If people don't want to be affected by foreign laws maybe their goverments should get together and agree that their laws not have extra-territorial scope.
They were able to grow primary cultures (from the embryo) on ECM whereas from what I gather you used ECM to differentiate cells that had already been cultured on feeder cells. A big deal if you are trying to avoid any contact at all with animal cell.s
Also it is hard to tell from the article but it also seems to imply that transferring stem cells on ECM was a recent step. I assume that if undergrads can grow stem cells on ECM, they must mean that being able to maintain totipotent undifferentiated cells on ECM was only done recently.
I assume some of the accepted applicants were well connected and not wet-behind-the-ear freshmen. It's just a matter of time before someone finds grounds to sue or otherwise pull some strings and when they do there will be some very quiet backpedaling...
There are two major issues here. The first one is reproducibility. If you look hard enough in the literature you can find a study that can support any conclusion. Errors are made and statistical variations will occur but if an effect is real it needs to be reproduced consistently. This has not been the case for effects from non-ionizing radiation in general and seeing that this is a paper from 1995, for this case in particular.
Now one can argue that maybe the few positive results are the real ones and that experimental technology is just not very good. Fair enough but there is a second issue here. There is no plausible mechanism for DNA damage from non-ionizing radiation aside from possibly heating. Again, it doesn't mean that one doesn't exist but this is in stark contrast to damage from ionizing radiation where the basic mechanisms have been known for decades.
With no body of reproducible results and no plausible mechanism, the null hypothesis that there is no effect is the one is generally accepted. You should, of course, pass your own judgement on the risk involved - I'm just trying to explain why these results are consigned to Electromagnetics rather than gracing the front pages of Science and Nature.
To say these guys are experts is akin to saying Bill Gates is an expert on the impact of software patent law...
These are the heads of organizations (administrators) with more than scientific truth as their primary interests. They probably haven't even read any of the relevant research but have been briefed by aides on what is the best position to take. To be fair, that's partially our fault for wanting everything reduced to 15 second sound bites...
There are three kinds of intelligence: one kind understands things for itself, the other appreciates what others can understand, and the third understands neither for itself nor through others. The first kind is excellent, the second good and the third kind useless... If a Prince has the discernment to the good or bad in what another says and does, even though he has no acumen himself, he can see when his minister's actions are good or bad... in this way, the minister can not hope to deceive him and so takes care not to go wrong
The Prince
Not bad insight from an old guy from 500 years ago i.e. it's better to know your stuff but if not at least know enough so that your staff can't take advantage of you (which they will...). Jobs, I think falls into the first camp, Gerstner who succeeded because he was a smart cookie (sorry) and I think he probably understood more than people gave him credit for, falls into the second group and Fiorina falls into the third camp.
I think I see your point but you make several tacit assumptions which I don't believe are true.
One is that there is enough available capital out there to take the place of the missing funding. The major source of funding for basic research is the federal government. Corporate funding is pretty much non-existent for this type of risky research which leaves us with other levels of government, foreign govenments, and some charitable foundations to make up the shortfall. Unless the states come through in a big way - I don't think that there is enough capital out there.
Secondly, demand is not going to be constant - but is very soft. It is always a risky proposition for scientists to get proposals funded in the best circumstances. Loss of funding means the end of a research career so the stakes are very high. By making it harder to find funding for EC research many scientists (while stubborn also have VISA bills) will alter their proposals to adult stem cells research even when that is the less likely to succeed.
So I believe the net effect of the Bush policy will be to drive remaining embryonic research overseas, or to the states that specifically set aside money for it (the accounting thing you were talking about) and encourage scientifically inferior research elsewhere.
This is getting ridiculous with all the posts trying to use this to justify the effective ban on embryonic stem cell research. IF you belIeve that this research is immoral that's fine - I do understand your opinion and I have no problem with it though I disagree.
BUT stop claiming that the denial of federal funds doesn't make embryonic stem cell research in the US very difficult. Stop claiming that there is no merit to embryonic stem cell research - that is just patently untrue (yes I am a scientist and I have worked with EC but not ES cells). Look up Parkinson's and Diabetes and get a developmental biologist to explain to you why embryonic stem cell research provides hope for a cure to these diseases. Or read NIH's own summary on stem cell research
Like I said if you have strong opinions that embryonic cell research is immoral - stand up for yourself and just say so. I respect that much more than trying to trick other people into accepting your agenda with naked FUD.
