Hand Transplant Transparency Nightmares
This February WIRED published my investigative story “The Devastating Allure of Medical Miracles,” which pulls aside the operating room curtain to r...
Author: David Dobbs
Climate Change Enters Its Blood Sucking Phase
Climate Change Enters Its Blood Sucking Phase,The Atlantic, Feb 21, 2019. In northern New England, a climate-driven explosion in populations of moose ticks is d...
Biology/Brains and Behavior/Culture of Science/History of science/Medicine/Psychiatry/Published elsewhere
What does it mean when a clinical trial fails? Probably not what you think.
Today I published a story I’ve been working on, off and on, for exactly two years. “What Can We Learn When a Clinical Trial is Stopped” now on...
Brains and Behavior/Culture/Culture of Science/Healthcare policy/History of science/Medicine/Psychiatry
How Culture Shapes Madness, my latest at Pacific Standard
“The Touch of Madness,” published online today in Pacific Standard magazine, is probably the most important article I’ve ever written. In the ...
A Sane Person’s Privacy Nightmare
At Slate today I examine the potential privacy nightmare posed by the emerging healthcare sector that wants to use data gathered from smartphone use to spot men...
Should fitness share the stage with beauty? My review of Prum’s “Evolution of Beauty”
The Times Sunday Book Review, six days ahead of the Sunday paper, published today my review of Richard Prum’s “The Evolution of Beauty” (and a...
Does autism happen the way we think it does?
My latest story, about how autism starts, starts like this: One of the oldest ideas in autism — as old as the naming of the condition itself — is that it comes ...
On John McCain’s False Heroism
My latest at Slate went up a couple days ago, after John McCain performed a weeklong drama in which he first revived the Kill Obamacare movement and then, telli...
Smartphone psychiatry? How NIMH director Tom Insel turned from brain scanners to social tech
Around this time, Insel told me recently, he’d just finished a talk describing the wonderful things the NIMH was discovering about the brain when a man in the a...
Did the gene-drug revolution just arrive?
Did the genomic revolution arrive last week, or was that just the snowstorm? The answer depends on whom you listened to and what they thought of a study publish...