Esquire Writing - on "New Biologist" Eric Schadt & Extreme Health

There's piece of writing in the latest Esquire that both has solid content and makes me think about words and what writers think about when they pen them...

The profile by Tom Junod is "Adventures in Extreme Science" and looks at brainiac 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 being both the source of the term "paradigm shift" and one of Schadt's early influences around the idea of necessary 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. Really interesting reading on the guy.

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Above is about the content of the piece... which by itself is me thinks worth a read. What struck me within it though was a specific anecdote written about the subject. Schadt early on is described as being a breaking from convention kind of guy and torch bearer for "New Biology"... in short, a whole new approach. After this was established about Schadt, Junod related how he "likes to do his supercomputing on planes." The further description of this was how Schadt would figure out what data he needs run and then simply hop onto a plane's WiFi network and order that data run via Amazon servers.

It's a remarkable detail that carries both a "whadda know? that's interesting" feel to it and shot across the bow backing for the "New" advocated for by Schadt. Maybe it's just because I'm a sucker for funky (and yet important) detail, but this anecdote made it much easier for me as a reader to embrace a paradigm shift idea (or someone extolling the virtues of one), simply because the tools available are also a paradigm shift from previously capabilities.

It was a really cool inclusion by Junod and as a interested reader type guy, I really wonder whether he put as much gravitas behind the anecdote about server time via Amazon as I took from it.

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Also of interest from this issue was the concept of Extreme Heath as written about in multiple short pieces. Featured were a number of otherwise common folk who decided to push themselves to do uncommon things... including surfer Laird Hamilton, subject of a "What I've Learned" piece.

Not that I necessarily want to go all crazy with it at this point, but I think there a lot to be said for the idea of pushing to see what you can accomplish.

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.

Great writing by Wollan for the NYT, Grann for The New Yorker and Junod, Warren & Granger for Esquire

Three feature stories I've seen recently that struck me as exceptional were written about a major street gang that took on the branding of a major university sports program, the authentication of art work as having been done by masters and the cutting edge of cancer treatment with one specific person as the test case.

The first of the features was "Fresno State Loves Its Bulldogs, but So Does a Gang" by Malia Wollan for the New York Times. It's maybe the most straightforward of the three pieces noted here, but remarkable nonetheless in how the branding of a university and it's sports teams was in many ways taken over.

The second piece of great writing to note here was by David Grann for The New Yorker. From 2010, "The Mark of a Masterpiece" was a 16,000 word story on the world of fine art and a man, Peter Paul Biro, who declared himself able to authenticate works of art as being done by a particular artist based on fingerprints within the works. It's a fascinating read and what Grann did so well in it was laying out details and facts for the reader to then form conclusions, rather that telling a story and stating what a reader should take from it. Additionally, it was fascinating to read three years after the piece was done some of the aftermath from it and the fairly recent ruling on a lawsuit that came out of the feature.

The last piece of exceptional writing to note was done for Esquire by Tom Junod and Mark Warren. "Patient Zero" was about Iraq war widow and mother of two Stephanie Lee, her initial diagnosis of terminal cancer and subsequent groundbreaking treatment. While reading the piece, I was struck to see that the cancer research genius who took her on was Eric Schadt, the subject of another Esquire story I remember well, and the confluence of these two people and what their interactions could potentially mean for future cancer treatments is nothing less than amazing to think about. 

One thing I felt at the conclusion of the story was that it felt incomplete, an assessment that then made complete sense to me after I saw the front-of-issue note from Esquire editor in chief, David Granger, and realized that the story felt incomplete because that's precisely what it is. The narrative about Lee and her life and then Schadt and his research is captivating reading, but what will come of Lee's treatment unknown... and what could then carry over to the treatment of countless others as they battle cancer... unknown and tremendously exciting.

The aforementioned Granger one-page note is titled "A Second Chance" and while it's not something I typically do when writing about something, I've included roughly the first half of it below as it doesn't appear to be posted online now and for me provides great big picture perspective on the story (especially after having read the feature by Junod and Warren)... 

"October 18, 2013: We've never done anything like this before.