It's sad that my first reaction was to call "Bullcrap!" on what might very well be good research from scientists who probably were very conscientious in presenting their data and the different conclusions that the media downplayed for the sake of a "life on Mars" story. And it's not just the National Enquirer crowd but also the shameless lobbying of JPL and NASA for a Mars mission with their news conference presentation of mineral formations that could be of bacterial origin (or not..) that is making it really hard to figure out what is FUD and what is good science...
I want to believe but I also want to know that it is not more Martian snake oil...
Look up Mueller's ratchet. The argument is that without exchange of genetic information within the population errors will accumulate in the genome that can not be repaired. It has been observed in real experiments with real organisms (not simulations).
In the case of giardia it may be that at one time the rate of mutation was higher (perhaps more radiation exposure...) and sexual reproduction for giardia was more and that this now only occurs at very low frequency - just enought to avoid the accumulation of deleterous mutations.
A much simpler explanation is that there is something fishy with the lab strains which is a pretty common occurence...
You have to remember that the first machines were used almost exclusively in cancer wards, and at a time when radiation therapies were more prevalent and with more side effects than they have now. So I think the idea was to reassure patients that this was not some sort of whole body radiotherapy that would make them sick...
Losing your job doesn't mean risking bankruptcy if you become sick and there are very generous social programs in Denmark to ease the transition from one job to another. I'm not saying being laid off is not a big deal but it is lower on the Richter scale. So because the Danes are less dependent on corporate largesse, they can also more easily ignore this type of corporate blackmail (albeit at the cost of higher taxes for some...)
How many medical and drug breakthroughs are happening in publicly funded institutions, the NIH being another example, and how many are actually developed inside the big drug and healthcare companies using private funding.
Depends what you mean by "develop". Essentially all leads come from publically funded research. The companies have neither the inclination to fund such financially risky ventures nor the expertise to carry it off. When there is a chance that a lead will lead to a payoff then the companies take over which IMHO could be more efficiently done by NIH given the proper investment. After all, they do the first part any way why not the profitable part as well?
I doubt that this will happen in my lifetime. Even less radical solutions such as shorter patents and mandatory licensing to generics are unlikely to occur any time soon. This was the system in Canada until pressure from the pharmaceuticals (and a very poor excuse for a Prime Minister) forced a change to a more American system and higher prices. The FUD here in the US is of the highest quality - noone talks about big changes in the system that would really reduce drug costs. Instead what passes for debate is diverted to red herrings, like negotiating better prices in bulk or importing drugs from Canada (and whether this is safe - big eyeroll...).
Perhaps the rationing that is being imposed by health insurers or eventually by Medicare will force people to think out of the box when their cancer pain medicine costs $100 per pill - but I'm not hopeful. The miniscule reaction to ENRON tells me that the blinders affixed pretty tightly...
Essentially these guys have been espousing a lottery argument. The odds of me winning Lotto 6/49 are about 14 million to 1. If I win it - there must be some divine influence since it is so unlikely to happen by chance - right?...
The fallacy is that the chance of someone winning the lottery eventually is 100%. Similarly, the chance of some unlikely set of random numbers occurring if you look long enough is 100%. The chance of that this occurs more often than usual if you do it enough times is - you guessed it 100%. It is a sampling thing that is going on here - if I sample non-randomly i.e. based on the result I want - I can get any unlikely result from random data because all results will occur if I wait long enough.
However, I will admit that if I did win a $20 million jackpot I will be more than happy to acknowledge the existence of God...
Let's turn this around - what would the Bush adminstrations say if Accuweather could either only disseminate its information through the NWS and allow the government to collect the profits or pay a tax on revenue made from distributing information to compensate the government for lost revenue? I'm sure the neo-cons would agree that propping up an inefficient government agency and discouraging private innovation in this manner is a bad idea..
So then why is the converse so hard to see. The NWS provides accurate information. In addition, this service needs to exist for other reasons (security, emergency response etc.) So is it not more sensible then to encourage the NWS to disseminate its information at a very marginal cost rather than propping up a parasitic enterprise with a flawed business model? If Accuweather does provide value added in more efficient data dissemination - then shouldn't it be able to make a profit without having to depend upon the indulgence of the NWS?
Seems someone is hiding (and profiting of course..) behind the mantra "government is bad, private is good" again and the taxpayers will foot the bill...
