Please explain the thought process here to me: if reliable computational methods for predicting drug effectiveness exist, why are drug companies still testing new compounds in people, let alone animals? Do you figure it's how we satisfy our mad scientist urges? Or is there some credible explanation you'd like for advance for why a profit maximizing company would spend such an enormous amount of money ($800 million to bring out one new drug is a figure commonly cited) when computers could do all the work?
If you think that it's possible to simulate human biology in a way that makes clinical testing unnecessary, then you're clearly ignorant about the state of computational prediction. Of course, based on your misunderstanding of how placebo controls in trials work, you're obviously ignorant about a lot of things. Seriously, this is medical ethics 101--if there's a known and accepted treatment for a condition, that's what the 'placebo group' in your trial gets. Any new drug in testing today doesn't just need to work, it needs to show it's at least as good as what doctors would already be doing.
If you don't understand that, then it's hard for me to treat anything else you say on this topic as credible.
First off, given the boundless evil and greed of Big Pharma, one wonders why they'd continue to spend money on animal trials if they achieve nothing more than the production of plausible deniability for the inevitable failures in clinial development. Given that they already blame their failures on the complexities of biology and the difficult regulatory environment, the benefit produced by pointing at animal test results seems pretty slim. How does your scenario work? "Well, shareholders, it's true that we've spent $50 billion this year and only put one new drug on the market, while we've had to withdraw three old drugs for unforeseen side effects, but, in our defense, we injected it into bunnies first and that seemed to work okay." Really, is that how you imagine it?
Second, do you by chance know how many potential compounds fail in animal testing before they even make it into people? If you start with 1000 compounds, and 900 are disqualified by preclinical testing (which includes animal testing) before the remaining hundred enter human trials, that's still a pretty substantial benefit. Indeed, that's about the proportion of compounds which are dropped prior to Phase 1, although the statistics I've seen don't break out animal testing specifically. The alternative to testing in animals, barring significant advances in computational predictive methods, would be to test each of those thousand compounds in people with minimal prior knowledge of safety. So for someone so concerned about animal welfare you're shockingly cavalier about the well-being of other human beings.
I wonder, do you resolve this apparent paradox by actually putting your own health and safety on the line by volunteering for Phase 1 studies? Do you keep your morals unsullied by refusing to take any medication which was tested in animals? Or are you a hypocrite in addition to being utterly ignorant?
You can't simulate with any certainty how a living thing will react in toto to a new drug--if that were possible we'd save ourselves the hundreds of millions currently spent in clinical testing and we'd just run simulations. But there are things you can usefully simulate even if you lack a full understanding of the biological processes involved. For example, it's fairly routine to simulate a drug's pharmacokinetics based on animal data and analogy to other known drugs. This helps us choose doses for clinical trials, it helps us figure out how many patients we need to test in order to produce robust results. Nothing about this is worthless--good sample size estimates minimize unnecessary patient risk and save money.
Then maybe, I dunno, explain to your parents that there's no a lot of value in sitting there while your child bashes at the laptop for 40 minutes a night. I mean, Jesus, seriously? NOTHING a two year old does is that interesting.
In one of Michael Collin's books he mentions what was referred to as the 'poor bastard' scenario for Mars exploration, in which they send up some poor bastard who does science for as long as he can until his supplies run out. As you can imagine, there was never a lot of political enthusiasm for the idea.
Type I diabetes is caused by the autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin. It has nothing to do with corn syrup or the FDA.
That position makes sense if you believe that other people will actually stand with you. Personally, when I observe the way people drive in traffic, or the way they leave a public restroom, it becomes very clear to me that you can't expect the average person to show the slightest consideration for his fellows unless there is some incentive for him to do so. The GPP is a clear example of that--if the other people at the checkpoint when the little girl ran away had refused to allow them to hold the parents, the screeners might have backed down. But they all considered the risk of missing their flights, or the chance of being detained or arrested, and they decided to do nothing.
My point being, if you're arguing that civil disoberdience in the solution to this problem, I'd like for you to explain what gives you confidence that other people will stand with you. I thought National Opt-Out Day was a great idea, but it probably wasn't enough to really hurt the TSA. Maybe an Occupy Airport movement, lasting days, would do the job.
