KV Pharmaceutical announced Friday that they will reduce the price of the drug Makena from $1,500 a dose to $690. Makena reduces the risk that a woman will give birth prematurely. The company also said it was improving its program that helps women receive the drug who can't afford it. But if you need Makena, you're not just going to need one dose, you're going to be given a dose a week for 20 weeks, which at its original cost would've totaled about $30,000 (now reduced to about $13,800). The St. Louis pharmaceutical company came under scrutiny recently for charging such a high price for such a lifesaving drug. The new price still seems a bit steep.
The drug is a form of progesterone called 17P, and has been used in a generic form for years since no company had previously marketed it. At-risk moms-to-be could get it from pharmacies cheaply and easily, but doctors were concerned about the purity and consistency of the drug. So initially it seemed like a victory when KV won FDA approval and 7-year exclusive rights to the drug formulation in February. Now despite that promise, the FDA says it will not stop pharmacies from continuing to make the $10 - $20 a dose versions of the drug.
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Friday, April 01, 2011
Colin Phillips, Linguistic Illusionist
Colin Phillips is a master linguistic illusionist. Take this sentence he offers up: “More people have been to Russia than I have.” Now try to explain what it means. In fact, that sentences means absolutely nothing. Yet when you first read it, it seems like it should really mean something because the words sound ok together. This is the linguistic illusion, the conundrum Phillips has been investigating.
A British professor of Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland, Phillips has dedicated himself to studying how our brains make sense of language. With proper English voice and bumbling mannerisms, the Hugh Grant-like Phillips excitedly sped through the results of his recent research in his presentation at the 2011 American Academy for the Advancement of Science Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
Using humor and audio-visual aids, Phillips makes it easy to see how our brain interprets language and can be easily fooled. The illusions he speaks of are the language equivalent of optical illusions – sentences that “sound right” but are grammatically incorrect or in some cases, meaningless.
The process of language comprehension is twofold: proactive and reactive. Phillips likens it to cooking shows: Julia Child has all her dishes prepared in advance, but on Iron Chef the cooks must make all the dishes from scratch in the allotted time. Our brain has but a few nanoseconds to comprehend words as they are fed to us, so they have to do a bit of preparation too.
As we read or hear a sentence, our brain is prepared ahead of time with its bank of words to fill in blanks, so we don’t have to hear/read all the letters of a word or words in a sentence to understand it. This is predictive processing: we are accustomed to how sentences are generally formed, so our brain expects certain words to follow others, or at least certain types of words.
Next our brain works retrospectively, thinking back to all the words you’ve heard and stringing them together to make sure it can make collective sense of them. While proactive processing is quite robust, reactive processing is prone to interference. Most linguistic illusions are the result of faulty memory retrieval.
Research into many different languages – English, Japanese, and Spanish, among others – has shown that there are certain specific elements of a sentence that you can and cannot play with to make it grammatically incorrect, yet still sound right. Called a “syntax illusion” changing some parts can make a sentence incorrect, but sound ok to us; if you change other parts of the sentence to make it incorrect, it does not sound ok anymore.
A British professor of Linguistics, Neuroscience, and Cognitive Science at the University of Maryland, Phillips has dedicated himself to studying how our brains make sense of language. With proper English voice and bumbling mannerisms, the Hugh Grant-like Phillips excitedly sped through the results of his recent research in his presentation at the 2011 American Academy for the Advancement of Science Annual Conference in Washington, D.C.
Using humor and audio-visual aids, Phillips makes it easy to see how our brain interprets language and can be easily fooled. The illusions he speaks of are the language equivalent of optical illusions – sentences that “sound right” but are grammatically incorrect or in some cases, meaningless.
The process of language comprehension is twofold: proactive and reactive. Phillips likens it to cooking shows: Julia Child has all her dishes prepared in advance, but on Iron Chef the cooks must make all the dishes from scratch in the allotted time. Our brain has but a few nanoseconds to comprehend words as they are fed to us, so they have to do a bit of preparation too.
As we read or hear a sentence, our brain is prepared ahead of time with its bank of words to fill in blanks, so we don’t have to hear/read all the letters of a word or words in a sentence to understand it. This is predictive processing: we are accustomed to how sentences are generally formed, so our brain expects certain words to follow others, or at least certain types of words.
Next our brain works retrospectively, thinking back to all the words you’ve heard and stringing them together to make sure it can make collective sense of them. While proactive processing is quite robust, reactive processing is prone to interference. Most linguistic illusions are the result of faulty memory retrieval.
Research into many different languages – English, Japanese, and Spanish, among others – has shown that there are certain specific elements of a sentence that you can and cannot play with to make it grammatically incorrect, yet still sound right. Called a “syntax illusion” changing some parts can make a sentence incorrect, but sound ok to us; if you change other parts of the sentence to make it incorrect, it does not sound ok anymore.
Britian's Oldest Brain Discovered
2,500-year-old preserved human brain discovered in an Iron Age pit in York, England. The well-preserved brain belongs to a man who was most likely hanged and then decapitated. Read the story here:
http://www.mnn.com/green-tech/research-innovations/stories/2500-year-old-preserved-human-brain-discovered?src=st
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