Self taught hacker outlines 7 steps to eliminating all bugs in software
I wonder what the response would be to that headline. Certainly not the gushing that we see here. The more diligent who did not dismiss it out of hand would at least Google it to see what the current state of knowledge is in automated proofs of program correctness or something like that.
Why then the gullibility when it comes to biology? Do people really think that biology is so simple that someone could teach themselves, do no experiments and find the answer to one of the most difficult problems? I don't claim that the people who have spent their lives working on the problem are following the correct avenues (IMHO, they are misguided too) but these guys are no dummies and have thought long and deep about it over the years. And at least they have some data to back up their ideas and speculations...
Excuse me but I think I'm going to write a book about a new kind of computer science now...
First, noone said that scientists shouldn't be paid or even whether there should be a profit motive - that's an entire straw man - the question is whether the advancement of science is hindered or helped by the presence of patents. I would argue that patents hinder biotech and also that you can make money without patents - you just have be more clever than being the first to stake out your claim.
Let us take a look at your example - your assay procedure. From what I read, you had to spend time developing an assay system because no good commercial solutions existed. Therefore when a superior commercial solution finally came about, you conclude that patents are a good thing because they motivated the development of a better cheaper assay. Of course, had the process not been patentable you wouldn't have been that much worse off since you had your own assay anyway. Also, from what I gather, the motivation from the switch has as much to do with convenience as quality of the assay for which there would likely still be commercial turnkey solutions. Waters makes money selling HPLC systems even though HPLC is not patented because they do it better than you can. But let us say that patenting the procedure is the only way it could be made sufficiently profitable for someone to spend the time to make it work well.
The downside is that no further development of the process (which may or may not have been a trivial enhancement of the open source one), without having to worry about infringements. That is a pretty big downside esp considering that their methodology was based upon the work of another publically funded researcher.
When I worked at the bench, we had to buy our Taq polymerase commercially, not because it was difficult (it was trivial) but because of the patent on the procedure. This is what I have a problem with - patents used to enforce exclusivity of procedures that any well equipped lab could otherwise do.
Now back to the profit motive. We write open source software for bioinformatics and structural biology. That doesn't mean that if it turns out to be successful that we couldn't profit off of it - as long as the software is truly useful and the ideas are truly difficult to expand upon then there will always be a demand for someone who understands it, no matter where that code is. That is, of course as long as no one is able to copy, make minor modifications, and patent the idea...
It is not surprising given the source. If you've had the misfortune of reading Ingram's articles you would discover very quickly that he is not a technical person but a business writer who knows just enough - to get things completely wrong. A poor man's John Dvorak...
Unfortunately, he is also one of the better Globe and Mail business writers too - but hey they're there to sell advertising not get things right or to be informative...
Let's say there was an "open source" pharmaceutical effort that came out with a drug to cure xxxx disease. That drug would never be allowed to be sold.
There may be some truth to this. A good example is that of H Pylori, a bacterium discovered back in the 80's that is a major factor in peptic ulcers. There should be a Nobel prize for this since it was against the wisdom of the time which held that excess acid production caused ulcers and the biggest money makers were acid reducers like Zantac and Tagumet. It wasn't until the mid 90's that the obvious antibiotic therapy was easily available in Canada - (my father had an ulcer around '95 and he was given antibiotics - a friend had it the year earlier and had no idea that bacteria were involved...). A lot of this probably had to do with the way the medical community is entrenched in its thinking esp in Canada (lumpectomies are *still* frowned upon by some idiot surgeons...).
In the end, however antibiotic treatment, in conjunction with newer proton pump inhibitors has been adopted, Zantac (which went off-patent in '97) has been relegated to an OTC role so the "open source" treatment did win out. Yet I have always wondered how much more quickly the new therapy would have been introduced had it involved something other than cheap antibiotics and whether these guys would have won the Nobel by now as they deserve.
Back in the 80's the CBC FM would just put canned classical music on at late night - no hosts no nothing. Somehow, they completed deviated from their classical/jazz lineup and as an experiment Brave New Waves was born playing alternative music when it was alternative. A wide variety of stuff - Einsturzende Neubauen, Pogues, Butth0le surfers, Skinny Puppy, Jesus Mary Chain... It had a really cool hostess Augusta Le Pay who would munch on pizza while interviewing Laurie Andersen and a pyschic before playing an hour of the sound of fences howling in the wind. Remember this was at a time when alternative music got no air play and on a network known for it's news and playing Vivaldi's 4 seasons every 20 minutes.
