Curious Case
What science and medicine got wrong before it got useful.
For about a hundred years, the medical consensus was that inflammation was what happened when you cut your finger. Redness, heat, swelling, and then it went away. A local event. A useful one. Nothing to write home about.
It turns out we had that almost exactly backwards. The inflammation that matters most is the kind that doesn't go away, doesn't announce itself, and rewrites the rules of a body for decades before anyone notices. Figuring this out took a microscope, a Nobel Prize, a lot of mice, and the embarrassing accident of a diabetes drug that started curing things it had no business curing.
That story, and stories like it, are what this series is about.
Curious Case is interested in the period before the answer, when a field was confidently wrong about something it would later treat as obvious. Sometimes for decades. Sometimes for a century. Historical curiosity is one reason to read these essays. But a better one is calibration. Watching a field revise itself a few times teaches you how to parse today's science media diet. Those headlines (Red Light Therapy Proven to ...) are easier to unpack once you've seen that pattern.
Each essay starts with a claim most readers will recognize, follows the long detour that made it visible, and ends with where the live science is now and how Nāhua acts on it. Some pieces will linger in the historical middle. Others will land harder at the leading edge. The frame is the same throughout. Science as a moving target. It treats you as someone capable of holding uncertainty without losing the ability to act.
The essays
Recent essays appear at the top. The list grows as the series does.
The Curious Case of... Inflammation. A hundred and sixty-eight years of revisions, from Virchow's microscope to the GLP-1 surprise. How a confident framing held for a century, started cracking in the 1980s, and is still being rewritten today.
More to come. Subjects include neuroplasticity, the brain that wouldn't change; dopamine, wanting without liking; the placebo problem; the resting brain; the autonomic nervous system; and the long arc of stress as a category.