You're seriously comparing diaper sales to 10 months of chemotherapy? Look, it's pretty safe to say that most people, most of the time, are at least not mostly evil. If big pharmaceutical corporation X has found a way to fight disease Y in a manner that is quicker, cheaper, more effective, but can't make a buck on it, there's going to be a team of dozens of scientists and technicians that are going to know something about it. If it's a negligible improvement and the current treatment works fairly well, or if the disease/health problem in question is on the order of toe jam or male pattern baldness, then it's unlikely that there will be a whistleblower. If the drug represents a major advance and the disease is something that is a big deal (like say cutting the chemotherapy time in half for treating Hodgkin's lymphoma and upping the survival rate to 99.9%), you're absolutely requiring those scientists, technicians, and the business executives to not mention the drug, the target, the pathway effected, anything, to anybody, ever. That's pretty evil, and not just an evil corporation, but a conspiracy of evil by all those who work there. Multiply that out by all the biotech and pharmaceutical companies and by many, many different diseases and we're deep into the feverish dreams of the tinfoil hat brigade...or maybe science is hard, expensive, slow, our knowledge is incomplete, and that's why we don't have miracle cures? That's the point I tried to make.
I'm a biochemist. After earning my PhD five years ago I've been working in academia, but my funding's about to run out and I'm applying for jobs at biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Do you think I had the empathy and morality centers of my brain removed or something? Do you think that every single person working in those sectors underwent the same procedure or were blessed from birth with complete amorality? The reality is that science is hard. The reality is that science is expensive. The reality is that our knowledge is incomplete and we do the best we can with the limited resources at our disposal. If we're lucky, that means we can turn a life-destroying illness into something treatable. Take cancer, for example. There's no magic pill to take it away and probably never will be, but it's because cancer is a large family of disease caused by different breakdowns of cellular mechanisms, many mechanisms that we don't understand very well and that are very hard to tease apart. That's why cancer, and diseases in general, tend to end up with treatments and not one-pill cures, not because big pharma's hiding it.
My brother went through 10 months of chemotherapy. 10 months of being nauseous, 10 months of not wanting to eat, 10 months without a sense of smell, 10 months with no sense of taste, 10 months of physical weakness, 10 months of diminished mental capacity, 10 months of needles, 10 months of IVs full of chemicals that burned when they went in, 10 months of doctors prodding and poking. He's now cancer-free and has been for 12 years. Back when he went through that his odds of surviving Hodgkin's lymphoma were about 80%. Current treatment has reached 90%, and a recent experimental treatment is at 98%. They're all still unpleasant and take months. Do you honestly think that if I had the ability to jump in with a magic pill and spare my brother those 10 months I wouldn't do it because it might hurt the corporate bottom line? Fuck the bottom line. Fuck having a job if it came to it. That's the prevailing attitude in biotech and pharmaceutical companies because they're made up of people like me, people who have seen loved ones go through horrible illness, and not the monsters your fantasy requires.
From USA Today: "Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83% of home-schooling parents want to give their children 'religious or moral instruction.'"
So the bulk of th 1.5 million homeschooling market teaches something that has been known to be wrong for 150 years (200 years if it includes Noah's flood and young-earth crap). I found this with 30 seconds of Google. If you look through amazon.com for creationism you'll find hundreds of books on the subject so creationist books conservatively cost the US millions a year in direct costs, but this is then multiplied greatly by the cost of correcting the falsehoods in those books. Multiple creationist ministries (Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, etc) have multi-million dollar annual budgets that are devoted entirely to obfuscation of well established scientific fact through the creation of those ignorance-promoting textbooks, science and educationally-hostile political advocacy, and legal battles, again amplifying those budgets to create a much larger drain on the US. These groups wield enormous political power: in 2008 multiple Republican presidential candidates (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo) and the Republican VP nominee (Sarah Palin) declared their support for creationism. If you look through Republican state party platforms you'll commonly see support for damaging education by incorporation of creationism. Widespread and politically powerful opposition to evolution is something that our foreign competitors have much less of a problem with: in one survey of selected countries we only beat Turkey in terms of acceptance of scientific fact. Considering evolution is of critical importance in biotechnology, pharmacology, medicine, etc. this is a grave threat to the USA.
"Rural people, even western people, see things every day in their environment that they assume is well known, and never bother to document. When noticed "scientists" it somehow becomes a discovery."
There's a reason for that. If you or I or a local group of people know something, great. But it's local, and limited, and easy to wipe out. Once that knowledge escapes that small group, either by the actions of that group or by an external factor it becomes something greater: part of the shared knowledge of humanity from which someone with no connection to the initial source of information can nonetheless make use of. For instance I'm working on a paper with a Chinese collaborator about the traditional use of certain plants by local farmers to combat pest insects. We're describing what those local farmers are doing (and probably have been doing for centuries) and providing an additional biochemical perspective; this knowledge will for the first time be available globally. It could lead to new insecticides, or perhaps the wider adoption of these plants themselves as organic insecticidal agents, and either or both could be done far outside the isolated community in which the use of these plants was found. This work is just a tiny part of a much larger, decades-long, global research effort by thousands of scientists (note lack of scare quotes) to try and take traditional medicine and other practices (including westerners: aspirin, for example), discover what works, how it works, and make that knowledge generally available. How's that for some perspective?
Injecting mosquitoes and not killing them is pretty challenging. I work in a mosquito lab and a few members have experiments where they inject adult mosquitoes. The volume you inject is less than one microliter, which means using a glass fiber made by heating and drawing out a glass pipette which itself takes some skill to do properly. So you take a mosquito which has been on a chill plate, which renders them immobile for a while but without permanent harm, and put them on a small tube that holds them via suction. Then you have the glass fiber hooked up to a syringe with your sample, and the fiber in a holder whose position can be finely adjusted with a couple knobs. Under a low power dissecting microscope you adjust the holder to put the fiber into the mosquito's meatiest part, the flight muscles under the wings right behind the head, and inject your sample. If your fiber is too big the wound will kill the "patient," if you inject in slightly the wrong place your sample often ends up in the digestive tract, and if you inject with too much you can explode the mosquito. People in the lab who are good at it have about a 90% success rate. I'm hoping to get to do this injection procedure soon for a set of experiments. Who would turn down the opportunity to turn the tables on the little bastards and inject them with something for a change?
Japan also has the second largest navy in Asia; China's is larger. There are some signs of Japan building up, including the not exactly constitutional Hyuga class "destroyers" which are in reality small (currently VTOL-only) aircraft carriers capable of carrying up to 11 aircraft. Larger ships capable of carrying more aircraft and 4,000 troops are supposed to start construction in 2011. They sound more like an amphibious assault ship half the size of a Tarawa class ship of the US Navy than a destroyer.
"Imagine how much faster science could advance if we had a system that actually let scientists focus on research, let people trained in technical writing do the reporting, and let Google design a post-publication moderation system to sort out the useful advances from the career posturing."
