Update to 'My Sarcoma' project

A few weeks ago I posted about my friend and neighbor, Ray Paul's battle with Sarcoma and his amazing response to it - to create art using histologic images of his own tumor.  Ray finished the first painting in the series and entered it into a contest, and it won!  You can see the contest - and Ray's finished painting, at the ArtSlant Competition website,

and here it is as well:

Ray Paul, "SP12-6796 x 40 - 3," acrylic, latex, enamel on canvas printed with a photographic image of the metastatic myxofibrosarcoma to my left lung, 26" x 36"  2013

 

He tells me he plans a total of 6 in this series (all quite different) and then hopes to exhibit them all at Moffitt and possibly take them on a tour of several cancer center's throughout the US with strong Sarcoma programs.  If you know of anyone interested, please do contact me or Ray.

As an aside, the TEDMED blog also ran a piece about this project.  Great exposure for art and healing.

You can follow Ray on twitter at @raypaul4 or see more of his work at his website, www.RayPaulArt.com

The case for pre-prints in biology

So when I first met +Jonathan Eisen at TEDMED in 2012, in addition to the social media mandate he gave to me, he started to introduce me to the whole #openaccess debate (his brother founded PLoS and he is the chair of the advisory board at PLoS Biology).  As a physicist by training, I was an easy convert, but I've found that MANY of my biological colleagues (even the theoretical ones) have been more difficult to sway.

I just had a conversation today, in our awesome collaboration space - the collaboratorium (this panorama doesn't do it full justice, but there's +Philip Gerlee)

with a friend and colleague Jonathan Wojtkowiak (who doesn't seem to have a G+ account), where I faced the same arguments that I've heard so many times before:

Why should I post my papers on a pre-print server where anyone can see it before it is published!?  They could scoop me!

I honestly don't understand this argument, but I hear it all the time.  By nature of pre-print servers, like the arXiv, the idea is yours! Time and date stamped. And, better yet, it is completely #openaccess, free of charge, and helps move science along at a better pace.  Only a very few journals have problems with posting of pre-prints before they get their (greedy) hands on the results of all your hard work, but most are totally OK with it.

There is a nice movement starting in biology to get things posted.  And some communities, like the population and evolutionary biology one, have their own pre-print discussion site - Haldane's Sieve.  I am starting to consider trying to do something similar for quantitative cancer research as well, with the help of some friends and colleagues, but we'll see.

If you still aren't convinced, here is a nice article in PLoS Biology highlighting the issue.  Also, take a look at the some of the nice press that my mentor +Alexander Anderson and +David Basanta recently got on a pre-print about Game Theory and cancer they posted by MIT Technology Review - this is press this article likely wouldn't have gotten through the standard route... and we know that you don't get cited unless people read your paper...

If you are against it - please leave some comments about why, I'd love to try to convince you otherwise!  If you are a biologist (or know one) who DOES post pre-prints, weigh in and share your good experiences!

The Tomorrow's Doctor Initiative

In my opening post, I mentioned that I gave a talk at last year's TEDMED meeting.  Giving the talk itself was a great experience, but more important to me were (are) the relationships that I made.  It was such a strange and lovely collection of people - lots of square pegs - that I felt right at home in a way I rarely have before.  I mentioned meeting Jonathan Eisen in my first post, but this time, I am going to focus on an initiative that the two other 'young guys' and I started.

The average speaker at TEDMED is, I would say, at least mid-career and crushing it.  Last year, there were three of us who did not fit this mold.  Me, you know, a PGY-3/PhD-2, sort of in medias res.  The other two, Ali Ansary (who talked about embracing technology in health care)

and Sandeep Kishore (who asked us to make sure we are considering the 'causes of the causes' in all of our health decision making) 

were rising 3rd year medical students.  To be fair, they both have other advanced degrees and have done some 'crushing it' on their own, but I digress.  

The three of us talked (on stage) about quite different topics, but our conversations backstage and during the breaks always gravitated to what we knew best - medical education.  We all felt that our experiences were really good, but that medicine was changing really fast, and the educational system wasn't keeping up.  We were lucky enough to engage folks from the AAMC and talk about changes they had planned already to the MCAT to try to capture a bit more about a student than just their hard science acumen, but we felt that we wanted to contribute a bit more to the discussion.

