The cancer relay race

An interesting post on Andrew Sullivan's blog touched the subject of big pharma, and the new push for anti-cancer drugs.

When people assert that compensation is of central importance to biomedical innovation, its important to keep some things in mind. The fight against cancer isn't equivalent to a bunch of scientists running a bunch of solo races. It's more like a bunch of relay races, where the advancement of one scientist pulls everyone else along as well.

For example, the lab I work in does melanoma research using a mouse model. My buddy and I finished an experiment literally within the last two weeks, and the results are very promising:

There really aren't many good treatments for melanoma, so this could be pretty significant some day. Our strategy is still years away from a possible human application.

Keeping in mind that this research was funded by a US government funded grant, consider the following. What if a pharmaceutical company took our strategy to the next level, and developed an effective drug to treat melanoma? That would be fantastic. Would they have done it alone? Certainly not. They just happened to be carrying the baton on the last leg of the relay race.

I am not* anti-big pharma, and what they do is very important. However, it is important that people realize the pharmaceutical companies aren't the only ones doing research. And, a huge chunk of the non-pharma researchers are directly funded by the US government. In that context, it seems a lot less unreasonable to think that medicare should be able to negotiate for cheaper drug prices from pharmaceutical companies, doesn't it?

*Just because I think drug companies are important does not mean that I don't think the system should be set up differently. I suspect that the executives of many pharmaceutical companies would not agree with some of the changes that I'd want.

Sheesh

Pretty harsh judgment in a NY Times op-ed about Kennedy's cancer death:

"Despite billions that have been spent, the death rate from most cancers barely budged."

In substitution for fact and statistic, the author opted to use words like "most", and phrases like "barely budged". Which is fine, but I'd expect the same author to describe a glass half full as "almost empty".

Sure, a lot of cancers remain terribly stubborn and difficult to treat. Many others have seen dramatic improvements in morbidity and mortality, thanks to better drugs, screening, and other intervention. Look at testicular cancer, which in 1960 had a 5 year survival rate of less than 5%; its closer to 95% now. Screening and early detection have improved breast cancer outcomes. We just developed a vaccine for cervical cancer. I could go on and on.

Inaccurate Descriptors

I was watching a report on health insurance companies tonight on MSNBC when it occurred to me how similar the health insurance "industry" is to the music industry.

I have long been a staunch opponent of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America), and not because I'm too cheap to buy CDs. If the internet had always existed, the concept of a "record company" would never have come into existence. Why would it? Using the internet, artists could directly transmit their songs to their fans. The artists themselves would make their salaries from live concert, attendance at which would certainly be bolstered by the band getting their name out using the internet.

Obviously, the internet didn't always exist. There was a time, when we needed a middleman between artist and consumer. There had to be a way to package and distribute the music, in the form of records, cds, or what have you. These middle men never actually produced the music, they just transmitted it. Their services are now largely obsolete, but they've managed to use their hold over the government to continue to justify their own existence.

At any rate, I think it is important that people keep in mind that health insurance companies don't actually produce anything. They are just a middleman. They are the link that pairs the doctor, nurse, pharmacist, and researcher to the patient. I think questions of capitalism, free markets, and the like need to be kept in their proper context. At the end of the day, I have a difficult time believing that the "invisible hand of the marketplace" would ever come to the conclusion that using a middle man in the first place is the best way to get a service from A to B.

As it turns out, I believe there is room for record companies in today's world. I would even be enthusiastic about the prospect of fairly priced CDs, perhaps 5 bucks a pop, available at stores. I might walk in and buy a few albums just to experiment. However, when the prices of albums are artificially inflated to ridiculous levels, I'm not interested (and they most certainly were artificially inflated. I won $ 15.00 for being a part of a class action law suit against the major record companies for holding prices up). Just because I'm not willing to play by the RIAA cartel's unfair rules doesn't mean I don't get music. It just means I don't get it legally. Likewise, there is certainly room for health insurance companies, in some form. What there is no longer room for, however, is the anti-competitive oligarchy we have today; essentially an obstructive and overcompensated middleman who gets between doctors and patients.

Yale University Press

So pathetic.

Four years after the initial controversy, I'm surprised to see people deliberately confusing cowardice and sensitivity. Here was a great quote about the Yale failure that I came across:

"What a courageous stand by the Liberals that run the university. Now if it had been a cross immersed in urine, that would have been on the cover."