A few things:
1. Where is this money to hire 10,000 technical writers going to come from when, excluding tenured faculty, all academic scientists are threatened with losing their jobs due to lack of funds at least one year in three?
2. What exactly is a technical writer going to be doing? They will never have the necessary background to write a review article (seriously--a review article can have anywhere from 150 to well over 300 referenced papers, selected from an even larger pool). A research paper is the description of what 1-30 people have spent the last couple of years doing, plus a small literature review, plus discussion and future directions. Is the technical writer going to go through a few to a few dozen notebooks from all of these people and assemble it, despite not knowing what's going on and somehow predict where it's going to go? Or are they there to check over a rough draft and polish it? If they're the polisher, how much time do I have to spend getting them to understand the terminology, which can be and often is extremely precise? How much time do I have to spend going over the paper, which will have my name on it and not theirs, and which could (especially in the case of a very poorly written or wrong paper) have a huge impact on my career, checking to make sure that the wording is correct? Nuance can be critical in a scientific paper, especially if you're attacking somebody else's results. Communities are small and egos can be large.
3. Your "technical writers write it and stick it on Google model" sounds like science reporting to me. I've had research described by the local paper. Thankfully the reporter was extremely diligent and emailed us what was about to be final copy. The boss was livid with the changes introduced by the reporter's editor to make the work "punchier." Had it gone out as it was it would have been a major embarrassment to the lab but we managed to do triage on it. You know all those stories that get written up on/. about some massive new breakthrough that is going to cure cancer and halitosis but instead is just another small-medium technical advance and everyone demands to know who the jackass scientists were that overinflated their results, how dare those overfunded eltist blowhard frauds? Yeah, that's what almost happened to me. How exactly will your system avoid massively amplifying this?
4. Google-based moderation will increase the incidence of posturing. Ever seen a website pushed to the top of the search heap by artificial means?
5. Lots of scientists read slashdot. We're well aware of the crapfest that is the slashdot moderation system. See any post having anything to do with global warming or evolution. Hell see any post having anything to do with biology and there's some asshole tagging it "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" and at least a dozen highly modded comments demanding that the scientist should be prevented from playing God...when it's poking about in a few systems in a highly benign fashion.
6. There are barriers to publication. Some of them are a good thing. Any ignorant crank can spew crap online, as is their right. A paper in a peer-reviewed journal ideally, and in fact normally, means more. It means that it has been read by peers of the authors who should, and usually do, spot outright bullshit. It means that it has gone through a process of criticism--not necessarily 100% conductive but papers are usually made a little bit better; think add/remove/modify figure X or do this one extra experiment. Is peer review perfect? Hell no! Anyone who's published more than two papers has gotten back comments that are useless and we're all familiar with the occasional 100% bull
Whether or not you get similar numbers from different radiometric techniques depends on what the half life of the decaying compound is. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5,730 years, decaying into nitrogen-14. Uranium-235 decays to lead-107 through the actinium series with a half life of around 704 million years. Both methods are highly precise, with around about a percent uncertainty. For C-14, a percent is 57.3 years. For U-235 a percent is 7 million years. There will be negligible decay of U-235 in 57.3 years. There won't be any C-14 left in 7 million years. There is no reason to ever expect these two methods to agree on the age of something because of the difference in decay rate.
DNA is more than just bits. DNA also contains data from physics and chemistry. Any code must also have those inputs. The proteins encoded by genes are more than just a pile of different amino acids in some sequence, they also contain data from physics and chemistry. Despite decades of trying and thousands of protein structures, we can't take a protein sequence and tell you what the three-dimensional structure looks like. That is a problem many, many orders of magnitude easier than what Kurzweil wants to do. Kurzweil wants to distill brains down to DNA and throw out physics and chemistry, and with them larger-scale properties of biochemistry and molecular biology like protein:protein and protein:DNA interaction, intra- and inter-cellular signalling, plus basic cell structure and basic anatomy of the brain, and how all those things develop, among many other things that aren't simply encoded in DNA but instead are emergent properties that require data from chemistry and physics. Biochemistry isn't a tangent. It's a critical part of how a brain functions that Kurzweil blithely ignores in his fabrication of a farcical "upper bound" that is estimated by throwing out most of what makes a brain a brain. This isn't to say we can't model some features of a brain. We can do that now, and we'll tackle bigger and more challenging aspects of brain function as we learn more biology and get better at making computers and clever code. But there's a hell of a difference between mere modeling or aping of something found in nature, and reverse engineering an ape. Kurzweil's statements suggest he doesn't grasp this, but without knowing the man and also knowing something about the horrid state of journalism it could just be the journalist and their editor mauling his true views.
I can sum it up quicker by quoting Voltaire: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
Fred Phelps' crew out on "serious missionary work" or whatnot can't manage to look less ridiculous than a bunch of adults goofing around having fun while dressed up as comic book characters.
Germ theory of disease, cell theory, evolution, geological uniformitarianism, heliocentric model of the solar system...all of those are 100 years old or older, and that's just off the top of my head. All are scientific consensus, no scare quotes needed. All have resisted any and all challenges. That's not to say that they have not been modified as required by new data, nor that details of a given scientific consensus are not up for contention either, but the core of each is intact.
"Two decades ago, scientific doomsayers were warning of a global ice age."
No, science gets blamed yet again for shit that journalists pull out of their asses. See wikipedia and read out from there. The money quote: "This hypothesis [global cooling] had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding..." Despite little, if any support from scientists at the time, it's over thirty years later and we still hear about this. While some might call it a case in point about scientists doing a poor job at communicating, I'm reminded of a book titled On Bullshit. Global warming is a problem that potentially affects everybody, just not equally. If you're corporation X that produces large quantities of compounds implicated in global warming, there is naturally going to be pressure on you to cut back. That will cut into your profits, and your profits, like for every corporation, are your sole reason to exist. You're pressured by market forces (and probably by some portions of the law as well) to do everything in your power to keep your ox from getting gored. That can mean anything from touting a fully legitimate study that supports your continued CO2 (or whatever) production byproducts, to a quote mine of a global warming paper, to hiring shills to write crap in unrefereed journals. A corporation doesn't care about right or wrong, it cares about profit, and this disregard for or the simple irrelevance of truth is bullshitting. If bullshitting helps corporate profit, corporations bullshit, and that's part of why we still have to deal with bullshit global cooling.
The other points in your post are similar, but I can't resist two. I work on a protein involved in maintaining proper cholesterol levels in animals. Cholesterol is both bad and good for you. If you were to purge your body of all cholesterol, you'd be dead pretty quickly. Cholesterol is involved in several critically important processes. Cholesterol is converted into other sterols which function as signaling molecules (testosterone and estrogen quickly come to mind). Cholesterol is also an important part of the cell membranes of all animals (at least, it's probably pretty darn important for most other critters), in that it is involved with maintaining appropriate levels of viscosity in the cell membrane, allowing protein receptors, ion channels, and whatnot to move around appropriately, and plays a role in the proper ordering of these structures within the membrane as well. However if you're a person you can have too much cholesterol and build up plaques in your arteries from eating too many tasty steaks, prosciutto, hams, yams cooked in bacon, eggs...{drools}...where was I...Oh yes. Build up plaques of cholesterol, have a heart attack and/or stroke and croak. So both overly high and overly low levels of cholesterol can kill you. Which is the same for a lot of things. Ingesting too much water can kill you just as well as too little...both oddly enough will make you hallucinate like a motherfucker along the way though.
