Monday, December 08, 2014

Favorite business writing linked to - on health care

One thing I've been thinking about lately in relation to my writing here has been how to best aggregate what I've written... with that output very much including the great writing from others that I've linked to. I've been happy with the consistent work I've done on this site over the past six plus years and to this point the aggregation has been in the form of books I've compiled and published via Amazon for both the Kindle and in print. Those books have been by category (business, sports, writing on writing, book reviews, etc.) and what I decided recently to take a stab at was going back through my past posts to this site and do new writing on a few particular categories of stories.

The area I've started with is business and over the past week or so I've gone through all of my business-related writing to this site and pulled out particular story links that resonated with me. In looking at the best business writing I've posted on, there's been a handful of topics I've found both to be of import as a subject and to have great writing on that subject I've written about previously. The first to post on here is health care (with at least somewhat a business-leaning angle to the story) and below are the health care stories I've seen that resonated the most with me and which are available online without a subscription:

"Illumina's new low-cost genome machine will change health care forever" by Ashlee Vance for Businessweek in Jan 2014 – on people gaining affordable access to information about the genetic traits that they carry.

"Patient Zero" by Tom Junod and Mark Warren for Esquire in Dec 2013 – on cancer patient Stephanie Lee and noted scientist and researcher Eric Schadt.

"States of Health" by Atul Gawande for the New Yorker in Oct 2013 – on the Affordable Care Act by the noted physician and excellent writer.

"Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone for Philadelphia Magazine in July 2013.

"Is Concierge Medicine the Future of Health Care?" by Devin Leonard for Businessweek in Nov 2012 – on doctors taking on patients on a monthly fee basis rather than billing insurance carriers for exams and basic services. It’s an interesting notion with lots of different service derivations and costs ranging from extremely high to quite affordable.

"Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World" by Wil Hylton for the New York Times in May 2012.

"Adventures in Extreme Science" by Tom Junod for Esquire in Mar 2011 – on scientist Eric Schadt and his "emperor has no clothes" approach to conventional wisdom in the field of molecular biology. Schadt makes for an interesting topic with his proselytizing about the vast networks and cause-effect relationships within the body... and how that runs counter to the previous belief that things within ran independently enough that successful mapping of human DNA would start us on the road to disease cure. In terms of this new viewpoint, the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is cited as one of Schadt's early influences and which led to him breaking away from conventional belief. Junod details not just the intelligence and contrarian viewpoint of Schadt, but also his propensity to get out in front of his ideas and advocate loudly for him. Lest that statement make him appear a simple self-promoter, also noted in the profile is Schadt's collaborative approach to solving problems and curing disease... regardless of whether it's he or his company getting the credit and subsequent revenue. It was really interesting reading on Schadt and also striking to me from the piece was an anecdote about how he "likes to do his supercomputing on planes" via Amazon servers.