Welcome to the August/September 2023 chapter newsletter. 

CHAPTER NEWS 

• New Publications Committee Chair (i.e., Newsletter Editor)

• Chapter Members Looking for Work

• Join our AMWA North Central LinkedIn Community! Link here. 

CHAPTER EVENTS 

• September Book Club Meeting, September 25, 2023

• Growing Hope 2023, September 14, 2023

FEATURES 

• Read a Good Book?

• AMWA Essential Skills Certificate Course: Thoughts and Observations (Part 2: Punctuation)

CHAPTER NEWS

New Publications Committee Chair (i.e., Newsletter Editor)

By Michael Franklin, MS

As a long-time member of AMWA, I’m excited to have the time to return to volunteering as the newsletter editor. Many years ago I was more active in AMWA, even serving as the president of the North Central Chapter. My career has benefited enormously from my participation in local and national AMWA activities, especially the annual meeting and workshops. As the new editor, my goal is to keep our chapter membership informed about these opportunities and to make the newsletter a place for chapter members to share their experiences and expertise with others.

Thank you to Adam Fix, PhD, for serving as the editor of the North Central Chapter newsletter from April 2021 to August 2023. Adam’s collegial and friendly style made the newsletter fun and informative to read. Thankfully, he won’t be missed! Adam, along with Paul Mamula, have both agreed to serve on the editorial board. I don’t know what I’d do without them. Thank you!

To all Chapter members, we welcome your contributions to the newsletter. These can include articles on chapter activities, notices of upcoming events, or essays on medical writing or career advice. As the new editor, I hope to continue to make the newsletter useful to members in their career development and networking.

I’m also eager to expand the newsletter’s editorial board. If you are interested, please let me know at franklin.editing@gmail.com.

That’s all for now.

Chapter members looking for work

The following AMWA North Central Chapter members are currently looking for work. See below for their names and details on what kinds of jobs they’re interested in. If you know of someone who’s hiring, please reach out!

• Sarah Kuyack (skuyack@gmail.com)

  • Looking for jobs in: patient education, public health communication, website content, mental health, veterinary or human medicine 

  • Job type: full or part time, contract, freelance 

If you’d like to add your name to this list, please contact the Publications Committee Chair Michael Franklin at franklin.editing@gmail.com.

Chapter Members Looking to Hire

The following AMWA North Central Chapter members are looking to hire. See below for details on what jobs they have available.

Referral from Alexandra Woods, AMWA North Central Co-treasurer: PSI CRO is hiring full-time and contract regulatory medical writers with experience in writing clinical study protocols, patient consent documents, clinical study reports, and other summary documents in support of new drug applications. Prior experience required. Please apply through the website for consideration.

EVENTS

September Book Club Meeting

Please join us at 7 pm on September 25, 2023, when our Book Club (via Zoom) will discuss Man’s 4th Best Hospital by Samuel Shem (the pen name of Stephen Bergman, MD). The book is a sequel to his groundbreaking novel, The House of God, which dealt with his experiences during residency. Shem’s new book tells how the original group reassemble to address the problems in providing adequate care in a corporate hospital setting.

Those who want to catch up with the characters can view the JAMA video about the original characters who reappear in Man’s 4 th Best Hospital (The House of God at 40: The Characters Speak | Humanities | JN Learning | AMA Ed Hub).(1) Both books are also discussed in podcasts and interviews on the M4BH website (Writing | SAMUEL SHEM).

Readers interested in a counterpoint view can read Rachel Pearson’s take on both books (: “The House of God,” a Book as Sexist as It Was Influential, Gets a Sequel | The New Yorker).(2)

1. The House of God at 40: The Characters Speak. JAMA 2019;322(6):486-487 doi:10.1001/jama.2019.9499 The House of God at 40: The Characters Speak | Humanities | JN Learning | AMA Ed Hub

2. Pearson R. “The House of God,” A book as sexist as it was influential, gets a sequel. The New Yorker, Dec 25, 2019. “The House of God,” a Book as Sexist as It Was Influential, Gets a Sequel | The New Yorker

Please join us for what should be an interesting discussion.

Growing Hope 2023

AMWA members interested in microbial therapeutic advances may want to attend this event!