The other item is DDT. I've worked on developing new pesticides. DDT is still in use and this is a good thing because some insect-borne diseases are total nightmares. Off the top of my head mosquitoes carry malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and several different viruses that cause encephalitis. If you're in an area that either has or is expected to have an outbreak of one of these, your best bet is to control the vector population (mosquitoes), and the most potent means of doing this is to use insecticides. Sadly, that means using DDT (still in use today for this purpose, but banned since 1972 in the US as a crop insecticide) and a horribly limited selection of other compounds, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. DDT will fuck up
It might not have been wine. I work in a lab with a number of Chinese co-workers and there's a tendency to call any non-beer alcoholic beverage "wine." That includes the god-awful marshmallow-infused turpentine flavor of their liquor Maotai, 106 proof firewater that's rougher than moonshine. It's also very expensive so you can't turn it down without being rude.
Re:Student loan debt not worth it
on
The Real Science Gap
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· Score: 3, Informative
I have a Ph.D. and while I wouldn't consider the pursuit of one to be insane, it is definitely not in your economic best interest. The sweet spot in science has long been to get the master's degree. The average Ph.D. won't catch up to the average M.S. in lifetime earnings, though eventually the average Ph.D. will get paid more. It's just that a M.S. takes 2-3 years, while the Ph.D. takes 6-7 years. Frequently, especially in the life sciences, the Ph.D. is then followed by one or two (or, horrors, more) 2-5 year long postdoctoral positions. A Ph.D. student in the sciences gets paid these days in the high teens to mid 20's (You're paid. Not well, but you're paid--no loans). A postdoc gets paid anything from the upper 20's to the low 50's, depending on experience and much more importantly luck. So it's pretty easy to see why a Ph.D. won't catch up to the M.S., even though many Ph.D.'s end up being the boss of the M.S., and very rarely the other way around.
One way to look at the long years of crap pay a Ph.D. scientist endures is simple supply and demand: we have too many science Ph.D.'s and too few M.S. That and whenever you hear about a "shortage" of Ph.D.'s in this country, remember that news of the shortage comes from the exact same people demanding an increase in H1B's because of the critical shortage of qualified computer programmers.
There's Public Library of Science, which has a handful of journals. At least some of which, like PLoS Biology, are highly ranked. PLoS ONE is the biggest open access journal, with over 4,000 articles published last year. Still has a decent second-tier ranking, which will probably increase. The journals published by the professional societies are pretty good too, with typically lower cost of subscription and decent ranking. As bad as the Nature Publishing Group is made to look here (and I'm fully on the side of the University of California system), they're one of the less evil publishers. Elsevier is rotten to the core. Not content with massively overcharging for journals, even by the standards of academic publishers, they're infamous for creating fake journals for Pharma to advertise in.
LaTeX? Maybe in math or physics. In the life sciences it's rarely used. We usually are asked for either a Word document or a.pdf (made by Word more often than not). The last article I wrote I had to use a journal-supplied template in Word. It wasn't too painful except for one table that was pretty much the whole page. The end result was I did all the formatting, and that kind of setup seems to be more and more common. But yeah the academic publishers don't do much: print dead tree format (if they have it), hire somebody to run a server, hire somebody to take care of subscriptions and billing. All the science part of the science journal is done by scientists who aren't paid by the journal, and now they've fobbed off the page layout on us too.
"However, the problem is that Nature is a leader in scientific publishing..."
Thankfully the University of California system includes a number of elite universities: UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSF, UCSD, and UC Davis all come to mind as usually ranking in the top 50 schools in the country. Others in the UC system are pretty well ranked. It's too many top programs cranking out research to piss off, even for NPG. TFA states that over the last six years the UC system has published ~5,300 articles in the 67 journals, with 638 in Nature alone. Nature publishes around about 16-17 research papers per weekly issue, so in the last six years the UC system is responsible for roughly one paper in eight in Nature! Nature is in a never-ending pissing contest with Science over status of top journal. If the faculty at these universities really do tell Nature to fuck off and they stop submitting and reviewing articles and resign from the editorial boards, there will be bad hit taken in journal rankings. Those journal rankings do mean something, generally you try for the highest ranked journal you think you can get accepted by. Death spiral is hyperbole, but it's easy to see a threat since all universities are cutting subscriptions because of cost, and low ranked journals go first. NPG must really bet that the UC faculty won't hold together. Normally that'd be a safe bet since getting a handful of professors to be in the same damn room at the same damn time can take weeks of effort to pull off (familiar to all graduate students trying to get a committee meeting set up). This time with California's budget crisis, NPG might be wrong.
Patent application title: COMPOSITION AND METHOD FOR ENABLING PROLIFERATION OF PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
Authors: Karl Tryggvason, Anna Domogatskaya, Sergey Rodin, a subset of the authors of the paper referenced at the end of TFA. I don't know enough about stem cells to say that the patent application is identical to TFA, but it's on at least highly similar subject matter. Prof. Tryggvason has over 30 patents as per his bio on the Biolamina corporate website, a company he co-founded. As a scientist currently trying to bring some academic research out of the lab and into deployment, I can tell you that this is just how things are done. It isn't perfect, but without the protection of a patent it's hard to see any company willingly expose itself to the massive risk and cost of developing, producing, testing, and marketing Prof. Tryggvason's work without the profit motive that patents protect.
Must be cheaper to do it yourself, not only for the volume required for a microbrewery to be interested (100 gallons? More?) and you don't pay the brewmaster! My initial equipment cost was about $60, although I've since added on a bit and now probably have sunk in closer to $300. If you go all-grain rather than using malt extracts then I've seen a $1500 setup, but it was owned by one of the guys who worked at the homebrew store. Looking through my notes, for a 5 gallon batch my ingredients cost from $27 to $65 and produces ~50 12 oz beers. More expensive than a macrobrew, competitive with microbrew, and far cheaper than specialty brews. I like some Trappist ales, but they cost a ridiculous amount--but since they come unfiltered it's possible to culture their yeast and do a very close copy yourself at a fraction of the cost. Starting a batch is a pretty good way of blowing a Sunday afternoon. Wait about a week to move to the secondary fermenter and a week later spend ~two hours bottling. Two to N weeks later you've got two cases of good beer waiting. You've got a huge amount of flexibility too. I tossed in some rye malt in the last batch, am bottling a stawberry ale this weekend, and will do a brown ale with home-grown horehound to replace the bittering hops (hops are fairly new to beer and other herbs were once commonly used as bittering agents, but good luck ever finding anything commercially available). If I'm lucky I'll get to use some home-grown hops from the garden. First year for the hops so I don't expect much. Next year, kickass.