Political topic: health care

I am a medical student, and follow politics as a hobby. So it is pretty ironic that the healthcare debate doesn't interest me as much as other things might. Part of it may be some of my innate pessimism about the prospects for successful legislation in that area. I do think that Obama was genuine about taking a bipartisan approach towards health care. I don't think the Republicans have met him half way, 1/4 the way, or even 0.000001% of the way. In fact I'm quite sure the GOP from day one had internally decided that Obama would not be cooperated with under any circumstances. Thus the failure to create bipartisan legislation, because the GOP refuses to play along, becomes a GOP talking point about how Obama isn't being bipartisan enough.

I think its sad because this sets a pretty nasty precedent for US politics in general. A lot of Republicans liken the situation to what happened to George W. Bush, in other words, his demonization by the left and the refusal for many Dems to work with him. There is a big difference between Bush and Obama though - Bush had been in office long enough to rightfully have deserved it. Obama has not. And its a sad precedent, that the opposing party who just got trounced in a major election to decide from day 1 that they will under no circumstances work with the new elected leader of the USA.

What is almost worse is how pathetic the Democrats in Congress are. They have an unstoppable majority, and a popular charismatic leader in the oval office, and they can't get their own house in order long enough to pass anything of substance. The cap-and-trade bill was a f*cking disaster, so honestly - who could expect health care reform to be any different?

So this is the dismal state of US politics right now, and perhaps this is why I am losing interest: the party with the unstoppable majority has its ranks filled with some of the most epically spineless cowards to have ever graced the capitol city, while the opposition party is a walking contradiction, is led by a bunch of psychopathic idiots, a bunch of loud-mouthed buffoons without the slightest bit of logic or rationality going into the words that come pouring incessantly out of their mouths.

In other words, the entire thing is a trainwreck. The US government right now reminds me of two crazy men fist-fighting in the cargo bay of an airplane that is in the process of crashing. Maybe this is the natural ebb and flow of politics. Maybe its always been like this. Or maybe this is what it looks like when an empire begins its long, steep decline.

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Addendum. I told my roommate this tonight, and I will reiterate it on here. Obama is pragmatic and he is conciliatory. I genuinely believe that he wanted to get a bipartisan consensus for health care. The Republicans played him for a fool; fine, he will learn from it. If I was Obama, I'd get legislation written that includes all of the crap that the Democrats originally wanted - Republicans be damned. Then I'd let it go to a vote, and I'd dare the blue-dog Democrats be known as the Democrats who killed healthcare reform.

Intellectual Leadership of the Conservative Movement

It used to look and sound like this. Now we have Sarah Palin, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, and Joe the Plumber.

"Funny"

Is it true that all right-wing rhetoric looks the same? It certainly appears that way. Anyway, this is "funny" because this flier was circulated in Dallas two days before JFK was shot there.

In other news, Obama is no longer a socialist. He is actually a fascist. This is, as far as I can tell, mainstream Republican sentiment. I would be willing to pay 1000 dollars if any of these idiots could accurately define what a fascist is, other than "Hitler".

On the obesity epidemic

A good read about obesity, its causes, and what to do about it. It is especially important, given a new vein of attack that is coming from the "libertarian" camp that is screaming, "it is wrong for government to try to get people to be less fat!" I'm a libertarian, and I think that line of thinking is ridiculous, but the article does a good job of illustrating why so I'll let it do the arguing for me.

Infatuation weans, politician sees support drop

No, I'm not talking about Barack Obama. I'm talking about Sarah Palin.

A solid majority of Americans don’t want to see Sarah Palin ever become president, according to the latest Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll.

Two-thirds, 67%, said they don’t ever want the former Alaska governor to be president, compared with the 21% who said they would.

While it should come as no surprise that 87% of Democrats said they don’t ever want Palin as commander-in-chief, some 43% of Republicans said the same thing—as well as 65% of independents.

Even 46% of self-identified conservatives said they do not want Palin as president, as well as 44% of those who voted for Arizona GOP Sen. John McCain in 2008.

At 44%, white evangelicals are the largest subgroup supporting Palin as president one day.

White evangelical Christians are the strongest supporters of Sarah Palin. Incidentally, these are the same people who actually believe the world is 6,000 years old. They denounce science as evil, but won't complain when receiving the newest medical treatments. Their leaders will rant and rave about homosexuals, almost like Islamic preachers do about Jews, but every few months one of them gets caught soliciting gay sex in a bathroom or engaging in an extramarital affair.