I don't really see how air marshalls solve anything. Since 9/11 there have been several incidents of suspicious or dangerous behavior on planes, e.g., the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, even that pilot who flipped out in flight a few weeks ago. In each of these situations, the offender was restrained by passengers armed with nothing more than what they'd carried on to the plane. Having a big guy with a bean bag launcher wouldn't have changed that. I would go so far as to say it would be almost impossible to carry out a 9/11-type plot on an airplane at this point--hence the focus on explosives. Bruce Schneier said it nicely: the only two things that have improved airline security since 9/11 are reinforced cockpit doors and passenger awareness. We'd be better off relaxing the current security standards to pre-9/11 levels (minus box cutters and things of that nature) and using the money saved to fund better intelligence and investigation of threats.
Equating making a stink at an airport security checkpoint with the American Revolution is a little idiotic. The founding fathers didn't hassle individual British tax collectors and tell themselves they were fighting the good fight. They had a plan of action with a clear endgame. If you have something like that for our modern situation (for example, the National Opt-Out Day) then that's worth talking about. But suggesting people should screw themselves over with no hope of actually changing things is self-righteous and silly.
I mean, heck, you could go to your nearest airport right now and heckle the TSA goons, and yet somehow I doubt you're about to. Maybe because you don't have any desire to inconvenience yourself for no appreciable gain.
I notice you didn't quote the part of my post where I stated I think the government should force everyone to pay for a space program. Maybe because there wasn't one?
Here's an idea for the politicians out there: if parents are unable or unwilling to monitor and regulate the behavior of their children, IT IS NOT THE JOB OF GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM. When an army of porn-addled youngsters starts rioting in the streets, then maybe we should consider drastic measures. In the meantime, please stop couching every idiotic bit of nanny state nonsense in terms of protecting the poor defenseless children.
And yet what would a private company ever get out of a Mars mission? What's the return on investment, and ultimately what is such a venture providing, and who is paying for it? I mean, nothing stops Boeing or Lockheed for building unmanned probes that could be used to investigate the solar system (maybe selling the data to scientific institutions?) but they're not doing it, and compared to a manned flight to Mars, the cost is peanuts.
How much food do you eat a day? Because with so many starving people in the world, the only moral option is to cut yourself down to starvation rations and give the surplus to the needy.
Do you have any evidence to support that point? Because while I think there may be a lot of reasons to focus on airplanes as a target, I don't see any reason to think that seeking synergy with common existing phobias is one of them. By that kind of logic, you may as well argue that terrorists would only attack at night, to capitalize on people's fear of the dark.
I've thought of it in economics terms. Like, for an example, take engagement rings. If you're proposing to a woman, you know you love her, and she knows you love her. A ring is just a way of showing, with cash on the barrelhead, that you're serious about her. You're paying a substantial cost up front to show you mean business. Prayer and ritual is the same thing--god doesn't just want you to love him. He wants you to love him until it costs you something.
Kind of makes you wonder why a supposedly higher being would be such a narcissistic crybaby, doesn't it? Even if he did exist I wouldn't want to kiss his ass.
As I asked someone else above, do you think that a black man might have that mentality because he has grown up in a society dominated by white cultural views, including racism? Or do you believe he has investigated the statistics around mugging and determined that he is much more likely to be victimized by a black person?
Do you think that a black man might have that mentality because he lives in a society that is largely dominated by white cultural views, which include racism?
In the interest of completeness it should be pointed out that one of the kids instructed his buddies to "take him [the victim] down," at which point the victim told them to "Remember Trayvon." It was after that they the beating started and one of the kids reportedly said "this is for Trayvon." The article at the Daily Mail states that the police don't know if the attack was racially motivated or if they interpreted "Remember Trayvon" as a racist remark. So to suggest that this was some kind of reverse lynch mob is a bit of a stretch, which of course does not prevent the Daily Mail from labeling it a 'twisted racial revenge' attack.
Please don't say idiotic things. While you will find morons on both sides of the aisle who only object to certain things when the other political party does them, there are plenty of Obama voters who are very unhappy about his trampling of civil liberties. Maybe if the Republicans could field a serious candidate, instead of a religious crank like Santorum, then I would not find myself choosing Obama as the lesser of two evils.
Behe is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University, but otherwise you're basically correct. I had him as a professor for basic biochemistry and science writing when I was a student there. He was a perfectly nice guy and didn't push his beliefs in class, but it's true that on the department website there's a statement from the rest of the faculty denouncing his belief in ID. And it's also true that he received a truly embarassing spanking during the Dover trial... I cringed a little when I watched the NOVA reenactment of it.