Both empty and full bottles were found to have breaking thresholds higher than the human cranium..."
Being a homebrewer, I know there's a hell of a lot of different beer bottles out there. But they're also wrong. In grad school I had a roommate who lost a bet with a friend: he bet that he could break a beer bottle over his own head, which he successfully did, and not bleed. He lost the nickel bet and had to have a third graduate student stitch up his scalp.
Also reminds me of "The pot game." Inspired by a Simpsons episode, two grad students put pots on their heads and run head first at each other. Loser is the one who falls down, bleeds, or breaks something.
I agree we're probably dealing with some media hype and also a scientist who's (probably justifiably) being tight lipped. What the author of the news article wants to lead us to is pretty obvious: holy shit arsenic-eating bacteria that evolved completely independently from everything else, a second genesis!!!1!!!!one!!! To which Dr. Wolfe-Simon does the double-facepalm mentioned up at the top of the comments.
In the article, Dr. Wolfe-Simon is not saying what she's found at all. The only thing she's volunteering in the article is that “We have some very exciting data,” and that the article describes her as being pleased. TFA's not clear on what exactly she's doing. She's taken the lake water (high arsenic), performs multiple dilutions with it, and by doing so knocks phosphorus levels to ~0 and increases the arsenic levels. Ok, what's she diluting it with? An arsenic solution? Then she adds a collection of other compounds known to support other bacteria. Fine, although it should be mentioned that the vast (>99%) majority of bacteria out there we have no idea how to grow in a lab; many just die on traditionally used media. To venture a guess, I'd say she managed to culture some bacteria from this lake that can survive on very low levels of phosphorus and make up for the phosphorus deficiency by utilizing some arsenic. That'd be pretty cool if true and would garner interest from biochemists to understand how exactly it was using arsenic. Specifically getting around the instability would be a neat trick. Polyarsenates hydrolyze much faster than polyphosphates which are already pretty unstable; polyphosphates are also essential for life as we know it. It might even eventually lead to practical applications like arsenic cleanup. But we don't know until the actual research is published "by the end of this year."
Again, bullshit. If you have a natural remedy, and it works, and you first don't succeed at isolating the compound(s) of interest, well, it ain't called search. It's called REsearch for a reason. You will find many compounds along the way that don't do anything for problem A. But now you've isolated them and kept notes so you can do it again if the need arises, so keep them around for screens for problems B through ZZZ. Maybe that one compound will be useful, maybe it won't. Some compounds will be in between. Some will show some level of efficacy, but have horrible side effects. Why is that? Can you modify the compound to increase efficacy and decrease side effects? No? Can you use the compound to zero in on whatever it is that is being targeted, and once the target is found use other methods to develop a useful compound against whatever it is that is causing illness 47.9Q? Is it toxic by itself in doses that treat the illness, but at lower, safe doses mucks up pathway X which degrades compound Y, which means compound Y is now a viable drug? Great, you've got something a bit useful.
I largely agree with your post and have wondered about relocating some of pharmaceutical research to an academic or government setting. Scientists aren't doing research for the money. For instance, I'm five years post-PhD and employed at a large research university. I'm hoping a grant I co-wrote comes through so my pay increases up to that rarefied air of the upper 40's. Big pharma of course is interested in payoff and I wonder what would happen if the federal R&D budget were increased to take more of the R&D away from Big Pharma. There'd still be the problem of trials and production but I wonder.
However, you're missing a critically important point. Two of them, actually. As it now stands funding for science is pathetic. Patents and industry partnerships in the lab I work in currently account for over half the budget. Take away patents and the lab is stone. cold. dead. There's precious little money to be had. A prof on the next floor down came back from a grant review board and there wasn't enough money to fund 5% of the applicants. When traditionally your sole source of income is grants, when they're at a less than one in twenty crapshoot you have to either look for other funding sources (patents) or just give up. The second point you're missing is that natural remedies rarely are "good enough." This is something I personally work on. Say your natural remedy is shown to work. Where does your natural remedy come from? If it's from something like say Yew bark, you're fucked. Only so many plants can be grown on so much acreage which will only be able to be harvested over so many years. Even it's corn you still have the problem of variability in harvest times, plant quality, storage problems, how it's prepared, and of course what other neutral or out right harmful compounds are in the mix. Now if instead you start with the natural remedy, show it works, and isolate the compounds, you've got a hell of a lot more control over what's going on and are much more informed as to what's working. You can isolate the compound that does the trick you need it to do. You can talk it up with the organic chemists to figure out how to make it, together with the chemical engineers to make it cheaply. Then you control exactly the dosage, and exactly what's in the treatment. You will never be able to do that with a natural remedy. What makes all that possible, for now, is patents and the profit they protect. The molecular biologist, the chemist, and the chemical engineer all need to get paid. Patents make that possible. It's not perfect, it might not even be the best way. But to get rid of patents right now without any compensating mechanism will definitely destroy all progress.
I dug around a little, and it looks like yes, the naturalpathic/alternative/traditional medicine industry certainly does make enough money to buy Congressmen: $45 billion in 2009 from integrative medicine and $2 billion from the practitioner channel supplement market. For the $45 billion figure I don't know how much is alternative medicine as it's a mixed approach. The $2 billion figure however is unambiguous. Besides I'll see you a Congressman and raise you a Senator: Tom Harkin of Iowa. Normally not that bad (I voted for him once when I was in school) but he's firmly in the bag for alternative medicine, for instance telling a Senate panel that he was disappointed that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine had disproven too many alternative therapies. That's from Respectful Insolence on ScienceBlogs where a lot more can be found on the Senator.
If by parsing the morality, can one judge that either the alternative medicine industry or big pharma is the more moral entity, I'd have to say maybe, although I wouldn't necessarily use the term "moral" to describe the matter. Big pharma is very tightly regulated and must demonstrate efficacy under controlled conditions, and must also know what the side effects are. When we get recalls and lawsuits we see a real consequence of failure, either from deliberate manipulation of the data or simply missing side effects. There's lots of medicines out there and the body is a horribly complex biochemical system so the majority of the recalls seem to be from the latter case. The alternative medicine industry is not under any real regulatory control at all. Treatments often aren't tested in any meaningful sense and recalls don't happen. Notorious frauds are common--homeopathy is a roughly $400 million a year scam in the US from different reports I found online. I can't think of a reason not to judge big pharma, warts and all, as having fewer "morality" problems than the alternative medicine industry.