Supporters of Sarah Palin really fall into two categories: they aren't thinkers, or they aren't paying attention. When Sarah Palin speaks, it is painfully obvious that no thought or intellectual consideration went into the formation of her words. For most of us, we have a built in alarm system that stands to alert us when someone is speaking without thinking. Red flags are raised, and suddenly we are aware that the speaker is completely stupid at best, or contemptible and evil at worst. Sarah Palin's supporters don't have these built in alarms, but they do have emotions, and of course Sarah Palin's emotional appeals can be found to be agreeable. In that sense, there was a national politician last fall during the campaign who was like Adolf Hitler - appealing to emotion, instinct, fear, and anger rather than to thought, consideration, and intellect. That politician was Sarah Palin.

Honestly, if a person was ever confused about politics and wasn't sure who to support, I might suggest for them a pretty simple strategy. Find out who "white evangelicals" are supporting, and vote the opposite.

Cap-and-trade: Epic failure

The ridiculous thing about how pathetic this bill turned out to be is that theoretically, it shouldn't have been extremely difficult to make this happen. Whether or not it is actually a good idea, Democrats as a group want to intervene and reduce CO2 emissions. Republicans as a group seem to be more concerned about foreign policy, and have an incentive to see oil imports drop, and especially to see the price of oil and gas fall worldwide (thereby weakening Russia, Venezuela, Iran, etc). Obviously, there is quite a bit of overlap between these objectives. Our congress completely failed to find it. Now we are all worse off because of it.

She is a quitter.

Old news, but Sarah Palin resigned as the governor of Alaska.

There are plenty of conservative Palin apologists out there making the case that this is a brilliant move, that shes positioned well for 2012, et cetera. I'd just like to reiterate my own position. Sarah Palin the intellectual rot of the conservative movement, personified. She is like a canary in a coal mine. So long as she is considered an actual viable candidate by a mainstream conservatives, I will be certain that the GOP is still not worth taking seriously. The sooner she is relegated to the fringe with the other lunatics, the better.

What a turn of events

A recent article about the security situation in Iraq. Money quote:

Muqtada al-Sadr, a prominent Iraqi Shia leader, has blamed the recent surge of violence on US plans to withdraw its troops from Iraqi streets.

Pretty ridiculous when one considers that before the surge, al-Sadr on many occasions blamed the violence on the American occupation.

The best plan for victory

...ideally shouldn't bank on one's enemy doing something really stupid. Such as, for example, trying to conquer Pakistan. Especially so when the Pakistani side of the border is where said enemy's supplies, reinforcements, and safe havens are.

Defeating the Taliban without the serious help of the Pakistanis would be extremely difficult. Thankfully, the Taliban seem to have done us a huge favor here. It won't be as easy fighting Nato in the West when the Pakistani army is coming simultaneously from the East.

religious terrorism in Kansas

Murder?.

If there is even the slightest doubt: now you know why Bin Laden does it. Once personal religious beliefs trump the law (both secular and religious: thou shalt not kill), a person becomes a terrorist.

Geopolitics at its finest

I'm about to embark on an interesting application of Occam's razor.

If recent news headlines are any indication, President Obama and Israeli PM Netanyahu are at odds over the middle east peace process.

I am quite certain that Obama is not foolish enough to think that he can single handedly reverse decades of US support for Israel (nor do I think he would want to, even if he could). At the same time, I am also quite certain that Netanyahu, an intelligent man himself, realizes that it would be extremely unwise to irritate the man that will be leading the US for probably the next 8 years.

Clearly, neither has anything to gain from animosity towards the other. Furthermore, upon closer consideration it actually becomes apparent that both men have a lot to gain from feigning differences in policy. When the news headlines read that Obama and Netanyahu disagree, it bolsters Obama's support from the left (which he has been somewhat losing, although admittedly to no consequence) and certainly gives him more credibility in the eyes of Muslims. At the same time, it benefits Netanyahu to stay true to his electoral promises, appeal to the Israeli right wing, and to necessarily start any peace process from a negotiating position that is positioned squarely on his side of the board. In other words, by refusing to accept Palestinian statehood from the get go, Netanyahu can turn his acceptance into that eventuality into a negotiating concession from Palestinians.

Meanwhile, Obama would be baiting right-wing critics through this whole process. They will accuse him of undermining Israel, and siding with Muslims. And then he will blind-side them with a peace deal, making the critics out to be the fools.

Occam's razor is a principle that states that the simplest explanation is the one most likely to be true. Are we to believe that two very intelligent political masters just wandered blindly into their dealings with arguably their most important counterpart in the world? Or that they meticulously prepared and calculated a dance that will necessarily lead to their mutual desired outcome? The simplest explanation is the latter!

