Well really it’s not their colon cancer patients they’re telling to bend over but their new-found breast and lung cancer patients they want to grab their ankles. Genentech had its drug Avastin (bevacizumab), a monoclonal antibody for Vascular Endothelial Growth Factor (VEGF) which prevents the growth of new blood vessels to cancerous tumors, approved for the treatment of colon cancer in 2004. Currently Genentech is selling $1 billion per year of Avastin and recent trials have shown that Avastin may also be effective at extending the lives of breast and lung cancer patients. To celebrate the good news Genentech announced it is doubling the price of Avastin for breast and lung cancer patients. It seems that the smart guys and gals at Genentech and their partner Roche have found that when people's lives are at stake there is considerable price inelasticity of demand for the drugs needed to keep them alive. "As we look at Avastin and Herceptin pricing, right now the health economics hold up, and therefore I don't see any reason to be touching them," said William M. Burns, the chief executive of Roche's pharmaceutical division and a member of Genentech's board. "The pressure on society to use strong and good products is there." I see. The “pressure on society” is there, so it’s perfectly O.K. for you to charge whatever you like for your product. A product developed with significant expenditure of public research dollars. A product for which you hold a state enforced monopoly in the form of patents. A product that only extends cancer patients lives an average of 5 months. A product currently involved in 94 clinical trials for nearly two dozen different cancers. A product expected to reach $7 billion in sales by 2009. A product you set a price for in colon cancer patients that would recoup your R&D costs and earn you a hefty profit on your product. Why is it necessary to charge twice as much for the same product in breast and lung cancer patients? Could it be because you’re greedy pigs? http://www.pigpalssanctuary.com/pictures/piggie.htm I do have one question for you piggies: What makes you different than a hostage taker demanding a ransom? The only blog inspired by a Bumper Sticker.

I realize that there comes a point of diminishing returns when criticizing and making fun of the intellectually vacuous propaganda that is "Intelligent Design". But I just can't help myself. Pharma Bawd made me go there to tell her what they were up to, and I saw this: Aarrghh!!! Of course! Why didn't I notice that models of DNA are designed before now? It's so obvious now that I've had the blinders of Darwinian orthodoxy taken from my eyes... Lets see what else may be an artifact of design. I think we can all agree that a soccer ball is designed But, what about a Bucky Ball? Sure, this model is designed just like the model of the DNA in the ID throw pillow (really? a throw pillow?) but is the molecule itself designed? Of course not, it's formed as a by-product of burning carbon. There's nothing there but very cool chemistry. Where is the Intelligent Design vs. Valence Shell Electron Pair Repulsion theory of molecular structure? I mean it's just a theory afterall. On a side note, I did learn that Bill DembskiDave Scot grows his own Japanese culinary mushrooms in semi-sterile conditions in his lab. That's a pretty cool "science" thing to do. I'm building a laminar flow hood in my shed so I can do sterile culture propagation of orchids myself. So, BillDave and I do share some common ground. We're both geeks. The only blog inspired by a Bumper Sticker.

PZ Myers points out this post at Northstate Science which discusses the 24 year old college drop out who attempted to censor NASA scientists. (The News that George Deutsch had never finished college was brought to light by blogger Nick Anthis of Scientific Activist.) Deutsch was appointed to his post at NASA by the Bush administration for his efforts on the campaign trail. As Northstate Science points out there is a similar situation taking place in our national parks: "...under the direction of Assistant Secretary of the Interior Paul Hoffman, the Park Service is re-writing its management policy guides. These reflect the larger vision expressed by the Park Service for management of our national parks and will guide the manner in which future policies and decisions are implemented." " The new guidelines would drop mention of evolution from National Park materials, they would drop scientific standards for manging the parks, and they would turn back policies aimed at the environmental protection of the parks. These rewrites come from a "former Cody, Wyoming Chamber of Commerce staffer with no National Parks experience"naturally. This is a great blog and a great article about continued efforts to privatize our National Parks. It makes mention of these articles in the George Wright forum which discuss the prospects for privatizing various aspects of our National Parks. Privatization: An Overview Maurice H. Schwartz, guest editor Privatization: An Overview—Introduction and Summary / Maurice H. Schwartz From Public to Private: Five Concepts of Park Management and Their Consequences / Thomas A. More The Greater Realities of Privatization: A Historian’s Perspective / Alfred Runte Entrepreneurism in America’s State Parks / Ney C. Landrum Beyond the Public Park Paradigm / Sylvia LeRoy Competitive Sourcing in Our National Parks / Geoffrey F. Segal The Effects of Neo-Conservatism on Park Science, Management, and Administration: Examples and a Discussion / John Shultis Forces Underlying the Emergence of Privatization in Parks and Recreation (Executive Summary) / John L. Crompton A New Tragedy for the Commons: The Threat of Privatization to National Parks (and Other Public Lands) / Bill Wade The Recreation Fee Demonstration Program and Beyond / Scott Silver Everyone who wishes to pass the National Parks we inherited from our grandparents, on to our grandshildren should go here and get involved. The only blog inspired by a Bumper Sticker.