A series of discussions over Skype ensued and we came up with a sort of manifesto, which we published on the Huffington Post

and subsequently on The Health Care Blog.

These articles, in short, outline what we see is a set of problems facing medical schools and physicians preparing to practice in the 21st century.  What we don't think we have right now is answers and there are already nearly 30 medical schools pioneering new curriculums (all different!) and organizations from the AMA (10M$ grant!) and AHA (white paper) who have taken stands to stir up change.  So how the heck will we fit in?

What we hope to do is start a conversation that anyone can join in on about preparing the 21st century physician.  We started a website, www.tomorrowsdoctor.org

which solicits people's 'visions' of how to prepare the 21st century physician.  The TEDMED blog ran a post about this at the time, and it is currently only cataloguing visions, but it will (next iteration, a week or two we hope) have more functionality to include the ability to comment on individual visions and share them via social media.

We are going to then sit down in 6 months time with some collaborators and curate these visions and the conversations that they begin and use this 'crowd-sourced' vision to design a unified set of core competencies for the 21st century physician and the track required to prepare and admit them.

Will it be taken seriously?  I don't know.  The AAMC is interested in what we're doing, so that is a start.  And, anything that sparks a conversation about this important issue isn't a waste of time. So - go share your vision with us if you haven't already...

We have a meeting with the AAMC next week, if there's anything you'd like us to communicate with them, let me know in the comments. Otherwise, stay tuned.

Upcoming posts will include a conversation about stochastic models in biology, a real 'cancer connection' where I've helped a modern artist (www.raypaulart.com - @raypaul4) and a pathologist come together to make art and start a healing journey (see twitter feed for an example of the new art!) and my own, personal, EO Wilson rant...

Jake out.

Edit on 4/27/2013:  I was remiss in not including an initial word cloud from the first 40 or so visions.  Here that is:

Hello world

I've been meaning to start this blog for a long time now.  A year ago, at TEDMED 2012, I met a guy backstage, Jonathan Eisen, who I didn't know from Adam.  It turns out, he's a pretty big deal, and more importantly, a really nice guy, a great scientist, science communicator and now a mentor and friend.  He  writes a science blog I follow, The Tree of Life and gave a great talk at that meeting called 'Meet your microbes', where he talked about fecal transplants, among other things.  You can watch his talk here.

It was our first conversation backstage though, when he challenged me about my 'job' as a scientist, that I remember best.  It went like this:

Jonathan: Oh cool, you do theoretical biology research? What's your twitter handle?

Me: I don't use that stuff, I just do science.

Jonathan: Wait, what's your job as a scientist then?

Me: Uhhh... My job is to do science.

Jonathan: No, your job is to do and then communicate science.  And if you aren't using social media and a blog to do that, you aren't doing it as effectively as you could be.

**update - just after I started this blog, members of Jonathan's lab published this awesome paper in PLoS Biology to help teach scientists how to use social media... I'm trying!**

So, I signed up to twitter (follow me if you wish, I'm @CancerConnector) and vowed to start writing a blog about science. Last week, at TEDMED 2013, I hung out with Jonathan again, and...  well, I'm writing a blog now.

My hopes for this blog are to write about my disparate interests in a somewhat more casual way than I would for official publications.  If you don't know me, I'm a radiation oncologist (someone who takes care of cancer patients and uses radiation therapy to help in their treatment) who does theoretical research into the way cancer works.  This research is usually in the form of mathematical models, but I work closely with biologists as well to ensure that my models are testable.  Because of my background, I have other interests that may find their way into this blog as well that include medical education (here's a recent article on Huffington Post), patient-doctor communication, global health, care of veterans and random medical essays... so bear with me.

I'd be remiss if I didn't also embed my own TEDMED talk as it nicely summarizes ME and will give a sense of who I am and what I'm generally about.  Here I am:

So.  There it is.  I hope this will be useful and informative.  Talk to you soon...