Achieving Cures Together is a nonprofit organization, directly supporting The University of Minnesota’s Microbial Therapeutics Program. The collaboration between these two organizations is at the forefront of using fecal microbial transplantation to treat C. difficile, autism, inflammatory bowel diseases, Parkinson’s, and other diseases.

The Growing Hope event will be held at 5:30pm, September 14th, at The Winery at Sovereign Estate. The event will feature presentations of research advances, an Italian dinner, and live music. Register here.

FEATURES

Read a Good Book?

Three Science Fiction Selections to Heat Up Your Summer

By Paul W. Mamula, PhD

I suggest 3 books for your summer reading: RedDevil 4, Interface, and The Terminal Man. All have a common theme of state-of the-art medical technology gone wrong. Although they were published over a span of 50+ years, the older ones still hold up and the newest deals with contemporary medical technology. The books came to mind in several ways, and I wanted to suggest the titles, describe how we found them, and share some trivia.

RedDevil4, A Techno Thriller

The first book is RedDevil4, a medical thriller by Eric C Leuthardt, MD, published in 2014. I discovered it shortly after interviewing Michael C. Park, MD, a neurosurgeon at the University of Minnesota in 2017 for a story about implantable devices to control tremors in Parkinson disease patients. The technology works by implanting electrodes that are connected to a pacemaker-like device. Pacemaker signals stimulate the brain and mitigate the tremors, giving patients a more normal life. While the therapy is new and cutting edge, brain modulating technologies have regularly provided the basis for a genre of science fiction.

Leuthhardt is an active neurosurgeon and biomedical engineer, and his background gives the story a vibe that sets it above the usual murder mystery. The tale is set in 2053 when most people have a neural implant that they use for multiple purposes, including work and messaging. The story unfolds with 3 successive murders, each one perpetrated by a man who has no criminal history and cannot remember any aspects of the crime. The perpetrators lack any obvious connection other than being linked into the system. How Detective Edwin Krantz and his partner find the culprit takes readers on an unexpected romp into the world of artificial intelligence (AI). The book is interesting because experts have begun to warn of potential dangers of AI, which makes such stories a little less like fiction.

Interface, A Technology Misused

Neal Stephenson and J. Frederick George’s Interface has a similar basic plot of medical technology co-opted for malevolent political purposes. The book tells the tale of a presidential candidate who has a stroke and receives an experimental implant that opponents use to control his behavior. This tale is now dated by its technology (no cellphones; use of audio tapes and faxes, limited computer technology) but aside from those details, the story presents a taut thriller. The book was a selection in 2017 for our book club’s September (dinner meeting) selection, and I was pleasantly surprised how well the story held up. I was nervous about suggesting it, some 23 years after first reading it, but our book club readers liked it. It served as a change of pace from our usual selections. (See Book Club Notes, North Central AMWA Newsletter October 2017).

The book’s authorship has an amusing history. The book was republished twice. I read the book in 1994, when it was published as a work by “Stephen Bury.” The book was reissued under its actual authors, Neal Stephenson and George Jewison (pen name of Stephenson’s father-in-law), about 10 years later and again several years later with Neal Stephenson and J Frederick George (his father-in-law’s actual name) as authors. I saw that book published with the authors Neal Stephenson and George Jewison in 2006. A few years later, I purchased and reread the book only to realize that the book was the same one I had read in 1994. Jean Cook, our then newsletter editor, asked me about the different authors when she copyedited my Book Club Notes, and I clarified the odd history. I suppose it pays to check one’s bookshelf and read copyright pages.

Terminal Man, An Early Neuromodulation Tale

The Terminal Man was Michael Crichton’s third novel and second bestseller. It was published in 1972. Crichton, an MD who opted out of a medical career to write fiction, had come into prominence as a new author with his second novel, The Andromeda Strain—He wrote the screenplay for the movie version just before he graduated medical school. The Terminal Man presents the story of a man treated with an implanted electrode and neural stimulation to control violent psychotic attacks. The episodes were triggered by abnormal brain impulses that turned a mild-mannered computer engineer into a violent brawler. How this technology goes awry is the basis of the story, but in the 1970s using electrodes and nerve stimuli in the brain was very new. Crichton included a technical bibliography in The Terminal Man that referenced the research papers he employed writing the book. Although the book is old, the basic story holds up well. (See the movie if you don’t want to read the book). A curious fact: My wife worked for a physician at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who was a classmate of Crichton’s at Harvard Medical School and thought that Crichton erred by not going into medicine. Those curious about Crichton’s views about his career choice can read his book, Travels (1988).