   I've been working at Esquire for more than 16 years. I've been doing magazine journalism for almost 30. I'ts not only that we-especially executive editor Mark Warren and writer-at-large Tom Junod-made a connection between two people. It's not only that a story we published two years ago, about an eccentric math-driven biologist, allowed us to introduce two people who needs each other very much. It's also that we, especially Mark and Tom, are all in on this one. We're involved. We saw an opportunity to arrange for a man in New York who is on the cutting edge of math and science and medicine and has endless resources to help a young mother of two girls from Mississippi whose husband was killed in the Iraq war and who was told earlier this year that her cancer is terminal... to maybe live.

   Maybe.

We don't know how the story ends. We know Stephanie Lee has fought every way she knows, with the help of a military hospital in Mississippi, to stay alive for her daughters. And we know when we first talked to Eric Schadt, who runs the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai hospital, he told us there was virtually no chance he could help Stephanie. And we know that at each of the dozens of points at which hope and possibility could have been derailed, they were not. And now Stephanie is here, in New York, staying with Mark and his family, visiting the city for the first time, to hear what Eric and Several of the best minds in cancer treatment have to tell her about her cancer and about the course of treatment they developed for her through the application of a combination of techniques that she is one the first patients to receive, ever."

Pieces by Chiarella on a bartender, Lukach on mental illness, and Junod on Stephanie Lee

Three stories to post on here included a profile of a longtime bartender at a Chicago landmark and two incredibly poignant and painful to read first-person pieces.

For Chicago Magazine was "Consider the Bartender" by Tom Chiarella, with the longtime Esquire writer providing a look at Jeff Magill, bartender at the Billy Goat Tavern. It was a really well-written and insightful piece that brought to mind another one from Chiarella, one pointed at himself with "Celebrity Profiler: Tom Chiarella, in His Own Words" for Indianapolis Monthly.

For Pacific Standard was "My Lovely Wife in the Psych Ward" by Mark Lukach. Really powerful writing that just after that title has "We met at 18. We wed at 24. At 27, I checked my wife into a psych ward—for the first time. How mental illness reshapes a marriage."

The last piece to note here was an awful one to see that it was written with "The Death of a Friend: Stephanie Lee" by Tom Junod. Stephanie's story of terminal cancer and efforts at a groundbreaking treatment was written about the 2013 Esquire feature "Patient Zero" by Junod and Mark Warren and that same issue included the following from Esquire editor in chief, David Granger...

"October 18, 2013: We've never done anything like this before.

   I've been working at Esquire for more than 16 years. I've been doing magazine journalism for almost 30. I'ts not only that we-especially executive editor Mark Warren and writer-at-large Tom Junod-made a connection between two people. It's not only that a story we published two years ago, about an eccentric math-driven biologist, allowed us to introduce two people who needs each other very much. It's also that we, especially Mark and Tom, are all in on this one. We're involved. We saw an opportunity to arrange for a man in New York who is on the cutting edge of math and science and medicine and has endless resources to help a young mother of two girls from Mississippi whose husband was killed in the Iraq war and who was told earlier this year that her cancer is terminal... to maybe live.

   Maybe.

We don't know how the story ends. We know Stephanie Lee has fought every way she knows, with the help of a military hospital in Mississippi, to stay alive for her daughters. And we know when we first talked to Eric Schadt, who runs the Icahn Institute for Genomics and Multiscale Biology at Mount Sinai hospital, he told us there was virtually no chance he could help Stephanie. And we know that at each of the dozens of points at which hope and possibility could have been derailed, they were not. And now Stephanie is here, in New York, staying with Mark and his family, visiting the city for the first time, to hear what Eric and Several of the best minds in cancer treatment have to tell her about her cancer and about the course of treatment they developed for her through the application of a combination of techniques that she is one the first patients to receive, ever."

BusinessWeek Pieces: Robert Young Pelton on Somali Pirates / Khan Academy / Interesting Companies

Interesting content from the past few issues of Businessweek that stood out for different reasons. There's the interesting story by an interesting writer, the story on an interesting guy with a noble venture and finally some pieces on companies that are just plain... interesting.

Probably the best writing was by Robert Young Pelton in his story Somali Pirates' Rich Returns. One of the points of this blog is to highlight cases of excellent writing on a topic of note and this piece definitely qualifies. I was struck even more by the story after realizing it was written by the author of The World's Most Dangerous Places (which I read years ago). Big fan I am of what seems to be a Businessweek practice of having diverse and fairly well known (and presumably non-staff) writers doing feature stories.

