Astral Codex Ten

Dr. Gura

4 min read

Dr. Gura

Article

Dr. Gura is a recurring person in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between August 06, 2021 and August 08, 2021. The archive places it in contexts such as “Our hero Dr. Gura with finding a solution”; “Dr. Gura and her team, by her own description, started a “media war””; “You’ll notice that in Dr. Gura’s story (whose tone I tried to reproduce in Part II)“. It most often appears alongside Europe, FDA, Hong Kong.

Metadata

  • Category: People
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: August 06, 2021
  • Last seen: August 08, 2021

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Details Of The Infant Fish Oil Story
August 06, 2021 · Original source
In 2002, Boston Children’s Hospital needed to give IV nutrition to a kid with a soy allergy. The hospital only had soybean-based fluid, and tasked our hero Dr. Gura with finding a solution. She asked a bunch of experts and “put the question on various nutrition listserves”, and finally some nutritionist who attended European conferences mentioned that Europe had a fish-oil based fluid, Omegaven. If they could get permission to import Omegaven from Europe, they could maybe save this kid. They asked the FDA for permission, filled out the relevant forms, and (to its credit) the got approved within 48 hours. They were able to get an emergency shipment of Omegaven from Europe and the kid got better.
Meanwhile, a team of researchers at the same hospital, including a certain Dr. Puder, were trying to figure out what was going on with PNALD. They pumped lab rats full of various combinations of nutritional fluid, trying to see which rats got liver disease and which ones didn’t. Dr. Gura was helping this team get their IV nutrients, and on a whim:
Dr. Gura and her team, by her own description, started a “media war” to “encourage” (her quotation marks) Fresenius to change their mind. In 2012, they finally agreed and submitted their application. In 2018, the FDA finally approved it.
Contra Drum On The Fish Oil Story
August 08, 2021 · Original source
Am I exaggerating when I say “everyone”? Reading Dr. Gura’s notes, you could imagine a story where this knowledge was limited to a couple of world experts in Boston, and it took them a long time to make a convincing case, and once they did the FDA approved it.
I got this from a book and haven’t been able to figure out exactly what it’s referring to - there doesn’t seem to be a corresponding entry in Dr. Gura’s notes. I suspect it’s true, since I find a lot of “compassionate use of Omegaven” studies from around this time, but I can’t find the actual FDA document involved. In any case, if true it slightly exonerates the FDA, so it’s probably not one of my points of contention with Drum.
The reporter who discovered the crisis would probably end up with a good impression of the FDA. They helped her along every step of the way, gave her money when she needed it, and approved her story in the end. When she accepted an award, her acceptance speech would be just as positive about her FDA as Dr. Gura's was to our FDA.