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You're seriously comparing diaper sales to 10 months of chemotherapy? Look, it's pretty safe to say that most people, most of the time, are at least not mostly evil. If big pharmaceutical corporation X has found a way to fight disease Y in a manner that is quicker, cheaper, more effective, but can't make a buck on it, there's going to be a team of dozens of scientists and technicians that are going to know something about it. If it's a negligible improvement and the current treatment works fairly well, or if the disease/health problem in question is on the order of toe jam or male pattern baldness, then it's unlikely that there will be a whistleblower. If the drug represents a major advance and the disease is something that is a big deal (like say cutting the chemotherapy time in half for treating Hodgkin's lymphoma and upping the survival rate to 99.9%), you're absolutely requiring those scientists, technicians, and the business executives to not mention the drug, the target, the pathway effected, anything, to anybody, ever. That's pretty evil, and not just an evil corporation, but a conspiracy of evil by all those who work there. Multiply that out by all the biotech and pharmaceutical companies and by many, many different diseases and we're deep into the feverish dreams of the tinfoil hat brigade...or maybe science is hard, expensive, slow, our knowledge is incomplete, and that's why we don't have miracle cures? That's the point I tried to make.
I'm a biochemist. After earning my PhD five years ago I've been working in academia, but my funding's about to run out and I'm applying for jobs at biotech and pharmaceutical companies. Do you think I had the empathy and morality centers of my brain removed or something? Do you think that every single person working in those sectors underwent the same procedure or were blessed from birth with complete amorality? The reality is that science is hard. The reality is that science is expensive. The reality is that our knowledge is incomplete and we do the best we can with the limited resources at our disposal. If we're lucky, that means we can turn a life-destroying illness into something treatable. Take cancer, for example. There's no magic pill to take it away and probably never will be, but it's because cancer is a large family of disease caused by different breakdowns of cellular mechanisms, many mechanisms that we don't understand very well and that are very hard to tease apart. That's why cancer, and diseases in general, tend to end up with treatments and not one-pill cures, not because big pharma's hiding it.
My brother went through 10 months of chemotherapy. 10 months of being nauseous, 10 months of not wanting to eat, 10 months without a sense of smell, 10 months with no sense of taste, 10 months of physical weakness, 10 months of diminished mental capacity, 10 months of needles, 10 months of IVs full of chemicals that burned when they went in, 10 months of doctors prodding and poking. He's now cancer-free and has been for 12 years. Back when he went through that his odds of surviving Hodgkin's lymphoma were about 80%. Current treatment has reached 90%, and a recent experimental treatment is at 98%. They're all still unpleasant and take months. Do you honestly think that if I had the ability to jump in with a magic pill and spare my brother those 10 months I wouldn't do it because it might hurt the corporate bottom line? Fuck the bottom line. Fuck having a job if it came to it. That's the prevailing attitude in biotech and pharmaceutical companies because they're made up of people like me, people who have seen loved ones go through horrible illness, and not the monsters your fantasy requires.
From USA Today: "Christian-based materials dominate a growing home-school education market that encompasses more than 1.5 million students in the U.S. And for most home-school parents, a Bible-based version of the Earth's creation is exactly what they want. Federal statistics from 2007 show 83% of home-schooling parents want to give their children 'religious or moral instruction.'"
So the bulk of th 1.5 million homeschooling market teaches something that has been known to be wrong for 150 years (200 years if it includes Noah's flood and young-earth crap). I found this with 30 seconds of Google. If you look through amazon.com for creationism you'll find hundreds of books on the subject so creationist books conservatively cost the US millions a year in direct costs, but this is then multiplied greatly by the cost of correcting the falsehoods in those books. Multiple creationist ministries (Answers in Genesis, Discovery Institute, Institute for Creation Research, etc) have multi-million dollar annual budgets that are devoted entirely to obfuscation of well established scientific fact through the creation of those ignorance-promoting textbooks, science and educationally-hostile political advocacy, and legal battles, again amplifying those budgets to create a much larger drain on the US. These groups wield enormous political power: in 2008 multiple Republican presidential candidates (Sam Brownback, Mike Huckabee and Tom Tancredo) and the Republican VP nominee (Sarah Palin) declared their support for creationism. If you look through Republican state party platforms you'll commonly see support for damaging education by incorporation of creationism. Widespread and politically powerful opposition to evolution is something that our foreign competitors have much less of a problem with: in one survey of selected countries we only beat Turkey in terms of acceptance of scientific fact. Considering evolution is of critical importance in biotechnology, pharmacology, medicine, etc. this is a grave threat to the USA.
"Rural people, even western people, see things every day in their environment that they assume is well known, and never bother to document. When noticed "scientists" it somehow becomes a discovery."
There's a reason for that. If you or I or a local group of people know something, great. But it's local, and limited, and easy to wipe out. Once that knowledge escapes that small group, either by the actions of that group or by an external factor it becomes something greater: part of the shared knowledge of humanity from which someone with no connection to the initial source of information can nonetheless make use of. For instance I'm working on a paper with a Chinese collaborator about the traditional use of certain plants by local farmers to combat pest insects. We're describing what those local farmers are doing (and probably have been doing for centuries) and providing an additional biochemical perspective; this knowledge will for the first time be available globally. It could lead to new insecticides, or perhaps the wider adoption of these plants themselves as organic insecticidal agents, and either or both could be done far outside the isolated community in which the use of these plants was found. This work is just a tiny part of a much larger, decades-long, global research effort by thousands of scientists (note lack of scare quotes) to try and take traditional medicine and other practices (including westerners: aspirin, for example), discover what works, how it works, and make that knowledge generally available. How's that for some perspective?
Injecting mosquitoes and not killing them is pretty challenging. I work in a mosquito lab and a few members have experiments where they inject adult mosquitoes. The volume you inject is less than one microliter, which means using a glass fiber made by heating and drawing out a glass pipette which itself takes some skill to do properly. So you take a mosquito which has been on a chill plate, which renders them immobile for a while but without permanent harm, and put them on a small tube that holds them via suction. Then you have the glass fiber hooked up to a syringe with your sample, and the fiber in a holder whose position can be finely adjusted with a couple knobs. Under a low power dissecting microscope you adjust the holder to put the fiber into the mosquito's meatiest part, the flight muscles under the wings right behind the head, and inject your sample. If your fiber is too big the wound will kill the "patient," if you inject in slightly the wrong place your sample often ends up in the digestive tract, and if you inject with too much you can explode the mosquito. People in the lab who are good at it have about a 90% success rate. I'm hoping to get to do this injection procedure soon for a set of experiments. Who would turn down the opportunity to turn the tables on the little bastards and inject them with something for a change?
Japan also has the second largest navy in Asia; China's is larger. There are some signs of Japan building up, including the not exactly constitutional Hyuga class "destroyers" which are in reality small (currently VTOL-only) aircraft carriers capable of carrying up to 11 aircraft. Larger ships capable of carrying more aircraft and 4,000 troops are supposed to start construction in 2011. They sound more like an amphibious assault ship half the size of a Tarawa class ship of the US Navy than a destroyer.
"Imagine how much faster science could advance if we had a system that actually let scientists focus on research, let people trained in technical writing do the reporting, and let Google design a post-publication moderation system to sort out the useful advances from the career posturing."