by Pharma Bawd I have a dirty little secret. I’ve never told a soul, but Tara’s call for submissions has fond memories of my last encounter flooding over me, filling me with guilt. I’m so embarrassed! What if my children found out? I can’t tell my husband, he wouldn’t understand. Hell, I don’t even understand why I do it. I just know I can’t stop. I remember my first time like it was yesterday. It was a Friday, nobody was around, so I tried it. It was AMAZING! I’d never felt that way before, like I was Queen of the World! I was the expert. I had ALL the answers. Once, in grad school, I was teaching a biology class and I had a similar experience, but this... this was different. I was on a higher plane! It was incredible. When I finished, I was glad I'd done it. It felt good! Hell, I went away from the experience feeling better about myself. God, how I curse that day! I thought I’d never do it again. I had my fun, nobody knew, I'll walk away like it never happened. Then, one day, I was feeling down, I was bored. So I did it again, and it was as good as the first time! Hey! It’s not like you think. It’s not just a feel-good joy-ride, it’s frustrating too. Every time, the second I start, I can feel pressure growing inside me. Sometimes it builds slowly and I feel it rising through my body, my heart beats faster, the pressure on my lungs makes me labor for breath... Then, other times, it comes on me all of a sudden, but every time, it ends the same, a mad cathartic explosion: anger, joy, confusion, banging my keyboard, kicking my desk, shouting out expletives, I fall from my chair laughing, shouting, and crying out to Darwin!... Every time I go away from that experience I’m certain that that time, that LAST time, was my absolute last. But it isn’t. I did it again today, and I know in my heart, I’ll do it again tomorrow. Once, when it looked like they were going to take it away from me for good.... I wept. I know it’s wrong, I don’t need you to tell me that. I know it’s a false sense of security, that my conquests in that fantasy world are meaningless, masturbatory, and an utter waste of my time... As Darwin’s my witness, I will never go to Uncommon Descent again! And this time, I mean it! Since they banned me and deleted my comments that first day, making going there an even bigger waste of time, I’ll post my last act of this particular intellectual Onanism here. Dembski asks: Does Darwinian Evolution Explain Antibiotic Resistance? About this article in Science: Sampling the Antibiotic Resistome Vanessa M. D’Costa,1 Katherine M. McGrann,1 Donald W. Hughes,2 Gerard D. Wright1* Microbial resistance to antibiotics currently spans all known classes of natural and synthetic compounds. It has not only hindered our treatment of infections but also dramatically reshaped drug discovery, yet its origins have not been systematically studied. Soil-dwelling bacteria produce and encounter a myriad of antibiotics, evolving corresponding sensing and evading strategies. They are a reservoir of resistance determinants that can be mobilized into the microbial community. Study of this reservoir could provide an early warning system for future clinically relevant antibiotic resistance mechanisms. Wow! I can’t believe he’d ask a question like this so soon. You’d think these guys would have learned that soil microorganisms are not to be messed with. To answer Dembski’s rhetorical question: No. Of course “Darwinian” evolution can’t explain all instances of antibiotic resistance. Although it can explain many, some of which are cited in the very article you offer your readers. Forty percent of resistant isolates were capable of inactivating the drug, which is intriguing because clinically, the most prevalent mechanism of rifampin resistance is through point mutations in the target: RNA polymerase_s b subunit.) For Darwin’s sake! Billy Dembski, you know Darwin didn’t know about DNA, you silly boy. <\batting eyelashes > However, if we incorporate the knowledge that DNA is the genetic material, as we do in modern theories of evolution, and we understand the very first experiments that proved that DNA is the genetic material, we can synthesize a modern theory of evolution that easily explains the phenomenon of antibiotic resistance among microorganisms. Additionally, we