Fred Coe and the crew from University of Chicago have started a kidney stone blog. This is the most prominent nephrology scientist to stick his toe in the blogging world. Dr. Coe was one of my teachers when I was at the University of Chicago (I blogged about him here and here). Dr. Coe has been instrumental in establishing the foundations of kidney stone science and continues to move field forward. He was a category in 2014’s NephMadness:
(5) Dr. Charlie Pak versus (4) Dr. Fred Coe
Charlie Pak and Fred Coe are the Bob Knight and Dean Smith of kidney stones. Not only did they dominate the field and do the pioneering work establishing the fundamental discoveries of the field, but they also trained the next generation of stone scientists that are currently leading the field.
To this day the centers where Pak and Coe worked are world leaders in the field. In a plot twist, that would most likely happen in a comic book origin story, they were classmates at the University of Chicago Medical School, class of ‘61, and then were residents together at U of C.
Dr. Coe remained at University of Chicago but Pak went elsewhere to established the Clinical Research Center and a new Division in Mineral Metabolism at University of Texas Southwestern Medical Center at Dallas.
They even jointly won the Belding Scribner Award from the ASN in 2000.
Intellectually they have staked out differing areas of excellence, Dr. Coe has focused on the the importance of the earliest stones to be anchored to the kidney. The location for these tiny early stones is Randall’s Plaques. The theory is that these tiny crystals form in the interstitium adjacent to the thin limb of the loop of Henle, they grow and eventually erode into the renal papilla. There, they are in contact with supersaturated urine which can deposit calcium oxalate (or other other types of stones?). The plaques can be seen on cystoscopy and their presence predicts stone formers. Stone formation correlates with the degree of plaque coverage.
A blog post is not a book chapter, a review article, a scientific article, or even a newsletter but something else entirely. It is the exact right size to convey one point and no more. It has no room for ornament or circumlocution, for fuzziness or indirection or even for two different points. You cannot avoid that moment when the main point must ring out clearly.
And this paragraph is just so Coe:
Being a singular, real, and immediate focus of attention, a point is something to work with. We can debate it, dissect it, even dismiss it if evidence permits or its logic is flawed. If a point appears to be sound, people can accept it as true for the moment, as an element that can be put together with like elements to make a picture of reality for this one disease. It is a picture that is true for the moment, arising as it does from science, just as the moment caught up in the pointillist net of Georges Seurat’s exquisite Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, being great art, will be true forever.
Welcome to the blogosphere Dr. Coe, we look forward to your posts. Your blog has earned a spot on my list of Notable Nephrology and Medical Blogs.