You should tell Pfizer that there's no money in vaccines, because last time I checked, Prevnar made them about a billion dollars a year. Besides, vaccine-preventable diseases are generally either bacterial or viral. There's not much to do about viruses besides vaccination. And most bacterial diseases (apart from some nasty resistant strains) can be knocked off with generic antibiotics that cost a few cents per pill. So explain to me why Big Pharma would rather sell some cheap antibiotics (and remember, they can't sell anything at all for viral diseases) when they could instead sell you a vaccine subsidized by government cash? I know, conspiracy theories are fun, but try to consider basic economics before you start raving.
Wow, you're remarkably ignorant. You'll notice the we haven't eradicated most of the diseases for which vaccines exist (smallpox is really the only eradicated disease), and yet the old vaccines remain effective. It's almost like, by reducing the number of people who can be infected, you're reducing the opportunity for mutations conveying increased virulence to occur. It's also worth pointing out that mutations don't magically make pathogens super powerful. A mutation that enables a bug to evade an existing immune response might well compromise its fitness in other ways that make it less effectives in unprotected hosts. Further, for bacterial diseases, vaccination greatly reduces the need to treat with antibiotics, which are a much more potent driver of resistance than vaccination is.
If you have any actual evidence showing the flu vaccination increases the intensity of flu viruses, by all means, provide it. Of course, you point out that the virus changes with time, so it's not really clear to me how flu virus X gets worse due to vaccination for flu virus Y (technically possible, but not particularly likely).
Whether seasonal flu vaccination is worthwhile outside of high risk populations is a topic epidemiologists are divided on, but pretty much everything else about your post was bullshit.
Maybe I'm misremembering the episode about handicap access, but I thought the point was more that a one size fits all approach (e.g., mandates by the federal government) produce a lot of collateral damage without necessarily improving access conditions. I.e., there may be cases where being forced to adhere to certain aspects of ADA will force a business to close, when there might have been another way to accomodate handicapped customers that wouldn't be ADA-compliant.
No excuses on the climate change thing, though. Skepticism is good and healthy, and there's always room for honest scientific debate, but to pretend that the evidence doesn't overwhelmingly point to anthropic climate change is just dishonest.
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And yet I imagine you pay taxes. So clearly some measure of imposition upon your freedom by means of coercive force is accepted.
Please explain the thought process here to me: if reliable computational methods for predicting drug effectiveness exist, why are drug companies still testing new compounds in people, let alone animals? Do you figure it's how we satisfy our mad scientist urges? Or is there some credible explanation you'd like for advance for why a profit maximizing company would spend such an enormous amount of money ($800 million to bring out one new drug is a figure commonly cited) when computers could do all the work?
If you think that it's possible to simulate human biology in a way that makes clinical testing unnecessary, then you're clearly ignorant about the state of computational prediction. Of course, based on your misunderstanding of how placebo controls in trials work, you're obviously ignorant about a lot of things. Seriously, this is medical ethics 101--if there's a known and accepted treatment for a condition, that's what the 'placebo group' in your trial gets. Any new drug in testing today doesn't just need to work, it needs to show it's at least as good as what doctors would already be doing.
If you don't understand that, then it's hard for me to treat anything else you say on this topic as credible.
This is wrong, I'm afraid.
First off, given the boundless evil and greed of Big Pharma, one wonders why they'd continue to spend money on animal trials if they achieve nothing more than the production of plausible deniability for the inevitable failures in clinial development. Given that they already blame their failures on the complexities of biology and the difficult regulatory environment, the benefit produced by pointing at animal test results seems pretty slim. How does your scenario work? "Well, shareholders, it's true that we've spent $50 billion this year and only put one new drug on the market, while we've had to withdraw three old drugs for unforeseen side effects, but, in our defense, we injected it into bunnies first and that seemed to work okay." Really, is that how you imagine it?
Second, do you by chance know how many potential compounds fail in animal testing before they even make it into people? If you start with 1000 compounds, and 900 are disqualified by preclinical testing (which includes animal testing) before the remaining hundred enter human trials, that's still a pretty substantial benefit. Indeed, that's about the proportion of compounds which are dropped prior to Phase 1, although the statistics I've seen don't break out animal testing specifically. The alternative to testing in animals, barring significant advances in computational predictive methods, would be to test each of those thousand compounds in people with minimal prior knowledge of safety. So for someone so concerned about animal welfare you're shockingly cavalier about the well-being of other human beings.
I wonder, do you resolve this apparent paradox by actually putting your own health and safety on the line by volunteering for Phase 1 studies? Do you keep your morals unsullied by refusing to take any medication which was tested in animals? Or are you a hypocrite in addition to being utterly ignorant?