Hopefully Zed will be the net version of this with just completely off-the-wall content. I'm not that optimistic - but we'll see. A lot of Brave New Waves success had to do with Augusta's and her producer's skill walking the thin line between quirky and interesting and stupid and dull...
And get over this "state run is crap" stuff (friggin' Enron fanboys...) - the CBC and BBC for that matter do occasionally provide programming that is a counterpoint to for example, Fox's "Who's your Daddy?"...
Low level specs are great but I have a real 1Ghz transmeta chip on a sub 2 pound Sharp notebook (OK 2.5 with big battery). It lasts 9 hours like it says (tested on a long flight) and runs more than fast enough with XP for Powerpoint, Word and not bad even with a pig like CorelDraw. The power cord accidentally got unplugged while it was connected to the network once and it still had half the battery left after nearly a week on intermittent sleep
The price performance thing is pretty meaningless as long as it is fast enough to do what you need. Not everyone uses their laptop as a primary machine, or for video processing. My main need was something that didn't weigh like a lead brick and could let me do real work on a long flight or a meeting without having to plug in somewhere. The Sharp/Transmeta does that admirably.
As for the Centrino - it may be great - I don't know but I wouldn't go by spec-sheet alone (Xeons are the fastest chip right?). I'm curious if anyone here has *real world* experience with the Centrino based Sony? My understanding is that it has about half the battery life of the Sharp from the user reviews and I certainly don't discount that this might be because of different power management schemes that don't relate to the chip. But as a end-user consumer the Sharp notebook was a lot cheaper than the Sony last I checked and is far from being a sub-par product.
The difference between science and other studies is that there is a well established scientific method for determining scientific truth. If hypothesis can be verified by experiment then it is accepted. Ms Irigaray can scream at the top of her lungs that the distinction between red and green is a product of sexist bias but that won't stop her from getting run over at the next intersection.
The problem is that nowadays the experiments are so much more complicated than crossing the street that the layman cannot understand the results. Hence, they need to reference sources many degrees of separation from the primary data. Irigaray's rants become equated with the theory of Einstein because people don't understand the Michelson Morley experiment and that the reasoning that follows its interpretation leading to relativity are *not* arbitrary.
As for your examples. Everyone knew Lysenko was full of crock - possibly even Lysenko. Or to put it another way, the data, even then, did not support his assertions. As for nature/nurture debates and climatology - these will be resolved eventually - with more evidence. Not loudness of shouting, not voting, not modding up or down, not TV campaigns but evidence. That's science. Whether people decide to listen - well that's politics...
Slashdot Mirror
Except that an American mulinational is affected?
If people don't want to be affected by foreign laws maybe their goverments should get together and agree that their laws not have extra-territorial scope.
They were able to grow primary cultures (from the embryo) on ECM whereas from what I gather you used ECM to differentiate cells that had already been cultured on feeder cells. A big deal if you are trying to avoid any contact at all with animal cell.s
Also it is hard to tell from the article but it also seems to imply that transferring stem cells on ECM was a recent step. I assume that if undergrads can grow stem cells on ECM, they must mean that being able to maintain totipotent undifferentiated cells on ECM was only done recently.
I assume some of the accepted applicants were well connected and not wet-behind-the-ear freshmen. It's just a matter of time before someone finds grounds to sue or otherwise pull some strings and when they do there will be some very quiet backpedaling...
There are two major issues here. The first one is reproducibility. If you look hard enough in the literature you can find a study that can support any conclusion. Errors are made and statistical variations will occur but if an effect is real it needs to be reproduced consistently. This has not been the case for effects from non-ionizing radiation in general and seeing that this is a paper from 1995, for this case in particular.
Now one can argue that maybe the few positive results are the real ones and that experimental technology is just not very good. Fair enough but there is a second issue here. There is no plausible mechanism for DNA damage from non-ionizing radiation aside from possibly heating. Again, it doesn't mean that one doesn't exist but this is in stark contrast to damage from ionizing radiation where the basic mechanisms have been known for decades.
With no body of reproducible results and no plausible mechanism, the null hypothesis that there is no effect is the one is generally accepted. You should, of course, pass your own judgement on the risk involved - I'm just trying to explain why these results are consigned to Electromagnetics rather than gracing the front pages of Science and Nature.
To say these guys are experts is akin to saying Bill Gates is an expert on the impact of software patent law...