can explain how and why this antibiotic resistance, once arisen anywhere in the microbial world, can be expected to find its way into our hospitals. Soil on earth is teeming with life. From Behe’s cross examination in Dover we learn that one ton of soil contains 10 to the 16th prokaryotic organisms. That’s 150,000,000,000,000,000 bugs in the top six inches of my backyard alone! Excuse me a moment. (calling out: Kids! Wash your hands before supper!) Sorry about that, where was I? Oh, life in the soil is tough! There’s a whole lot of competition and the food, what there is of it, is not all that great. To survive in the soil you’ve got to live off the land, literally, you’ve got to stake your claim and then you have to defend it. Only then can you settle down with... uh... yourself, and raise a little family of a few hundred million children/siblings. So what’s the best way to accomplish this? First, you’ve got to be willing to eat anything! Second, once you find anything to eat you’ve got to eat it before your 10 to the 16th greedy neighbors come and eat it first. One way to keep the greedy neighbors away is to poison the food, this will usually kill their appetite for the succulent carbon source you’ve discovered. Thing is you don't want to kill yourself or your offspring/siblings. If you choose this tactic you need to pick a poison that won’t kill you and the little ones. Having a unique enzyme that can break down the poison is a great way to do that. And since, even with all the unnecessary obstacles the Intelligent Design Creationists throw in your way, it will only take the organisms living in the backyards of the 1000 houses in my neighborhood 1 year to evolve such an enzyme from scratch, according to Behe’s calculations, that seems like a good way to go. According to the paper in Science, that's a very popular choice: We uncovered a wealth of inactivating enzymes produced by soil bacteria. Of the 11 antibiotics screened, bacterial isolates were detected that putatively metabolized 6 drugs (Table 1), including rifampicin and Synercid. Alternatively you could export the toxin from your cell, leaving even more in the food to drive the neighbors away. But what if it’s the Fourth of July? And your cousins from out of town, who you haven’t seen in like 60,000 generations, show up. Well, they aren’t going to be able to eat that smorgasboard of cellulose you’ve found unless they can break down the poison you put in it to keep the neighbors at bay. There are three ways you can help your relatives out: 1. Conjugation 2. Transformation 3. Transduction These three mechanisms allow antibiotic resistance and other beneficial genes to be passed from bacterium to bacterium. They can even be passed between different bacterial species, spreading a gene that will confer a tremendous selective advantage on any bacterium that finds itself in an environment that’s inundated with antibiotics, like a hospital. Once the genes for antibiotic resistance are present in a hospital, they are extremely difficult to get rid of because of the many ways that those DNA sequencees can be taken up and transferred by multiple bacterial species. Once present, these genes are maintained in the population by, you guessed it, natural selection. Don’t miss the comments at Uncommon Descent. Dave Scot trumpets the vindication of Lamarck, and Salvador Cordova, (Oh Sal! I’m gonna miss you the most.) Is helpful as always. They even go off on a paper in PLoS Biology that reports the researchers were able to STOP evolution of resistance to the DNA damaging antibiotic Ciprofloxacin in E coli by preventing activation of the SOS DNA repair pathway. My God, what a discovery! These actual scientists were able to stop evolution in the lab, therefore, it can’t happen anywhere! I got news for the UD guys, if you kill the entire population it ain’t gonna evolve squat. Just ask the Dodoes. Update: On second thought, don't go read the thread at uncommon descent. Just go over to Aetiology and read all the great articles Tara has collected for the inaugural edition of her new blog Carnival Animalcules. "Bacteria acquiring resistance to antibiotics is an active response. It supports descent with modification and vindicates Lamarck." -- Dave Scot The only blog inspired by a bumper sticker.

