Articles by Walter Brown

Recently, I cofounded a small business, and my partner and I decided that we needed capital. Since neither of us had the desire or skills to write the mandatory business plan, we hired Howie, a new MBA and my son's friend, to do it for us. We gave Howie some background information and made some guesses about what things would cost and what we would earn. After getting additional background material, Howie devised a business plan that my potential investors say is just fine.Howie could not have d

Advances in technology always make us uneasy. Telephones, vaccinations, E-mail, mobile phones--despite the value we now place on them, these innovations provoked dire forecasts, and damnation, on their arrival. A vocal minority continue to see these innovations as dangerous. Some of the unease that comes with the new and different is well founded. We don't have to search far to find examples of new technologies that turned out to have unanticipated, troublesome consequences. Nonetheless, muc

Since Sputnik, hardly a year goes by without the federal government, some nonprofit foundation, or a large corporation launching schemes to entice people into research careers. These initiatives, meant to improve the quality of our science and bring about technological, medical, and other advances, offer educational opportunities and financial incentives. Sensible as these programs often are, they do not consider some of the most important motives that draw people to science and the personal

It's hard to concoct a research scenario in which the investigator does not desire one result over another. Perhaps a bit of government-supported contract research falls into this category--the engineer paid by the Air Force, let's say, to measure the tensile strength of several compounds or the biochemist paid by the Food and Drug Administration to assess the bioactivity of two generic agents. But most investigators do care about the results; that's why they do the research in the first place

A decade ago, Bernadine Healy, then director of the National Institutes of Health, spoke of the "need to discover the new medical Mozarts among the many Salieris in biomedicine."1 For Healy, the popular play and movie Amadeus, which depicted the rivalry between Antonio Salieri and Wolfgang Mozart, makes an important statement about talent. Salieri, Healy recalled, was talented in a "workmanlike sort of way. He could compose and get the job done with competence. By contrast, Mozart was a mercuri

For more than two millennia philosophers and psychologists have discovered and rediscovered a prevailing psychological truth: Intuition and fiercely held beliefs often guide us more than the facts. Nonetheless, the scientific community seems to operate under the assumption that people think and behave rationally; provide the facts, most of us believe, and people will behave in accordance with them. When they don't we wring our hands. Although the scientific enterprise is firmly establish

Doctors and their patients often hold different ideas about disease and how to treat it. When it comes to alternative medicine, the line seems clear. The public prefers alternative treatments--acupuncture, herbal remedies, imagery, therapeutic touch--to the drugs, psychotherapies, and surgery offered by the medical establishment. According to a 1993 report in the New England Journal of Medicine (D.M. Eisenberg et al., 328:246-52) Americans make more visits to alternative healers and spend more