/. about some massive new breakthrough that is going to cure cancer and halitosis but instead is just another small-medium technical advance and everyone demands to know who the jackass scientists were that overinflated their results, how dare those overfunded eltist blowhard frauds? Yeah, that's what almost happened to me. How exactly will your system avoid massively amplifying this?
A few things:
1. Where is this money to hire 10,000 technical writers going to come from when, excluding tenured faculty, all academic scientists are threatened with losing their jobs due to lack of funds at least one year in three?
2. What exactly is a technical writer going to be doing? They will never have the necessary background to write a review article (seriously--a review article can have anywhere from 150 to well over 300 referenced papers, selected from an even larger pool). A research paper is the description of what 1-30 people have spent the last couple of years doing, plus a small literature review, plus discussion and future directions. Is the technical writer going to go through a few to a few dozen notebooks from all of these people and assemble it, despite not knowing what's going on and somehow predict where it's going to go? Or are they there to check over a rough draft and polish it? If they're the polisher, how much time do I have to spend getting them to understand the terminology, which can be and often is extremely precise? How much time do I have to spend going over the paper, which will have my name on it and not theirs, and which could (especially in the case of a very poorly written or wrong paper) have a huge impact on my career, checking to make sure that the wording is correct? Nuance can be critical in a scientific paper, especially if you're attacking somebody else's results. Communities are small and egos can be large.
3. Your "technical writers write it and stick it on Google model" sounds like science reporting to me. I've had research described by the local paper. Thankfully the reporter was extremely diligent and emailed us what was about to be final copy. The boss was livid with the changes introduced by the reporter's editor to make the work "punchier." Had it gone out as it was it would have been a major embarrassment to the lab but we managed to do triage on it. You know all those stories that get written up on
4. Google-based moderation will increase the incidence of posturing. Ever seen a website pushed to the top of the search heap by artificial means?
5. Lots of scientists read slashdot. We're well aware of the crapfest that is the slashdot moderation system. See any post having anything to do with global warming or evolution. Hell see any post having anything to do with biology and there's some asshole tagging it "whatcouldpossiblygowrong" and at least a dozen highly modded comments demanding that the scientist should be prevented from playing God...when it's poking about in a few systems in a highly benign fashion.
6. There are barriers to publication. Some of them are a good thing. Any ignorant crank can spew crap online, as is their right. A paper in a peer-reviewed journal ideally, and in fact normally, means more. It means that it has been read by peers of the authors who should, and usually do, spot outright bullshit. It means that it has gone through a process of criticism--not necessarily 100% conductive but papers are usually made a little bit better; think add/remove/modify figure X or do this one extra experiment. Is peer review perfect? Hell no! Anyone who's published more than two papers has gotten back comments that are useless and we're all familiar with the occasional 100% bull
Whether or not you get similar numbers from different radiometric techniques depends on what the half life of the decaying compound is. Carbon-14 has a half life of 5,730 years, decaying into nitrogen-14. Uranium-235 decays to lead-107 through the actinium series with a half life of around 704 million years. Both methods are highly precise, with around about a percent uncertainty. For C-14, a percent is 57.3 years. For U-235 a percent is 7 million years. There will be negligible decay of U-235 in 57.3 years. There won't be any C-14 left in 7 million years. There is no reason to ever expect these two methods to agree on the age of something because of the difference in decay rate.
DNA is more than just bits. DNA also contains data from physics and chemistry. Any code must also have those inputs. The proteins encoded by genes are more than just a pile of different amino acids in some sequence, they also contain data from physics and chemistry. Despite decades of trying and thousands of protein structures, we can't take a protein sequence and tell you what the three-dimensional structure looks like. That is a problem many, many orders of magnitude easier than what Kurzweil wants to do. Kurzweil wants to distill brains down to DNA and throw out physics and chemistry, and with them larger-scale properties of biochemistry and molecular biology like protein:protein and protein:DNA interaction, intra- and inter-cellular signalling, plus basic cell structure and basic anatomy of the brain, and how all those things develop, among many other things that aren't simply encoded in DNA but instead are emergent properties that require data from chemistry and physics. Biochemistry isn't a tangent. It's a critical part of how a brain functions that Kurzweil blithely ignores in his fabrication of a farcical "upper bound" that is estimated by throwing out most of what makes a brain a brain. This isn't to say we can't model some features of a brain. We can do that now, and we'll tackle bigger and more challenging aspects of brain function as we learn more biology and get better at making computers and clever code. But there's a hell of a difference between mere modeling or aping of something found in nature, and reverse engineering an ape. Kurzweil's statements suggest he doesn't grasp this, but without knowing the man and also knowing something about the horrid state of journalism it could just be the journalist and their editor mauling his true views.
"Elon Musk made a fortune with PayPal and could easily have retired to a private island."
Well, close. Paypal cofounder Peter Thiel's a board member, don't know about any involvement by Elon Musk.
I can sum it up quicker by quoting Voltaire: "I have never made but one prayer to God, a very short one: 'O Lord make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
Fred Phelps' crew out on "serious missionary work" or whatnot can't manage to look less ridiculous than a bunch of adults goofing around having fun while dressed up as comic book characters.
Germ theory of disease, cell theory, evolution, geological uniformitarianism, heliocentric model of the solar system...all of those are 100 years old or older, and that's just off the top of my head. All are scientific consensus, no scare quotes needed. All have resisted any and all challenges. That's not to say that they have not been modified as required by new data, nor that details of a given scientific consensus are not up for contention either, but the core of each is intact.
"Two decades ago, scientific doomsayers were warning of a global ice age."
No, science gets blamed yet again for shit that journalists pull out of their asses. See wikipedia and read out from there. The money quote: "This hypothesis [global cooling] had little support in the scientific community, but gained temporary popular attention due to a combination of press reports that did not accurately reflect the scientific understanding..." Despite little, if any support from scientists at the time, it's over thirty years later and we still hear about this. While some might call it a case in point about scientists doing a poor job at communicating, I'm reminded of a book titled On Bullshit. Global warming is a problem that potentially affects everybody, just not equally. If you're corporation X that produces large quantities of compounds implicated in global warming, there is naturally going to be pressure on you to cut back. That will cut into your profits, and your profits, like for every corporation, are your sole reason to exist. You're pressured by market forces (and probably by some portions of the law as well) to do everything in your power to keep your ox from getting gored. That can mean anything from touting a fully legitimate study that supports your continued CO2 (or whatever) production byproducts, to a quote mine of a global warming paper, to hiring shills to write crap in unrefereed journals. A corporation doesn't care about right or wrong, it cares about profit, and this disregard for or the simple irrelevance of truth is bullshitting. If bullshitting helps corporate profit, corporations bullshit, and that's part of why we still have to deal with bullshit global cooling.