These are the heads of organizations (administrators) with more than scientific truth as their primary interests. They probably haven't even read any of the relevant research but have been briefed by aides on what is the best position to take. To be fair, that's partially our fault for wanting everything reduced to 15 second sound bites...
I remember that John returned his MBE - in protest of some politics he didn't agree with and his song "Cold Turkey" dropping on the charts...
Seem to recall that George may have returned his at some point too but I can't be sure...
I think I see your point but you make several tacit assumptions which I don't believe are true.
One is that there is enough available capital out there to take the place of the missing funding. The major source of funding for basic research is the federal government. Corporate funding is pretty much non-existent for this type of risky research which leaves us with other levels of government, foreign govenments, and some charitable foundations to make up the shortfall. Unless the states come through in a big way - I don't think that there is enough capital out there.
Secondly, demand is not going to be constant - but is very soft. It is always a risky proposition for scientists to get proposals funded in the best circumstances. Loss of funding means the end of a research career so the stakes are very high. By making it harder to find funding for EC research many scientists (while stubborn also have VISA bills) will alter their proposals to adult stem cells research even when that is the less likely to succeed.
So I believe the net effect of the Bush policy will be to drive remaining embryonic research overseas, or to the states that specifically set aside money for it (the accounting thing you were talking about) and encourage scientifically inferior research elsewhere.
This is getting ridiculous with all the posts trying to use this to justify the effective ban on embryonic stem cell research. IF you belIeve that this research is immoral that's fine - I do understand your opinion and I have no problem with it though I disagree.
BUT stop claiming that the denial of federal funds doesn't make embryonic stem cell research in the US very difficult. Stop claiming that there is no merit to embryonic stem cell research - that is just patently untrue (yes I am a scientist and I have worked with EC but not ES cells). Look up Parkinson's and Diabetes and get a developmental biologist to explain to you why embryonic stem cell research provides hope for a cure to these diseases. Or read NIH's own summary on stem cell research
http://stemcells.nih.gov/info/basics/basics1.asp
Like I said if you have strong opinions that embryonic cell research is immoral - stand up for yourself and just say so. I respect that much more than trying to trick other people into accepting your agenda with naked FUD.
It's sad that my first reaction was to call "Bullcrap!" on what might very well be good research from scientists who probably were very conscientious in presenting their data and the different conclusions that the media downplayed for the sake of a "life on Mars" story. And it's not just the National Enquirer crowd but also the shameless lobbying of JPL and NASA for a Mars mission with their news conference presentation of mineral formations that could be of bacterial origin (or not..) that is making it really hard to figure out what is FUD and what is good science...
I want to believe but I also want to know that it is not more Martian snake oil...
Look up Mueller's ratchet. The argument is that without exchange of genetic information within the population errors will accumulate in the genome that can not be repaired. It has been observed in real experiments with real organisms (not simulations).
In the case of giardia it may be that at one time the rate of mutation was higher (perhaps more radiation exposure...) and sexual reproduction for giardia was more and that this now only occurs at very low frequency - just enought to avoid the accumulation of deleterous mutations.
A much simpler explanation is that there is something fishy with the lab strains which is a pretty common occurence...
You have to remember that the first machines were used almost exclusively in cancer wards, and at a time when radiation therapies were more prevalent and with more side effects than they have now. So I think the idea was to reassure patients that this was not some sort of whole body radiotherapy that would make them sick...
It's not the US...
Losing your job doesn't mean risking bankruptcy if you become sick and there are very generous social programs in Denmark to ease the transition from one job to another. I'm not saying being laid off is not a big deal but it is lower on the Richter scale. So because the Danes are less dependent on corporate largesse, they can also more easily ignore this type of corporate blackmail (albeit at the cost of higher taxes for some...)
Depends what you mean by "develop". Essentially all leads come from publically funded research. The companies have neither the inclination to fund such financially risky ventures nor the expertise to carry it off. When there is a chance that a lead will lead to a payoff then the companies take over which IMHO could be more efficiently done by NIH given the proper investment. After all, they do the first part any way why not the profitable part as well?
I doubt that this will happen in my lifetime. Even less radical solutions such as shorter patents and mandatory licensing to generics are unlikely to occur any time soon. This was the system in Canada until pressure from the pharmaceuticals (and a very poor excuse for a Prime Minister) forced a change to a more American system and higher prices. The FUD here in the US is of the highest quality - noone talks about big changes in the system that would really reduce drug costs. Instead what passes for debate is diverted to red herrings, like negotiating better prices in bulk or importing drugs from Canada (and whether this is safe - big eyeroll...).