You can't simulate with any certainty how a living thing will react in toto to a new drug--if that were possible we'd save ourselves the hundreds of millions currently spent in clinical testing and we'd just run simulations. But there are things you can usefully simulate even if you lack a full understanding of the biological processes involved. For example, it's fairly routine to simulate a drug's pharmacokinetics based on animal data and analogy to other known drugs. This helps us choose doses for clinical trials, it helps us figure out how many patients we need to test in order to produce robust results. Nothing about this is worthless--good sample size estimates minimize unnecessary patient risk and save money.
Then maybe, I dunno, explain to your parents that there's no a lot of value in sitting there while your child bashes at the laptop for 40 minutes a night. I mean, Jesus, seriously? NOTHING a two year old does is that interesting.
In one of Michael Collin's books he mentions what was referred to as the 'poor bastard' scenario for Mars exploration, in which they send up some poor bastard who does science for as long as he can until his supplies run out. As you can imagine, there was never a lot of political enthusiasm for the idea.
Type I diabetes is caused by the autoimmune destruction of the pancreatic islet cells which produce insulin. It has nothing to do with corn syrup or the FDA.
That position makes sense if you believe that other people will actually stand with you. Personally, when I observe the way people drive in traffic, or the way they leave a public restroom, it becomes very clear to me that you can't expect the average person to show the slightest consideration for his fellows unless there is some incentive for him to do so. The GPP is a clear example of that--if the other people at the checkpoint when the little girl ran away had refused to allow them to hold the parents, the screeners might have backed down. But they all considered the risk of missing their flights, or the chance of being detained or arrested, and they decided to do nothing.
My point being, if you're arguing that civil disoberdience in the solution to this problem, I'd like for you to explain what gives you confidence that other people will stand with you. I thought National Opt-Out Day was a great idea, but it probably wasn't enough to really hurt the TSA. Maybe an Occupy Airport movement, lasting days, would do the job.
I don't really see how air marshalls solve anything. Since 9/11 there have been several incidents of suspicious or dangerous behavior on planes, e.g., the shoe bomber, the underwear bomber, even that pilot who flipped out in flight a few weeks ago. In each of these situations, the offender was restrained by passengers armed with nothing more than what they'd carried on to the plane. Having a big guy with a bean bag launcher wouldn't have changed that. I would go so far as to say it would be almost impossible to carry out a 9/11-type plot on an airplane at this point--hence the focus on explosives. Bruce Schneier said it nicely: the only two things that have improved airline security since 9/11 are reinforced cockpit doors and passenger awareness. We'd be better off relaxing the current security standards to pre-9/11 levels (minus box cutters and things of that nature) and using the money saved to fund better intelligence and investigation of threats.
That's why I usually just say 'measures of central tendency.' Precision ambiguity.
Equating making a stink at an airport security checkpoint with the American Revolution is a little idiotic. The founding fathers didn't hassle individual British tax collectors and tell themselves they were fighting the good fight. They had a plan of action with a clear endgame. If you have something like that for our modern situation (for example, the National Opt-Out Day) then that's worth talking about. But suggesting people should screw themselves over with no hope of actually changing things is self-righteous and silly.
I mean, heck, you could go to your nearest airport right now and heckle the TSA goons, and yet somehow I doubt you're about to. Maybe because you don't have any desire to inconvenience yourself for no appreciable gain.
I notice you didn't quote the part of my post where I stated I think the government should force everyone to pay for a space program. Maybe because there wasn't one?
Here's an idea for the politicians out there: if parents are unable or unwilling to monitor and regulate the behavior of their children, IT IS NOT THE JOB OF GOVERNMENT TO DO IT FOR THEM. When an army of porn-addled youngsters starts rioting in the streets, then maybe we should consider drastic measures. In the meantime, please stop couching every idiotic bit of nanny state nonsense in terms of protecting the poor defenseless children.
And yet what would a private company ever get out of a Mars mission? What's the return on investment, and ultimately what is such a venture providing, and who is paying for it? I mean, nothing stops Boeing or Lockheed for building unmanned probes that could be used to investigate the solar system (maybe selling the data to scientific institutions?) but they're not doing it, and compared to a manned flight to Mars, the cost is peanuts.
How much food do you eat a day? Because with so many starving people in the world, the only moral option is to cut yourself down to starvation rations and give the surplus to the needy.
Do you have any evidence to support that point? Because while I think there may be a lot of reasons to focus on airplanes as a target, I don't see any reason to think that seeking synergy with common existing phobias is one of them. By that kind of logic, you may as well argue that terrorists would only attack at night, to capitalize on people's fear of the dark.