Our Book Club Selections and Science Fiction

While RedDevil4 is based on contemporary technologies, The Terminal Man and Interface by Neal Stephenson also employed then-current technology in their stories. (See Book Club Notes, North Central AMWA Newsletter October 2017). Despite their age, the latter 2 books still make entertaining biomedical fiction.

Our book club had begun to select works of medically related science fiction to spice things up a while ago. We chose Interface as a book club selection in 2017, after we read Ticked, a true story about how an implantable device put a patient’s Tourette’s syndrome in remission (See Book Club Notes, North Central AMWA Newsletter October 2016). During our discussion, we thought about other possible science fiction novels and came up with one that served as the basis for a technology-gone-wrong genre—The Terminal Man—although we didn’t select it for the book club. The Terminal Man was initially mentioned by one of our AMWA speakers, Tim Denison, PhD, as the basis for cautions about early implementation of technology and for the rejection of Medtronic’s initial patent for neural modulation as “not an original idea.” (See North Central AMWA Newsletter, December 2014). Coincidentally, while looking through my notes about Dr Denison’s talk for background for this article, I noticed that one of Dr Denison’s slides cited one of Dr Leuthardt’s articles on neuroprosthetics.[1]

So, there you are, 3 science fiction books with a biomedical theme for your summer. Happy reading!

References

1. Leuthardt EC, Schalk G, Moran D, Ojemann JG. The emerging world of motor neuroprosthetics: a neurological perspective. Neurosurgery 2006 Jul;59(1):1-14 doi: 10.1227/01.NEU.0000221506.06947.AC.

AMWA Essential Skills Certificate Course: Thoughts and Observations (Part 2: Punctuation)

By Adam Fix

Every writer has opinions on punctuation. But did you know that the AMWA Essential Skills course includes an entire 172-page guide to proper punctuation? Here are some rules of thumb I learned from Part 2:

1. When nesting parentheses, the rule is “outer round inner square.” Start with () and use [ ] for additional nested parenthetical expressions inside the (). For example:

• Many prestigious organizations (including the National Institutes of Health [NIH]) supported the initiative.

2. Don’t use commas to separate parts of a sentence that have the same subject. Consider the following sentence:

• “The patient went into remission in 2001 and continued follow-up until signs of metastasis appeared in 2005.”

This does NOT need a comma after “2001” because “patient” is the subject of both the first and the second part of the sentence. It’s all one clause.

3. AMWA recommends hyphens, NOT en-dashes, to join words of equal significance into a phrase. For example, this form is correct:

• “Brown-Vialetto-van Laere syndrome”

However, be aware that other style guides may recommend en-dashes for this purpose.

4. Write “preoperatively and postoperatively” instead of “pre- and postoperatively.” This is because these words are not normally hyphenated, so abbreviating them with a hyphen as in the incorrect choice above would be inconsistent. Moreover, having the reader wait to complete what comes after the hyphen in “pre-” demands more effort. Punctuation should make writing easier for the reader to interpret, not easier for the writer to write concisely.

5. Our very own Mary Knatterud makes a guest appearance on p. 11, credited as “a true punctuation maven.” Mary establishes “the four C’s of punctuation” as follows:

• Clarity—don’t leave the flow or meaning open to doubt; don’t make the reader backtrack.

• Connectedness—don’t separate unduly what logically belongs together; don’t forget the second mark of a pair (of commas, quotation marks, parentheses, or brackets).

• Conciseness—don’t clutter with excessive marks or stilted interruptions; break up long sentences.

• Consistency—don’t apply punctuation rules or options haphazardly or selectively.

Looks like solid advice to me!

Questions, comments or new additions to the newsletter? Please contact the Publications Committee Chair.