Perhaps the rationing that is being imposed by health insurers or eventually by Medicare will force people to think out of the box when their cancer pain medicine costs $100 per pill - but I'm not hopeful. The miniscule reaction to ENRON tells me that the blinders affixed pretty tightly...
Essentially these guys have been espousing a lottery argument. The odds of me winning Lotto 6/49 are about 14 million to 1. If I win it - there must be some divine influence since it is so unlikely to happen by chance - right?...
The fallacy is that the chance of someone winning the lottery eventually is 100%. Similarly, the chance of some unlikely set of random numbers occurring if you look long enough is 100%. The chance of that this occurs more often than usual if you do it enough times is - you guessed it 100%. It is a sampling thing that is going on here - if I sample non-randomly i.e. based on the result I want - I can get any unlikely result from random data because all results will occur if I wait long enough.
However, I will admit that if I did win a $20 million jackpot I will be more than happy to acknowledge the existence of God...
and don't make conclusions based on one data point plus a control...
Sheesh...
is much closer to the truth in this matter...
Let's turn this around - what would the Bush adminstrations say if Accuweather could either only disseminate its information through the NWS and allow the government to collect the profits or pay a tax on revenue made from distributing information to compensate the government for lost revenue? I'm sure the neo-cons would agree that propping up an inefficient government agency and discouraging private innovation in this manner is a bad idea..
So then why is the converse so hard to see. The NWS provides accurate information. In addition, this service needs to exist for other reasons (security, emergency response etc.) So is it not more sensible then to encourage the NWS to disseminate its information at a very marginal cost rather than propping up a parasitic enterprise with a flawed business model? If Accuweather does provide value added in more efficient data dissemination - then shouldn't it be able to make a profit without having to depend upon the indulgence of the NWS?
Seems someone is hiding (and profiting of course..) behind the mantra "government is bad, private is good" again and the taxpayers will foot the bill...
Why then the gullibility when it comes to biology? Do people really think that biology is so simple that someone could teach themselves, do no experiments and find the answer to one of the most difficult problems? I don't claim that the people who have spent their lives working on the problem are following the correct avenues (IMHO, they are misguided too) but these guys are no dummies and have thought long and deep about it over the years. And at least they have some data to back up their ideas and speculations...
Excuse me but I think I'm going to write a book about a new kind of computer science now...
Sounds like a bit of a troll to me but I'll bite.
First, noone said that scientists shouldn't be paid or even whether there should be a profit motive - that's an entire straw man - the question is whether the advancement of science is hindered or helped by the presence of patents. I would argue that patents hinder biotech and also that you can make money without patents - you just have be more clever than being the first to stake out your claim.
Let us take a look at your example - your assay procedure. From what I read, you had to spend time developing an assay system because no good commercial solutions existed. Therefore when a superior commercial solution finally came about, you conclude that patents are a good thing because they motivated the development of a better cheaper assay. Of course, had the process not been patentable you wouldn't have been that much worse off since you had your own assay anyway. Also, from what I gather, the motivation from the switch has as much to do with convenience as quality of the assay for which there would likely still be commercial turnkey solutions. Waters makes money selling HPLC systems even though HPLC is not patented because they do it better than you can. But let us say that patenting the procedure is the only way it could be made sufficiently profitable for someone to spend the time to make it work well. The downside is that no further development of the process (which may or may not have been a trivial enhancement of the open source one), without having to worry about infringements. That is a pretty big downside esp considering that their methodology was based upon the work of another publically funded researcher.
When I worked at the bench, we had to buy our Taq polymerase commercially, not because it was difficult (it was trivial) but because of the patent on the procedure. This is what I have a problem with - patents used to enforce exclusivity of procedures that any well equipped lab could otherwise do.
Now back to the profit motive. We write open source software for bioinformatics and structural biology. That doesn't mean that if it turns out to be successful that we couldn't profit off of it - as long as the software is truly useful and the ideas are truly difficult to expand upon then there will always be a demand for someone who understands it, no matter where that code is. That is, of course as long as no one is able to copy, make minor modifications, and patent the idea...
It is not surprising given the source. If you've had the misfortune of reading Ingram's articles you would discover very quickly that he is not a technical person but a business writer who knows just enough - to get things completely wrong. A poor man's John Dvorak...
