year and it’s only March. Apparently a series of CEOs, big-wigs, privileged wealthy, and Hollywood stars paid a guy in Los Angeles to falsify college applications that turned their non-athlete kids into scholarship bait or

Stepford Docs On The Bayou: Not The MD Anderson Way By Leonard Zwelling What so struck me in 1984 when I came to MD Anderson was the enormous tolerance the institution had for people with—how do I put this—different ideas about cancer, its treatment and how to interact with other people. The place was a

Contempt And Trump And Russia By Leonard Zwelling https://www.nytimes.com/2019/03/02/opinion/sunday/michael-cohen-steele-dossier.html?action=click&module=Opinion&pgtype=Homepage Two opinion pieces in Sunday’s New York Times (March 3) reveal a major problem thread running through the American psyche and how it affects our national politics. In the first piece, Arthur Brooks, president of the American Enterprise Institute think tank, notes the awful toll that

What Should A Chief Scientific Officer Do? By Leonard Zwelling MD Anderson has had vice presidents for research, chief academic officers, and provosts. I am not at all sure it ever had a chief scientific officer until recently. The duties of the CSO cannot be those of the chief academic officer because there is also