Who defines disease, and who gets money to study cures?

At our August meeting we workshopped two draft opinion essays that, from different angles but from within the same field, raised fundamental questions about how we should describe and nurture scientific progress—in this case, in medicine.

In our first text, a surgeon began with an anecdote about her mother to interrogate how illness is defined and who benefits.

Then, a clinical researcher and journalist explored a possible essay that, in the face of crisis-level cuts to funding for medical science, might help readers think outside the box about funding accountability and what defines success.

Image: kwanchai chai-udom, Vecteezy