Unfortunately, he is also one of the better Globe and Mail business writers too - but hey they're there to sell advertising not get things right or to be informative...
There may be some truth to this. A good example is that of H Pylori, a bacterium discovered back in the 80's that is a major factor in peptic ulcers. There should be a Nobel prize for this since it was against the wisdom of the time which held that excess acid production caused ulcers and the biggest money makers were acid reducers like Zantac and Tagumet. It wasn't until the mid 90's that the obvious antibiotic therapy was easily available in Canada - (my father had an ulcer around '95 and he was given antibiotics - a friend had it the year earlier and had no idea that bacteria were involved...). A lot of this probably had to do with the way the medical community is entrenched in its thinking esp in Canada (lumpectomies are *still* frowned upon by some idiot surgeons...).
In the end, however antibiotic treatment, in conjunction with newer proton pump inhibitors has been adopted, Zantac (which went off-patent in '97) has been relegated to an OTC role so the "open source" treatment did win out. Yet I have always wondered how much more quickly the new therapy would have been introduced had it involved something other than cheap antibiotics and whether these guys would have won the Nobel by now as they deserve.
Others have a somewhat stronger viewpoint...http://www.orc.ru/~yur77/pylori.pdf
Back in the 80's the CBC FM would just put canned classical music on at late night - no hosts no nothing. Somehow, they completed deviated from their classical/jazz lineup and as an experiment Brave New Waves was born playing alternative music when it was alternative. A wide variety of stuff - Einsturzende Neubauen, Pogues, Butth0le surfers, Skinny Puppy, Jesus Mary Chain... It had a really cool hostess Augusta Le Pay who would munch on pizza while interviewing Laurie Andersen and a pyschic before playing an hour of the sound of fences howling in the wind. Remember this was at a time when alternative music got no air play and on a network known for it's news and playing Vivaldi's 4 seasons every 20 minutes.
Hopefully Zed will be the net version of this with just completely off-the-wall content. I'm not that optimistic - but we'll see. A lot of Brave New Waves success had to do with Augusta's and her producer's skill walking the thin line between quirky and interesting and stupid and dull...
And get over this "state run is crap" stuff (friggin' Enron fanboys...) - the CBC and BBC for that matter do occasionally provide programming that is a counterpoint to for example, Fox's "Who's your Daddy?"...
Low level specs are great but I have a real 1Ghz transmeta chip on a sub 2 pound Sharp notebook (OK 2.5 with big battery). It lasts 9 hours like it says (tested on a long flight) and runs more than fast enough with XP for Powerpoint, Word and not bad even with a pig like CorelDraw. The power cord accidentally got unplugged while it was connected to the network once and it still had half the battery left after nearly a week on intermittent sleep
The price performance thing is pretty meaningless as long as it is fast enough to do what you need. Not everyone uses their laptop as a primary machine, or for video processing. My main need was something that didn't weigh like a lead brick and could let me do real work on a long flight or a meeting without having to plug in somewhere. The Sharp/Transmeta does that admirably.
As for the Centrino - it may be great - I don't know but I wouldn't go by spec-sheet alone (Xeons are the fastest chip right?). I'm curious if anyone here has *real world* experience with the Centrino based Sony? My understanding is that it has about half the battery life of the Sharp from the user reviews and I certainly don't discount that this might be because of different power management schemes that don't relate to the chip. But as a end-user consumer the Sharp notebook was a lot cheaper than the Sony last I checked and is far from being a sub-par product.
The difference between science and other studies is that there is a well established scientific method for determining scientific truth. If hypothesis can be verified by experiment then it is accepted. Ms Irigaray can scream at the top of her lungs that the distinction between red and green is a product of sexist bias but that won't stop her from getting run over at the next intersection.
The problem is that nowadays the experiments are so much more complicated than crossing the street that the layman cannot understand the results. Hence, they need to reference sources many degrees of separation from the primary data. Irigaray's rants become equated with the theory of Einstein because people don't understand the Michelson Morley experiment and that the reasoning that follows its interpretation leading to relativity are *not* arbitrary.
As for your examples. Everyone knew Lysenko was full of crock - possibly even Lysenko. Or to put it another way, the data, even then, did not support his assertions. As for nature/nurture debates and climatology - these will be resolved eventually - with more evidence. Not loudness of shouting, not voting, not modding up or down, not TV campaigns but evidence. That's science. Whether people decide to listen - well that's politics...