Obama, Notre Dame, and Abortion

Another update, a pertinent quote:

"A very popular error: having the courage of one's convictions; rather it is a matter of having the courage for an attack on one's convictions!" - Nietzsche

***** Update *****

Cardial Francis George, president of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops, claims the following:

"It is clear that Notre Dame didn't understand what it means to be Catholic when they issued this invitation (to Obama)."

What does it mean to be a Catholic? Something like this?

"Archibishop Jose Cardoso Sobrinho of the coastal city of Recife announced that the Vatican was excommunicating the family of a local girl who had been raped and impregnated with twins by her stepfather, because they had chosen to have the girl undergo an abortion. The Church excommunicated the doctors who performed the procedure as well."

By the way, that girl was 9 years old. There you go Notre Dame. Take your theological cues from Archbishop Sobrinho.

Good Catholics should recognize that their leaders are not divinely inspired, and that they need to be closely monitored. When those leaders misspeak, act politically, or have flawed ideas, it is up to Catholics everywhere to correct them. When good Catholics don't speak out, when they just assume their leadership couldn't possibly go astray, terrible things happen.

***** End Update *****

Obama's visit to the University of Notre Dame has riled up the endless controversy about abortion. I would like to take a moment to reiterate my own position:

As a member of the Regressive Party, I am against abortion, but for killing babies.

Quote for the day

"My guess is that criminal laws against marijuana use have become culturally untenable. At this point, if you want to maintain criminal laws against more dangerous drugs, you're better off conceding the legality of marijuana, lest the public lose respect for drug laws in general."

This is an extremely important point that people frequently miss. When children are told that little white lie, that all drugs are dangerous, they will find out the truth someday. Then they will wonder whether the whole thing is a lie. You can almost see the thought process:

"I was told that marijuana was dangerous. I tried it, and now I know it isn't very harmful. I wonder if the same applies to cocaine and heroin?"

Also, I know quite a few people who smoke marijuana on a regular basis. I could make a phone call and get marijuana in about 30 minutes if I wanted. Here is the kicker. If I wanted some cocaine or heroin, I could get it in about an hour. How? Because I'd call the person who could get me marijuana, and they could call their dealer who could almost certainly find them other drugs. In other words, marijuana is a gateway drug precisely because it is illegal. If I was given a challenge to find cocaine or heroin, with the stipulation that I couldn't use a pot-smoking intermediary, I wouldn't know where to begin.

The Objective Media

Update: I do realize that "blaming Bush" won't forever be a reason to ignore the GOP. When will I take the right seriously again? I'm not sure how to answer that, but I do know what will make me continue to ignore the right: Sarah Palin, Rush Limbaugh, Jerry Falwell, Michael Steel, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, and "Tea Party Protests". While the left wing also has its fringe extremists, the Democrats are not dominated by them.

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I was folding clothes tonight and so watched a little bit of cable news. I ended up flipping between two shows that might as well be mirror images. MSNBC's Countdown, with Keith Olbermann, features plenty of Bush bashing and Obama praising. Fox News has the OReilly Factor, which true to the network motto was going to extraordinary lengths to make Obama look bad. The thought occurred to me that a reasonable, objective person might almost be tempted to think that the current setup is fair. After all, the GOP has their channel - Fox News. Nobody is deceived by the "Fair and Balanced" slogan; Fox News was the last administration's Pravda. Meanwhile, the Democrats have their stations too - CNN and MSNBC. However, I actually don't think the current status quo is reasonable in the slightest.

Presumably (and whether or not this happens in reality is obviously a subject of considerable debate) the purpose of the media is to find out the objective truth, insofar as it is visible, and report on it. Furthermore, it is absurd to think that the careers of political leaders are entirely subjective. There is of course some subjectivity. Democrats will be tempted to see their leaders as great, Republicans will disagree, and vice versa. Bill Clinton is a striking example, adored by Democrats but generally not well liked among Republicans; Reagan being an opposite example. As I said, though, things are not entirely subjective. At some point, there is truth as to whether or not a political career was a success. I don't know of any reasonable Democrats who would call Reagan a failure. Its also relatively difficult to call Bill Clinton a failure (although one can attribute the successes in the 90s to other factors).

Here is the clincher, and the relevance to current issues. The Presidency of George W. Bush was an objective failure. A response will inevitably be made about Iraq, but to call Iraq a success is to completely ignore the original intentions, plans, and purposes that Bush had in mind when he invaded, not to mention the precarious nature of the fledgling democracy at the present time. Bush was a failure, in all but the most partisan of minds: so doesn't it make sense that the media is coming after him? If the purpose of the MSM is to report the truth, then when the media slammed Bush all of those years, it was doing its job - reporting the facts, not acting out of some sort of vindictive liberal bias.

