Due to my boneheaded error, last week’s newsletter incorrectly included the intro from the previous week. I’m sorry!
I’ve been thinking lately about how to beef up First Opinion’s coverage of biotech and pharma. I have a special place in my heart for the more general interest pieces — public health, the practice of medicine, the experience of being a patient, policy — but I’d love to expand our offerings on biopharma. I want to hear from you: Should I be publishing more pieces on drug development, research, the biopharma workforce, etc.? If so, what do you want to read? Who do you want to hear from? This is a complicated space, of course — CEOs want to write fairly bland pieces, and many writers have financial conflicts of interest. So I want to make sure that I’m bringing fair, surprising arguments that aren’t overly influenced by the writer’s personal fortunes. What might that look like? Should we launch a new biotech columnist? Let me know.
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I’ll be at the STAT Summit in Boston on Wednesday and Thursday. Come find me and say hello! Don’t have your tickets yet? Get ’em now!
In other exciting STAT news, this week we announced our latest crop of Wunderkinds. It’s our 10th year recognizing rising stars in medicine and research, and as usual, it’s an inspiring and exciting bunch. One of the Wunderkinds even wrote a First Opinion just this week: Leah Pierson, a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital who studies ethics, weighed in on “bump codes” and AI tools inflating health care costs.
Recommendation of the week: Last month, BritBox shows began appearing on HBO Max, much to my delight. One of them is the first season of the binge-worthy “Outrageous,” a show about the real-life Mitford sisters. “The Six,” as they were known, came from a prominent family down on its luck and became a fascination to mid-20th-century Britain, in part because of their wildly differing politics. Author Ben Macintyre once referred to them as “Diana the Fascist, Jessica the Communist, Unity the Hitler-lover, Nancy the Novelist, Deborah the Duchess and Pamela the unobtrusive poultry connoisseur."