by Pharma Bawd This is a very strange case of blog-imitating-life-anticipated-by-advertising. Maybe advertisers really have learned how to read our minds to target advertising based on our thoughts. To tell you the truth, I expected it to come from Google first. It’s all my fault really, I suggested we drop the Google Adsense ads in protest of Google agreeing to censor its search results for the Chinese government. (The only reason we have the ads is in hopes of generating enough revenue to pay for a hosted domain instead of using blogspot.) So we signed up with Crispads Join the CrispAds Blog Advertising Network! (Yes, we may get $.50 if you ad CrispAds to your blog through that referral.) We posted the code into the template and our new ad appeared. Now, don’t take this or any subsequent posts as a suggestion that you click on the ad. I mean, click on it if you want, or not, depending on your interest in the advertisement itself. Don’t interpret this as me encouraging you to click the ad. Do so if you want, but not because I said to. Because I didn’t. I just draw attention to it because it’s strange. No, not the subject of the ad itself, although it is a subject that rarely comes up in most people’s casual conversations or blog posts. The odd thing is I’ve been preparing to write about Herpes. Orac seems to have a lot of fun debunking “alternative” medicine treatments like chelation therapy for autism and the like. These posts are a valuable public service frankly. Even a well-educated laymen can’t be expected to recognize every sham product, snake oil, and patent medicine offered on the internet at first glance. So, I thought maybe I would get in on the act talking about some “alternative medicines” and their pharmaceutical counterparts. But which one? I thought about writing about some of the most highly “Googled” pharmaceuticals but those turn out to be things like Oxycodone, Xanex, Viagra, etc. and although any traffic to the blog generated by Google would be great, I think most of those people wouldn’t be too happy with what they found here. So I started thinking what would be a “good” thing to write about? Something that would actually be helpful and appreciated by the random people who wound up here through a Google search for instance, something that not every blogger and skeptic is already talking about, something that attracts a lot of products of dubious efficacy, something that affects a lot of people who might not have access to good information or may, out of desperation, be “willing to try anything.” That’s when I thought of the perfect topic: Herpes. Herpes is a great subject for such a project because there is a huge unmet medical need for treatment, there are several legitimate effective treatments to control the outbreaks of Herpes, and there are numerous products that make dubious claims as to efficacy. Many are sold at high cost right here on the internet. When I saw the new ad I was like: “Oh no. If this is one of those alternative medicine treatments I’m gonna slam them, and there goes our advertising empire. Again! I’ll just have to register a domain name myself and be done with the whole advertising thing.” But it wasn’t. It’s a very legitimate company with a legitimate product with proven effectiveness in FDA evaluated clinical trials. What a relief. Now, although I do work in the pharmaceutical industry, I do not work for the company advertising on this site. (Although I may have worked for them in the past. It’s tough to keep straight with all the mergers. I once worked for three different companies in one day all without getting up from my desk!) And as for advertising revenues from the ad, one of the reasons we chose to go with Crispads is that they’ll pay out your earnings when they reach $5.00 instead of waiting until you have $100.00 with adsense. I probably would have retired before we ever got out first check from adsense. Hopefully with Crispads we’ll be able to register a domain and move away from blogspot just like the big boys in the blogosphere do. So don’t think I’m some blog-whore pimping for my advertisers. That’s my day job, and I make a lot more there than I ever will on the internet! So, I’ll be doing a series of articles about Herpes. They’ll probably go something like this: 1. Revolutionary Cure For Herpes!!! Not. This will be a Skeptical Pharmacy Friday post (a planned regular irregular feature with the lofty goal of one article every two weeks on, of all days, Friday.) I’ll take a look at one “alternative” treatment for Herpes this week and evaluate whether it’s worth the money or should we just get a prescription. 2. Molecular Biology and Treatment of Herpes. I’ll discuss how the virus is transmitted, what it does inside the cell, and how current legitimate treatments to control the symptoms of Herpes function. 3. Alternative Medicine and Herpes. This will be about truly alternative Herpes medicine, in that I will be talking about uses of the Herpes virus to treat other diseases through gene therapy. I may do a post before Friday on the Herpes viruses just to provide a little background information prior to discussing treatments. PhB Update: Oh well. Looks like the ad changes periodically. There was an advertisement for famvir earlier. I'm still going ahead with the series. What are the odds of something like that happening by chance? I feel that this was a sign from the internet gods, I must obey their calling. 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A post-doc in the Moment of Science Laboratories has worked out the biochemical pathway by which evolution information is metabolized by the Blogosphere. Click here for the clickable image. Oh, just in case anyone hasn't taken biochemistry. And, no. We don't plan on determining blogospheric metabolism of evolution information to this level of detail. Apologies to all those other great enzymes who participate in both catabolic and anabolic processes, who were not included. Future research will focus on other biochemical pathways by which the Blogosphere processes information. Please create links to this URL as the large image will probably be moved in the future. With regards to the Commissar. Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. The only blog inspired by a Bumper Sticker.

for Bison? Posted to the Friday Ark. The only blog inspired by a Bumper Sticker.