Also standing out as a BW piece lately was Salman Khan: The Messiah of Math. While the writing from Bryant Urstadt was certainly solid enough, the mission of Khan is just plain remarkable. On his Khan Academy website he provides free access to a self-created 2,100+ video library tutorial which began with math education and is now expanded to many other subjects.

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These were the metaphorical big rocks from Businessweek lately, but there were also a number of smaller pieces on companies doing interesting things...

- In the category of "writing on a big and innovative company continuing to do big and innovative things" was Apple's Deals May Transform Digital Music about a potential announcement of cloud storage for a user's music collection. As detailed in the piece, this type of offering has been chased by many... and would be yet another coup for Apple if they can introduce a user-friendly program bought into by the record labels.

- Similar to the aforementioned Pelton story in this regard, the piece Pacific Biosciences' $600 Million Decoder Ring was made more interesting in relation to another story. In this case, that other story wasn't by the same author, but rather on the same guy at Pacific Biosciences. As written about in this Esquire piece (which I posted on here), remarkable guy this Eric Schadt.

- Short, but interesting piece was Innovator: Carnegie Mellon's Richard McCullough on McCullough's efforts at the company Plextronics. His is fascinating work in the field of conductive ink for use in ultra-thin flexible displays (think: cell phones, televisions, magazines, etc). Definitely an area of business with huge potential.

- Finally of interest was SeatGeek Helps Online Ticket Buyers Beat the Scalpers on the ticket search site SeatGeek. Not the most profound offering in the world (digital music storage isn't either), but the company appears to be using technology well to fill a consumer need.

Great Newspaper writing - by Eli Saslow, Clay Tarver, Wil Hylton & Courtney Queeny

There's been some excellent pieces I've seen from newspapers over the past few weeks with really solid work both in the New York Times and Washington Post.

The most recent story I've read was actually the oldest one with "Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World" done for the Times in May 2012. Written by Wil Hylton, it's a fascinating look at the biologist noted by Hylton (and in Venter's Wikipedia page) as being one of two people who first sequenced the human genome. Venter as a scientist working on cutting-edge stuff makes for a fairly complicated profile and Hylton did a good job making the piece eminently readable. In this regard the story reminded me of another scientist profile I wrote about and linked to in 2011, one by Tom Junod on biologist Eric Schadt.

The other two Times pieces I've seen recently which struck me as memorable were by Courtney Queeny and Clay Tarver respectively. "The View From the Victim Room" is Queeny's first-person account of an abusive relationship and just tremendous and highly personal writing. The Tarver story is a profile of former Nirvana and then Soundgarden bassist turned Army Special Forces solider Jason Everman. Titled "The Rock ’n’ Roll Casualty Who Became a War Hero", it's a remarkable tale that's recounted very well in the piece.

From the Washington Post last week was another great piece by Eli Saslow on a subject that seems as if it must have been painful to report on and witness firsthand. "In rural Tennessee, a new way to help hungry children: A bus turned bread truck" reminded me a great deal of Saslow's March story "Food stamps put Rhode Island town on monthly boom-and-bust cycle". Both pieces were sad for what they portray, and this latest story also made me think of how it easy it would be for many of the kids written about to just keep the cycle of poverty going when they become adults.

Remarkable pieces of writing on tragedy - by Carr, Junod & Teague

There were three pieces of recent first-person writing on the subject of death that really struck a cord with me, two from Esquire and one from Glamour.

The Glamour piece was the fairy short essay "My Dad, My Mentor: How Do You Say Goodbye to Your Father?" by filmmaker Erin Carr about her father, David Carr, who died in February. It was a really nice remembrance on the writer who I a few times posted on writing by and about.

The first of two Esquire pieces to note here was by Tom Junod with "The Death of Patient Zero," a followup story to his 2013 "Patient Zero" on Stephanie Lee. I wrote about the original feature in this blog post and as sad as it was to read of Lee's passing, it was almost heartening to read of the friendship that Junod and Esquire Mark Warren formed with Lee and devotion they showed to her. Also, even with the awfulness of Lee dying of cancer so young is the hopeful idea that the efforts to save her put forth by Eric Schadt and his team could continue to move forward and help save others.

The last piece to mention also centered around someone dying of cancer with Matthew Teague writing "The Friend" on his wife Nicole Teague, her diagnosis with terminal cancer, and his best friend Dane Faucheux moving in with them and staying past her death. The essay from Teague is quite possibly the most personal and open account I've ever seen someone write and Faucheux someone that comes across as an absolutely remarkable person.

