Michael Stapley

“The physician’s duty is not to stave off death or return patients to their old lives, but to take into our arms a patient and family whose lives have disintegrated and work until they can stand back up and face, and make sense of, their own existence.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“You can’t ever reach perfection, but you can believe in an asymptote toward which you are ceaselessly striving.”
― Paul Kalanithi, When Breath Becomes Air

“The second development, in 1960, was the development of a new technology that allowed researchers for the first time ever to measure accurately the level of hormones circulating in the bloodstream. It was the invention of Rosalyn Yalow, a medical physicist, and Solomon Berson, a physician, and was called the radioimmunoassay. When Yalow won the Nobel Prize for the work in 1977 (Berson by then was not alive to share it), the Nobel Foundation would describe it aptly as bringing about “a revolution in biological and medical research.” Those interested in obesity could now finally answer the questions about which the pre–World War II European clinicians could only speculate: which hormones were regulating the storage of fat in fat cells and its use for fuel by the rest of the body? Answers began coming with the very first publications out of Yalow and Berson’s laboratory and were swiftly confirmed by others. As it turns out, virtually all hormones work to mobilize fat from fat cells so that it can then be used for fuel. Hormones are signaling our bodies to act—flee or fight, reproduce, grow—and they also signal the fat cells to make available the fuel necessary for these actions. The one dominant exception to this fuel-mobilization signaling is insulin, the same hormone that researchers still assumed in the early 1960s to be deficient in all cases of diabetes. Insulin, Yalow and Berson reported, can be thought of as orchestrating how the body uses or “partitions” the fuel it takes in.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case Against Sugar

“By 1952, the University of Minnesota nutritionist Ancel Keys was arguing that high blood levels of cholesterol caused heart disease, and that it was the fat in our diets that drove up cholesterol levels. Keys had a conflict of interest: his research had been funded by the sugar industry—the Sugar Research Foundation and then the Sugar Association—since 1944, if not earlier, and the K-rations he had famously developed for the military during the war (the “K” is said to have stood for “Keys”) were loaded with sugar. This might have naturally led him to perceive something other than sugar as the problem. We can only guess.”
― Gary Taubes, The Case Against Sugar