The other points in your post are similar, but I can't resist two. I work on a protein involved in maintaining proper cholesterol levels in animals. Cholesterol is both bad and good for you. If you were to purge your body of all cholesterol, you'd be dead pretty quickly. Cholesterol is involved in several critically important processes. Cholesterol is converted into other sterols which function as signaling molecules (testosterone and estrogen quickly come to mind). Cholesterol is also an important part of the cell membranes of all animals (at least, it's probably pretty darn important for most other critters), in that it is involved with maintaining appropriate levels of viscosity in the cell membrane, allowing protein receptors, ion channels, and whatnot to move around appropriately, and plays a role in the proper ordering of these structures within the membrane as well. However if you're a person you can have too much cholesterol and build up plaques in your arteries from eating too many tasty steaks, prosciutto, hams, yams cooked in bacon, eggs...{drools}...where was I...Oh yes. Build up plaques of cholesterol, have a heart attack and/or stroke and croak. So both overly high and overly low levels of cholesterol can kill you. Which is the same for a lot of things. Ingesting too much water can kill you just as well as too little...both oddly enough will make you hallucinate like a motherfucker along the way though.
The other item is DDT. I've worked on developing new pesticides. DDT is still in use and this is a good thing because some insect-borne diseases are total nightmares. Off the top of my head mosquitoes carry malaria, dengue fever, yellow fever, chikungunya, and several different viruses that cause encephalitis. If you're in an area that either has or is expected to have an outbreak of one of these, your best bet is to control the vector population (mosquitoes), and the most potent means of doing this is to use insecticides. Sadly, that means using DDT (still in use today for this purpose, but banned since 1972 in the US as a crop insecticide) and a horribly limited selection of other compounds, each with its own strengths and weaknesses. DDT will fuck up
It might not have been wine. I work in a lab with a number of Chinese co-workers and there's a tendency to call any non-beer alcoholic beverage "wine." That includes the god-awful marshmallow-infused turpentine flavor of their liquor Maotai, 106 proof firewater that's rougher than moonshine. It's also very expensive so you can't turn it down without being rude.
I have a Ph.D. and while I wouldn't consider the pursuit of one to be insane, it is definitely not in your economic best interest. The sweet spot in science has long been to get the master's degree. The average Ph.D. won't catch up to the average M.S. in lifetime earnings, though eventually the average Ph.D. will get paid more. It's just that a M.S. takes 2-3 years, while the Ph.D. takes 6-7 years. Frequently, especially in the life sciences, the Ph.D. is then followed by one or two (or, horrors, more) 2-5 year long postdoctoral positions. A Ph.D. student in the sciences gets paid these days in the high teens to mid 20's (You're paid. Not well, but you're paid--no loans). A postdoc gets paid anything from the upper 20's to the low 50's, depending on experience and much more importantly luck. So it's pretty easy to see why a Ph.D. won't catch up to the M.S., even though many Ph.D.'s end up being the boss of the M.S., and very rarely the other way around.
One way to look at the long years of crap pay a Ph.D. scientist endures is simple supply and demand: we have too many science Ph.D.'s and too few M.S. That and whenever you hear about a "shortage" of Ph.D.'s in this country, remember that news of the shortage comes from the exact same people demanding an increase in H1B's because of the critical shortage of qualified computer programmers.
There's Public Library of Science, which has a handful of journals. At least some of which, like PLoS Biology, are highly ranked. PLoS ONE is the biggest open access journal, with over 4,000 articles published last year. Still has a decent second-tier ranking, which will probably increase. The journals published by the professional societies are pretty good too, with typically lower cost of subscription and decent ranking. As bad as the Nature Publishing Group is made to look here (and I'm fully on the side of the University of California system), they're one of the less evil publishers. Elsevier is rotten to the core. Not content with massively overcharging for journals, even by the standards of academic publishers, they're infamous for creating fake journals for Pharma to advertise in.
LaTeX? Maybe in math or physics. In the life sciences it's rarely used. We usually are asked for either a Word document or a .pdf (made by Word more often than not). The last article I wrote I had to use a journal-supplied template in Word. It wasn't too painful except for one table that was pretty much the whole page. The end result was I did all the formatting, and that kind of setup seems to be more and more common. But yeah the academic publishers don't do much: print dead tree format (if they have it), hire somebody to run a server, hire somebody to take care of subscriptions and billing. All the science part of the science journal is done by scientists who aren't paid by the journal, and now they've fobbed off the page layout on us too.
"However, the problem is that Nature is a leader in scientific publishing..."
Thankfully the University of California system includes a number of elite universities: UCLA, UC Berkeley, UCSF, UCSD, and UC Davis all come to mind as usually ranking in the top 50 schools in the country. Others in the UC system are pretty well ranked. It's too many top programs cranking out research to piss off, even for NPG. TFA states that over the last six years the UC system has published ~5,300 articles in the 67 journals, with 638 in Nature alone. Nature publishes around about 16-17 research papers per weekly issue, so in the last six years the UC system is responsible for roughly one paper in eight in Nature! Nature is in a never-ending pissing contest with Science over status of top journal. If the faculty at these universities really do tell Nature to fuck off and they stop submitting and reviewing articles and resign from the editorial boards, there will be bad hit taken in journal rankings. Those journal rankings do mean something, generally you try for the highest ranked journal you think you can get accepted by. Death spiral is hyperbole, but it's easy to see a threat since all universities are cutting subscriptions because of cost, and low ranked journals go first. NPG must really bet that the UC faculty won't hold together. Normally that'd be a safe bet since getting a handful of professors to be in the same damn room at the same damn time can take weeks of effort to pull off (familiar to all graduate students trying to get a committee meeting set up). This time with California's budget crisis, NPG might be wrong.
Patent application title: COMPOSITION AND METHOD FOR ENABLING PROLIFERATION OF PLURIPOTENT STEM CELLS
Authors: Karl Tryggvason, Anna Domogatskaya, Sergey Rodin, a subset of the authors of the paper referenced at the end of TFA. I don't know enough about stem cells to say that the patent application is identical to TFA, but it's on at least highly similar subject matter. Prof. Tryggvason has over 30 patents as per his bio on the Biolamina corporate website, a company he co-founded. As a scientist currently trying to bring some academic research out of the lab and into deployment, I can tell you that this is just how things are done. It isn't perfect, but without the protection of a patent it's hard to see any company willingly expose itself to the massive risk and cost of developing, producing, testing, and marketing Prof. Tryggvason's work without the profit motive that patents protect.
Must be cheaper to do it yourself, not only for the volume required for a microbrewery to be interested (100 gallons? More?) and you don't pay the brewmaster! My initial equipment cost was about $60, although I've since added on a bit and now probably have sunk in closer to $300. If you go all-grain rather than using malt extracts then I've seen a $1500 setup, but it was owned by one of the guys who worked at the homebrew store. Looking through my notes, for a 5 gallon batch my ingredients cost from $27 to $65 and produces ~50 12 oz beers. More expensive than a macrobrew, competitive with microbrew, and far cheaper than specialty brews. I like some Trappist ales, but they cost a ridiculous amount--but since they come unfiltered it's possible to culture their yeast and do a very close copy yourself at a fraction of the cost. Starting a batch is a pretty good way of blowing a Sunday afternoon. Wait about a week to move to the secondary fermenter and a week later spend ~two hours bottling. Two to N weeks later you've got two cases of good beer waiting. You've got a huge amount of flexibility too. I tossed in some rye malt in the last batch, am bottling a stawberry ale this weekend, and will do a brown ale with home-grown horehound to replace the bittering hops (hops are fairly new to beer and other herbs were once commonly used as bittering agents, but good luck ever finding anything commercially available). If I'm lucky I'll get to use some home-grown hops from the garden. First year for the hops so I don't expect much. Next year, kickass.