I've thought of it in economics terms. Like, for an example, take engagement rings. If you're proposing to a woman, you know you love her, and she knows you love her. A ring is just a way of showing, with cash on the barrelhead, that you're serious about her. You're paying a substantial cost up front to show you mean business. Prayer and ritual is the same thing--god doesn't just want you to love him. He wants you to love him until it costs you something.
Kind of makes you wonder why a supposedly higher being would be such a narcissistic crybaby, doesn't it? Even if he did exist I wouldn't want to kiss his ass.
As I asked someone else above, do you think that a black man might have that mentality because he has grown up in a society dominated by white cultural views, including racism? Or do you believe he has investigated the statistics around mugging and determined that he is much more likely to be victimized by a black person?
Do you think that a black man might have that mentality because he lives in a society that is largely dominated by white cultural views, which include racism?
In the interest of completeness it should be pointed out that one of the kids instructed his buddies to "take him [the victim] down," at which point the victim told them to "Remember Trayvon." It was after that they the beating started and one of the kids reportedly said "this is for Trayvon." The article at the Daily Mail states that the police don't know if the attack was racially motivated or if they interpreted "Remember Trayvon" as a racist remark. So to suggest that this was some kind of reverse lynch mob is a bit of a stretch, which of course does not prevent the Daily Mail from labeling it a 'twisted racial revenge' attack.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2126003/Trayvon-Martin-case-6-youths-beat-man-78-twisted-racial-revenge-attack.html
Please don't say idiotic things. While you will find morons on both sides of the aisle who only object to certain things when the other political party does them, there are plenty of Obama voters who are very unhappy about his trampling of civil liberties. Maybe if the Republicans could field a serious candidate, instead of a religious crank like Santorum, then I would not find myself choosing Obama as the lesser of two evils.
Behe is a professor in the Department of Biological Sciences at Lehigh University, but otherwise you're basically correct. I had him as a professor for basic biochemistry and science writing when I was a student there. He was a perfectly nice guy and didn't push his beliefs in class, but it's true that on the department website there's a statement from the rest of the faculty denouncing his belief in ID. And it's also true that he received a truly embarassing spanking during the Dover trial... I cringed a little when I watched the NOVA reenactment of it.
You should tell Pfizer that there's no money in vaccines, because last time I checked, Prevnar made them about a billion dollars a year. Besides, vaccine-preventable diseases are generally either bacterial or viral. There's not much to do about viruses besides vaccination. And most bacterial diseases (apart from some nasty resistant strains) can be knocked off with generic antibiotics that cost a few cents per pill. So explain to me why Big Pharma would rather sell some cheap antibiotics (and remember, they can't sell anything at all for viral diseases) when they could instead sell you a vaccine subsidized by government cash? I know, conspiracy theories are fun, but try to consider basic economics before you start raving.
Wow, you're remarkably ignorant. You'll notice the we haven't eradicated most of the diseases for which vaccines exist (smallpox is really the only eradicated disease), and yet the old vaccines remain effective. It's almost like, by reducing the number of people who can be infected, you're reducing the opportunity for mutations conveying increased virulence to occur. It's also worth pointing out that mutations don't magically make pathogens super powerful. A mutation that enables a bug to evade an existing immune response might well compromise its fitness in other ways that make it less effectives in unprotected hosts. Further, for bacterial diseases, vaccination greatly reduces the need to treat with antibiotics, which are a much more potent driver of resistance than vaccination is. If you have any actual evidence showing the flu vaccination increases the intensity of flu viruses, by all means, provide it. Of course, you point out that the virus changes with time, so it's not really clear to me how flu virus X gets worse due to vaccination for flu virus Y (technically possible, but not particularly likely). Whether seasonal flu vaccination is worthwhile outside of high risk populations is a topic epidemiologists are divided on, but pretty much everything else about your post was bullshit.
Maybe I'm misremembering the episode about handicap access, but I thought the point was more that a one size fits all approach (e.g., mandates by the federal government) produce a lot of collateral damage without necessarily improving access conditions. I.e., there may be cases where being forced to adhere to certain aspects of ADA will force a business to close, when there might have been another way to accomodate handicapped customers that wouldn't be ADA-compliant. No excuses on the climate change thing, though. Skepticism is good and healthy, and there's always room for honest scientific debate, but to pretend that the evidence doesn't overwhelmingly point to anthropic climate change is just dishonest.