Keep in mind, I am not saying that the media does NOT have a slight liberal bias. Overall, it probably does. But when the president was such a dismal failure for 8 years, instead of screaming liberal bias, conservatives should be seriously introspecting the party's decisions and positions and changing things accordingly. They've done nothing like that of course for the last 8 years, which is why the party is in an intellectually bankrupt, tantrum throwing, leaderless funk. On the other side of the coin, many major news networks have been friendly to Obama. Rightfully so; Barack Obama has barely been in office 100 days. That is not a liberal bias. That is called giving the winner of our democratic election the benefit of the doubt; perfectly appropriate. Interestingly enough, Fox News and a host of supporting conservative "intellectuals" were after Obama from day 1, and did not give him a fair chance. That is conservative bias. Towards the end of his term, many in the media wouldn't give Bush his due when he did manage to do things right; that was liberal bias.

At the end of the day, people should remember this. If the media was anti-Bush 99% of the time, and Bush failed 90% of the time, the problem isn't liberal bias.

Do you want to know why some people don't believe in evolution?

Update: came across this video which seems very relevant to this post. It is a quick (ten minute) video that discusses whether or not people are actually open minded.

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Here is a short piece that explains why bad arguments persist.

...there’s a certain class of rhetoric I’m going to call the “one way hash” argument. Most modern cryptographic systems in wide use are based on a certain mathematical asymmetry: You can multiply a couple of large prime numbers much (much, much, much, much) more quickly than you can factor the product back into primes. Certain bad arguments work the same way—skim online debates between biologists and earnest ID afficionados armed with talking points if you want a few examples:

The talking point on one side is just complex enough that it’s both intelligible—even somewhat intuitive—to the layman and sounds as though it might qualify as some kind of insight. (If it seems too obvious, perhaps paradoxically, we’ll tend to assume everyone on the other side thought of it themselves and had some good reason to reject it.) The rebuttal, by contrast, may require explaining a whole series of preliminary concepts before it’s really possible to explain why the talking point is wrong. So the setup is “snappy, intuitively appealing argument without obvious problems” vs. “rebuttal I probably don’t have time to read, let alone analyze closely.”

A classic example of this theory in practice is the absurd 'watchmaker' argument. It goes as thus: a person stumbles across a watch, a fantastically complex device. Obviously, there was a creator of the watch; the pieces couldn't have accidentally happened together by chance. To a layperson, that sounds intuitive. Now any biologist will tell you that evolution doesn't work that way, but explaining precisely why to a layperson is going to take multiple steps and they'll probably have ceased paying attention by that point. And thus bad arguments persist, and there are people who don't believe in evolution. Going further, creationists can be neatly placed in one of three categories:

1. People who simply do not have the mental capacity to comprehend the theory of evolution. This would include small children and people with mental disorders.

2. People who are insufficiently educated about the concepts involved, or just don't care all that much. This is by far the largest percentage. They may be creationists because they were raised by creationists, or work with creationists, or because their friends are creationists. These people may also erroneously believe that they are forced to choose between God and evolution...in truth, evolution is easily reconciled with religious belief.

The curious thing is that you would have expected this group of people to have gradually diminished, just like I'm quite sure that many people still believed the world was flat hundreds of years ago. And yet, they persist. This is explained by a force that is opposing the spread of knowledge in this particular area, a force composed of people that are placed in my final category...

3. People that are willfully ignorant, irrational, and / or malicious. Some people have simply made up their minds, and no amount of evidence and reason could ever sway them otherwise. And there are others, about whom I have written written before, who deny the theory of evolution in order to create a false controversy and generate a false enemy. It boils down to power and influence.

I would also like to point out that I am absolutist about virtually nothing, save evolution. There are incredibly smart people who believe in god and can use logical argument to support their position...likewise, there are atheists who can do the opposite. Reasonable people can disagree about abortion rights, and there are powerful arguments on both sides. Reasonable people can disagree about global warming and what we should do about it.

Alternatively, there are no reasonable people that are actively arguing against evolution. Not once in my entire life have I read a reasonable, logical, and honest argument against evolution by someone who actually understands evolution. The people that attempt to make them are either uninformed or deliberately disingenuous. Denying evolution is like denying the Holocaust, except that there exists far more evidence for evolution than there is for the Holocaust.

Glenn Beck is NUTS!

Obama = fascism?

He is so scared for the future of our country!

The fact that this man has his own television show on a major news network has got to be one of the 7 signs of the impending apocalypse.