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The "kidneys" produced could not be printed into the patient, they're not functional.

Wake Forest University's got an Institute for Regenerative Medicine in their medical school. I have a friend (just a pre-med undergraduate) who might get to do some research there this summer and is really excited about the possibility. It's neat stuff.

I don't think that's the correct paper. The original article can be found on the page below as a PDF: http://www1.wfubmc.edu/Nba/Faculty/Dwayne+Godwin.h tm Not beach reading...!

So in order for this to work in people, we'd need to genetically modify/engineer babies?

Not necessarily. I suppose you _could_ genetically engineer human offspring to carry this gene, but there appear to be other routes to take. From the article I already linked-to; specifically, section III of the summary:

However, these results show that the concept would work under the right circumstances. For example, if we identified the gene, it might be possible to take immune cells from a patient and insert that mutant gene into those cells in the test tube, then give these cells back to the same patient; this would then perhaps allow the mutant immune mechanism to work to reject tumor cells without the loss of the immune cells due to transplant rejection.

So in order for this to work in people, we'd need to genetically modify/engineer babies?

Not necessarily. I suppose you _could_ genetically engineer human offspring to carry this gene, but there appear to be other routes to take. From the article I already linked-to; specifically, section III of the summary:

However, these results show that the concept would work under the right circumstances. For example, if we identified the gene, it might be possible to take immune cells from a patient and insert that mutant gene into those cells in the test tube, then give these cells back to the same patient; this would then perhaps allow the mutant immune mechanism to work to reject tumor cells without the loss of the immune cells due to transplant rejection.

Oops! - I should have given the top page:

http://www1.wfubmc.edu/pathresearch/srmouse/

Thanks! I've dug out the direct link:

http://www.pnas.org/cgi/content/abstract/060238210 3v1

Here's the first paper:

http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/articlerender.fcgi?ar tid=164507

and a nice website from the research group with lots of background:

http://www1.wfubmc.edu/pathresearch/srmouse/part1. htm

I'd highly reccomend reading this. It's absolutely fascinating, and it provides a great amount of detail that's written in terms most people will understand.

I'll try to answer your questions based on my read-through.

So these mice are "cancer-resistant"? When exposed to carcenigous, do they ignore them?

It seems that these mice have an immune system that is able to selectively identify and destroy cancer cells. So, no, they don't ignore carcinogens, they just kill the cells that are affected by the carcinogens.

Are these mice just impervious to cell mutation? ...would that spell the end of evolution?

Nope. Again, the mice seem to have a "smarter" immune system that destroys only the cancerous cells.

The article talks about how our immune system may be constantly killing off cancerous cells. It may only be when a cell mutates beyond our body's ability to identify as such that it becomes a cancer. If so, that implies a previously unknown mechanism for our immune system to identify cancer cells. This property of our immune system would likely be determined by genetics; and it is quite likely that the unique immune-boosting gene these super-resistant mice posses has an equivalent in humans.

Do these reports suggest that cancer cells really do not grow "in a vacuum," but are affected by control mechanisms that already exist in the body? Does cancer reach a detectable size because these controls have failed? If so, could such controls be identified, and enhanced in patients to provide new therapies? In fact, how do cancer cells actually "succeed" in patients? Do they actively inhibit protective processes that ordinarily would prevent cancer? Do cancers occur continuously during our lifetimes, yet are eliminated by internal mechanisms so that they are never seen? http://www1.wfubmc.edu/cancer/research/mice/summar y.htm

There are two, independent questions here:
a. The important question - can we save money by moving all drug R&D into the public sector,
  and
b. The ancillary question - how much of the money spent to do drug R&D is really private, under the current circumstances.

  I'm not that interested in point b, which is the only one you seem to want to talk about.

1. They're not well-established and credible journals.
  Challenge is a bit odd, but Health Letter and Journal of Health Policy are both reputable - more importantly, you already complained about the bibliography being too long, and the Challenge article contains a great many citations which you can follow, if you really care about the question and aren't just arguing for the sake of it.

2. They weren't studies, they were op-ed and promotional pieces in the journals.
  How exactly are you concluding that if you cannot read them? The *second three* (helpfully labeled as position papers) are indeed opinion articles.

  If you actually knew anything about medline you'd know that it only returned recently published articles - no 19th century cadavers. If you know anything at all about biology and chemistry, you'd know why I find your whole line completely baffling - drug companies do hardly *any* fundamental research at all, they just develop drugs. This is simply common knowledge among all researchers, the drug companies don't even deny it.

  Here is one example:
  Telmisartan blocks the action of Angiotensin. As mentioned in this abstract. Angiotensin was discovered by this man, in the public sector. If you type angiotensin into medline (as I just did) you will find many examples of ongoing fundamental research on angiotensin, certainly useful to drug companies - of the ones I checked, all done by academic scientists. Comb the list for counter-examples, see if you can find any.

  To be blunt, your assertion is from Mars. I'm not sure anyone even bothers to do a careful study of the question, it's regarded as so obvious. 40 years ago the situation was significantly different - private drug companies still depended heavily on public science, but it wasn't nearly so extreme as it is today.

  Anyway, if you actually care about the question ask Dean for the articles, I have to go to bed.

hmm interesting. I think the future here is going to ultimately be custom wavefront corrections using fully intrastromal ablations without the use of a flap. Where ultrashort laser pulses are used to "photodisrupt" tissue at controlled distances below the corneal surface so there won't be any opening of the cornea at all. That said, it will obviously be a long time before this is a reality and in the meantime there are still huge improvments being made in traditional LASIK with wavefront modelling and such, there are actually people who specialise in modelling the dynamics of the vapor plume created by the individual pulses of the laser spot!

If you paid attention in Gattaca, there was actually mention of anti-discrimination legislation. It existed, and was intended to curb exactly the type of discrimination that the movie's premis was based on. But it didn't. Why? Because it is often very difficult to prove discrimination. How do you prove that your ex-potential employer scoured the room for your dead skin cells after you left, and run them through a screening process? How do you prove that your employer had a back-room meeting with a geneticist, discussing your potential shortcomings, costs, and life expectancy prior to your hire? How do you fight the phrase "We just found other candidates superior to Mr. Smith", even if you know them to be false?

The short of it is, you can't. Not without tracking and recording every conversation, handwritten note, and thought process, which, thankfully, is not yet possible. (Though, with enough trained monkeys, this may change soon.)

In the meantime, we're going to have to put up with discrimination based on race, sex, sexual preference, skin color, hair color, political choice, and coming soon to a job near you, genetic risk factor. Just as it took place in Gattaca, and just as difficult to fight. My only hope is that it will not be so widespread and commonplace. But unfortunately, most companies are more concerned with the bottom line, than with legality, so here we are.

But from a slightly different prespective... would some genetic screening be so bad? In terms of setting a precident, certainly. After all, once you say it's okay to do in some circumstances, it inevitably becomes accepted in others. But I could see some scenarios where genetic screening would be beneficial to all parties involved. What if a gene was discovered that led to a greater resistance to chemical-induced distortions in your cells (such as cancer), even if it also lead to high blood pressure? You might make an excellent candidate for genetic research, chemistry, or molecular biology, even if you had a higher risk for heart attack. There are pros and cons. You'd be safer to employ, from a liability aspect... but riskier to employ, based on your life expectancy. Legislations is a good step towards allowing the former and eliminating the latter, but legislation alone will not solve the problem.

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This text here is written to add more characters per line to my post, disabling the lameness filter.

so I would suggest that it is valid to restrict the clients. (It might be technically hard - or impossible - but that is another matter.)

Why not steal the validation code from the Netrek source?

Your Working Boy,