I would like to nominate Arvind Mahankali to be the next head of the USDA.   Why? He is obviously very smart, has an outstanding work ethic, and a superb vocabulary. He may have even reached puberty. And if he hasn’t, give it a year or so. Arvind is 13. 

But if you are concerned that he may not yet have what it takes to run an agency with a $24 billion budget and the responsibility of protecting us from unsafe foods, fear not. Last May, Arvind won the 86th National Spelling Bee championship. The word that gave him the championship was knaidel. For fans of irony, a knaidel is a type of Jewish dumpling.   

On face value, if you read Anita Clayton's Huffington Post piece entitled “The FDA, Sexual Dysfunction and Gender Inequality,” you could not come to any conclusion other that the FDA is overtly sexist.

 Wherever he is, Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim a/k/a Paracelsus must be doing the Foxtrot in his grave. Because somehow a bunch of dopes have managed to “correct” something he got absolutely right 600 years ago. You know what it is.

 Unfortunately, the dopes are not so dopey when it comes to spreading their message: Because a chemical is toxic or carcinogenic in high doses (usually in rodent experiments) that it poses a danger to humans at miniscule doses. Therefore we should be scared of any chemical that they tell us is dangerous, regardless of the exposure. And their list is endless.

It would be almost impossible to find a better example of the difficulties that face the pharmaceutical industry than the campaign against hepatitis C.

Unfortunately, this example is now at the expense of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, a small, but top-notch drug discovery organization that began as a biotech startup in 1989.