Both empty and full bottles were found to have breaking thresholds higher than the human cranium..."
Being a homebrewer, I know there's a hell of a lot of different beer bottles out there. But they're also wrong. In grad school I had a roommate who lost a bet with a friend: he bet that he could break a beer bottle over his own head, which he successfully did, and not bleed. He lost the nickel bet and had to have a third graduate student stitch up his scalp.
Also reminds me of "The pot game." Inspired by a Simpsons episode, two grad students put pots on their heads and run head first at each other. Loser is the one who falls down, bleeds, or breaks something.
Grad students drink heavily. Very heavily.
I agree we're probably dealing with some media hype and also a scientist who's (probably justifiably) being tight lipped. What the author of the news article wants to lead us to is pretty obvious: holy shit arsenic-eating bacteria that evolved completely independently from everything else, a second genesis!!!1!!!!one!!! To which Dr. Wolfe-Simon does the double-facepalm mentioned up at the top of the comments.
In the article, Dr. Wolfe-Simon is not saying what she's found at all. The only thing she's volunteering in the article is that “We have some very exciting data,” and that the article describes her as being pleased. TFA's not clear on what exactly she's doing. She's taken the lake water (high arsenic), performs multiple dilutions with it, and by doing so knocks phosphorus levels to ~0 and increases the arsenic levels. Ok, what's she diluting it with? An arsenic solution? Then she adds a collection of other compounds known to support other bacteria. Fine, although it should be mentioned that the vast (>99%) majority of bacteria out there we have no idea how to grow in a lab; many just die on traditionally used media. To venture a guess, I'd say she managed to culture some bacteria from this lake that can survive on very low levels of phosphorus and make up for the phosphorus deficiency by utilizing some arsenic. That'd be pretty cool if true and would garner interest from biochemists to understand how exactly it was using arsenic. Specifically getting around the instability would be a neat trick. Polyarsenates hydrolyze much faster than polyphosphates which are already pretty unstable; polyphosphates are also essential for life as we know it. It might even eventually lead to practical applications like arsenic cleanup. But we don't know until the actual research is published "by the end of this year."
Again, bullshit. If you have a natural remedy, and it works, and you first don't succeed at isolating the compound(s) of interest, well, it ain't called search. It's called REsearch for a reason. You will find many compounds along the way that don't do anything for problem A. But now you've isolated them and kept notes so you can do it again if the need arises, so keep them around for screens for problems B through ZZZ. Maybe that one compound will be useful, maybe it won't. Some compounds will be in between. Some will show some level of efficacy, but have horrible side effects. Why is that? Can you modify the compound to increase efficacy and decrease side effects? No? Can you use the compound to zero in on whatever it is that is being targeted, and once the target is found use other methods to develop a useful compound against whatever it is that is causing illness 47.9Q? Is it toxic by itself in doses that treat the illness, but at lower, safe doses mucks up pathway X which degrades compound Y, which means compound Y is now a viable drug? Great, you've got something a bit useful.
Black and white it ain't.
I largely agree with your post and have wondered about relocating some of pharmaceutical research to an academic or government setting. Scientists aren't doing research for the money. For instance, I'm five years post-PhD and employed at a large research university. I'm hoping a grant I co-wrote comes through so my pay increases up to that rarefied air of the upper 40's. Big pharma of course is interested in payoff and I wonder what would happen if the federal R&D budget were increased to take more of the R&D away from Big Pharma. There'd still be the problem of trials and production but I wonder.
However, you're missing a critically important point. Two of them, actually. As it now stands funding for science is pathetic. Patents and industry partnerships in the lab I work in currently account for over half the budget. Take away patents and the lab is stone. cold. dead. There's precious little money to be had. A prof on the next floor down came back from a grant review board and there wasn't enough money to fund 5% of the applicants. When traditionally your sole source of income is grants, when they're at a less than one in twenty crapshoot you have to either look for other funding sources (patents) or just give up. The second point you're missing is that natural remedies rarely are "good enough." This is something I personally work on. Say your natural remedy is shown to work. Where does your natural remedy come from? If it's from something like say Yew bark, you're fucked. Only so many plants can be grown on so much acreage which will only be able to be harvested over so many years. Even it's corn you still have the problem of variability in harvest times, plant quality, storage problems, how it's prepared, and of course what other neutral or out right harmful compounds are in the mix. Now if instead you start with the natural remedy, show it works, and isolate the compounds, you've got a hell of a lot more control over what's going on and are much more informed as to what's working. You can isolate the compound that does the trick you need it to do. You can talk it up with the organic chemists to figure out how to make it, together with the chemical engineers to make it cheaply. Then you control exactly the dosage, and exactly what's in the treatment. You will never be able to do that with a natural remedy. What makes all that possible, for now, is patents and the profit they protect. The molecular biologist, the chemist, and the chemical engineer all need to get paid. Patents make that possible. It's not perfect, it might not even be the best way. But to get rid of patents right now without any compensating mechanism will definitely destroy all progress.
I dug around a little, and it looks like yes, the naturalpathic/alternative/traditional medicine industry certainly does make enough money to buy Congressmen: $45 billion in 2009 from integrative medicine and $2 billion from the practitioner channel supplement market. For the $45 billion figure I don't know how much is alternative medicine as it's a mixed approach. The $2 billion figure however is unambiguous. Besides I'll see you a Congressman and raise you a Senator: Tom Harkin of Iowa. Normally not that bad (I voted for him once when I was in school) but he's firmly in the bag for alternative medicine, for instance telling a Senate panel that he was disappointed that the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine had disproven too many alternative therapies. That's from Respectful Insolence on ScienceBlogs where a lot more can be found on the Senator.
If by parsing the morality, can one judge that either the alternative medicine industry or big pharma is the more moral entity, I'd have to say maybe, although I wouldn't necessarily use the term "moral" to describe the matter. Big pharma is very tightly regulated and must demonstrate efficacy under controlled conditions, and must also know what the side effects are. When we get recalls and lawsuits we see a real consequence of failure, either from deliberate manipulation of the data or simply missing side effects. There's lots of medicines out there and the body is a horribly complex biochemical system so the majority of the recalls seem to be from the latter case. The alternative medicine industry is not under any real regulatory control at all. Treatments often aren't tested in any meaningful sense and recalls don't happen. Notorious frauds are common--homeopathy is a roughly $400 million a year scam in the US from different reports I found online. I can't think of a reason not to judge big pharma, warts and all, as having fewer "morality" problems than the alternative medicine industry.