Great writing on Medicine & Money - by Fagone, Gawande & Lewis

There's been a few pieces of writing I've seen recently that struck me as particularly excellent on the subjects of medicine and money... which, sadly are inextricably linked perhaps more now than ever.

For evidence of that linkage, one could simply look at the Tampa Bay Times feature series "Never Let Go" I wrote on last week. Included in the third story from the writer, Kelly Benham, was mention of how over a million dollars in micro-preemie infant care cost she and her husband $400, and of course would have financially ruined other parents with different or no health coverage.

A medical story I haven't previously written about and linked to was "Slow Ideas" from the July 29th issue of The New Yorker. It's written by Atul Gawande, a noted surgeon and bestselling author who I've posted about a few times and this latest piece is a fascinating one about how ideas spread and recommendations take hold (in this case recommendations toward reducing infant mortality rates in India).

Another really solid medical piece I've seen lately was "Has Carl June Found a Key to Fighting Cancer?" by Jason Fagone for the August issue of Philadelphia Magazine. It's a piece I previously linked to under a different post topic and is a tremendously interesting look at a doctor doing cutting-edge work. In that regard, the feature reminded me of a couple of other physician profiles I've seen in past years, "Craig Venter’s Bugs Might Save the World" by Wil Hylton for the New York Times and "Adventures in Extreme Science" written on Eric Schadt by Tom Junod for Esquire.

Going to the second side of this medicine and money topic, two other pieces of writing to mention here were both by Michael Lewis. Among other bestselling books, Lewis wrote The Big Short and Boomerang: Travels in the New Third World (which I wrote about in 2011) and an excellent recent feature story of his was "Did Goldman Sachs Overstep in Criminally Charging Its Ex-Programmer?" for the September issue of Vanity Fair. The piece was thoroughly reported and details the length to which Goldman would go seemingly to protect their image as a company worthy of the money they make. It's a compelling story and made me think of another piece of writing by Lewis, his "Princeton University's 2012 Baccalaureate Remarks". Really great stuff from Lewis about life and career choices in this speech with the title "Don't Eat Fortune's Cookie".

Bold by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler

Bold by Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler was a follow up to their 2010 book Abundance (which I wrote about last year) and it's noted early on in Bold that the book written as a sort of a playbook for accomplishing the things that can solve some of the world's biggest problems and bring about abundance. Bold is divided into three sections with the first on bold / exponential technologies, the second on the psychology of the book as well as current innovators and third on detailed how-to steps that Diamandis and Kotler lay out as recipes towards business success.

The first section was the most compelling to me and the idea of exponential technologies relates to technology advances multiplying again and again (in the same fashion of the Moore's Law concept that the number of integrated circuits on a transistor will double every twelve to twenty-four months) and that exponential technologies means that advances or entirely new business areas create the potential for additional advances and other areas to build on top of them.

Some the examples of industries and companies that Diamandis and Kotler note in the exponential technologies section include: 3-D printing (which enables industries and companies like Made in Space), self-driving cars (it didn't seem to be spelled out in the book, but this would create the ability for an entire ecosystem around providing services, likely through apps, to people who no longer need to pay attention driving while in their car), networks and sensors (what the Internet of Things is about), artificial intelligence (with one usage for AI being the analyzing of data from all the networks and sensors), robotics (including drones), and entirely new developments in the medical field (synthetic biology and personalizing medicine, which brings to mind the scientist Eric Schadt who I've several times linked to articles about). Additionally Diamandis and Kotler give as examples of exponential technologies that operate at a platform level Kickstarter, Airbnb and Uber.

The second part of the book about the bold mindset includes mention of companies and organizations that have successfully employed skunk works (a group apart from the rest of the business) to bring about innovation, the Google X group led by Astro Teller that aims for 10x or 1,000 increases in performance, and the company Planetary Resources that Diamandis and others created to mine asteroids for materials. Additionally included in this section were profiles on Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Elon Musk, and Larry Page. The third section was titled the bold crowd and included pretty in-depth details and instructions for people in the areas of crowdsourcing, crowd funding, building communities, and incentive competitions.

Overall it was a solid read and details about Bold were posted by Diamandis with "11 Steps for being Bold" to his tumblr blog.