The Bethesda, Md, desk of Bruce Waxman, PhD, is a spot where efforts to incorporate the computer into biomedical research often pause for financial sustenance.
The Special Research Resources Branch, National Institutes of Health Division of Research Facilities and Resources, grants some $9 million annually to over 40 projects in medical computation. Dr. Waxman, a demographer, and chief of the branch since 1965, is co-editor of a recent two-volume review on Computers in Biomedical Research.
The University of Chicago graduate, who was a featured speaker at the American Medical Association's most recent Clinical Convention, sketched his thoughts on the pathways and problems of the computer in clinical medicine during a JAMAMedical News interview.
Q: On the general subject of what the computer can and can't do, you once mentioned that "in the early days it was thought computers could do everything but raise the dead." Aren't a lot of