Science, Technology & Health: November 2003 Archives

As you can imagine, I don't like the idea of harvesting stem cells from fetal tissue. Fortunately, it looks like there may be another source of stem-cell-like cells: ordinary white blood cells.

A small company in London, UK, claims to have developed a technique that overturns scientific dogma and could revolutionise medicine. It says it can turn ordinary blood into cells capable of regenerating damaged or diseased tissues. This could transform the treatment of everything from heart disease to Parkinson's.

If the company, TriStem, really can do what it says, there would be no need to bother with conventional stem cells, currently one of the hottest fields of research. But its astounding claims have been met with bemusement and disbelief by mainstream researchers.

TriStem has been claiming for years that it can take a half a litre of anyone's blood, extract the white blood cells and make them revert to a "stem-cell-like" state within hours. The cells can be turned into beating heart cells for mending hearts, nerve cells for restoring brains and so on.

The company has now finally provided proof that at least some of its claims might be true. In collaboration with independent researchers in the US, the company has used its technique to turn white blood cells into the blood-generating stem cells found in bone marrow.

Therapy based on stem cell regeneration will possibly be able to cure the effects of every disease currently known to man, including cancer and aging. Human trials are underway.

So lets say we're all eventually given the option of living forever in perfect health, barring death by unnatural causes. Would you take the pill?

SDB has a great post up that explains how the FDA is the root of many American health care problems, from unnaturally expensive drugs to the illegality of some "miracle cures".

The approval process is so long and so involved and requires such a mountain of data to be collected, that it is massively expensive. The total cost for development and approval can exceed $100 million per drug. And a lot of money can be consumed during the testing and approval for drugs which are ultimately rejected.

Pharmaceutical companies have to recoup that cost, and the money can only come from sales of drugs after approval. That's why drugs which are still under patent are so expensive compared to generics after patent expiration. Generics are priced based on a markup over manufacturing and distribution costs, whereas drugs under patent are priced to amortize the cost of development and regulatory approval, as well as to amortize the money spent on other drugs which were rejected.

The amortization premium paid by Americans is all the greater because most other nations in the world "free ride" on American drug development. (The majority of that development is done here, even by European pharmaceutical companies.) They pay something like the generic price even for drugs still under patent, letting the US alone pay the amortized development cost. When it comes to nations like Zambia and Botswana, I think it's reasonable, but not for nations like Germany and the UK. There's no excuse for them not paying their share of the development costs, and the only reason they don't is that we let them get away with it. If other wealthy nations did not free-ride that way, the drug companies could spread the amortized cost over a larger number of sales and reduce the price we Americans pay.

See my previous entries about the FDA, if you're interested in some specific examples of when the FDA's over-cautious policies have cost hundreds of thousands of lives.

I wrote about outsourcing software to other countries with cheaper labor, and now it looks like Dell is having problems with its tech support call center based in India. What looks good on paper doesn't always turn out well in real life.

After an onslaught of complaints, computer maker Dell Inc. has stopped using a technical support center in India to handle calls from its corporate customers.

Some U.S. customers have complained that the Indian technical-support representatives are difficult to communicate with because of thick accents and scripted responses.

Rush's site has some interesting statistics from a Robert Samuelson column in the Washington Times (which I can't find) on the new prescription drug entitlement our Congress has just tacked onto Medicare. It looks like seniors don't even want it.

Robert Samuelson, who is one of my favorite columnists, is in the Washington Times. He's an economist. He says given all of the excitement you think that passing a Medicare drug benefit would solve one of the nation's pressing social problems. It won't, he says pointedly. But you wouldn't know that from politicians in the news media. They treat the elderly’s problems in getting drugs as a major social crisis. You would know it if you'd read a government survey of Medicare recipients in 2002. It asked this question. "In the last six months, how much of a problem, if any, was it to get the prescription medicine you needed?" The answers were, 86.5%, not a problem. 9.4%, a small problem. 4.2%, a big problem. This a government survey of Medicare recipients! And only 4.2% say it's a big problem! And we are creating the largest entitlement in 40 years to solve a big problem for 4.2%, not of the population, but of the Medicare population. Which is why I have been saying lets fix it for those people - 86.4%, it's not a problem. That's why we're not hearing from them on the phones here calling and complaining at me for standing in the way of something they need. It's not a problem. Prescription drugs are not a problem. It is a manufactured Washington politician problem, to advance the expansion of government conceptually and realistically. Now, let's put some numbers to these percentages, okay? Let me give you the percentages again. Numbers are hard to follow on the radio. Medicare recipient survey, 2002, federal government did the work. 86.5% getting drugs not a problem. 9.4%, small problem. 4.2%, a big problem. Medicare has 41 million beneficiaries. Even 4.2% represents about 1.7 million people. We are creating the nation's largest entitlement in 40 years to serve the needs of 1.7 million people. ...

One thing the government survey doesn't say is whether the problems of this 1.7 million people reflected high drug costs, doctors' reluctance to write scripts or something else. But most people can somehow afford their prescription drugs. Now, in 1999, about 30% of retirees had insurance from former employers. About 20% had government coverage, mainly from Medicaid and the department of veterans affairs. Another 25% bought insurance, called Medigap or had some other coverage. For the very poor without coverage, pharmaceutical companies provide free or heavily discounted drugs. Nobody designed this. It's a flawed and messy hodgepodge that on balance works, though. It works.

My biggest frustration with the Bush administration is its proliferate spending. Does Bush really think old people are going to start voting Republican if he gives them money? Please. I know a good number of older folks, and their political affiliation is pretty well set in concrete. My grandmother wouldn't vote for a guy with an R behind his name if he was running against the Marquis de Sade - D.

Ananova reports that the number of people living with HIV in the UK increased 20% last year, but doesn't indicate whether or not this is the result of a greater number of infections, or improved health care.

Overall, the number of people living with HIV in the UK went up from 41,700 in 2001 to 49,500 in 2002. ...

The number of heterosexual cases picked up in the UK increased from 147 in 1998 to 275 in 2002.

Overall, there were 5,711 people newly diagnosed with HIV in the UK in 2002 - expected to rise to 6,400 when all reports for the year are received.

Of these, 3,305 were heterosexually acquired and 1,691 were among gay and bisexual men.

So heterosexual infections increased over 4 years, but what about the 1-year period between 2001 and 2002?

A 20% surge in HIV infections over a single year is huge, and I don't think it can be accounted for as a natural fluctuation. My intuition tells me there are so many more people living with HIV largely because they aren't dying from AIDS, thanks to better health care. I'm sure the number of infections has risen as well, though, simply due to population increase.

MOAB

Donald Sensing points to a nifty new ad hoc invention -- designed by an Army sergeant stationed in Baghdad -- that can warm up injured people three times faster than commonly used hospital devices: it's called the "Chief Cuddler".

As the 25-year-old ward master, from Yorktown, Va., for the Surgical Intensive Care Unit (SICU) of the 28th Combat Support Hospital, from Fort Bragg, N.C., which is currently deployed in support of Operation Iraq Freedom, Irby said they needed something to warm patients who have lost a large amount of blood.

The result is a makeshift blue cardboard box, which resembles a young child’s playhouse, but it is more commonly known to staff at the 28th CSH as the “Chief Cuddler.”

“We receive critically-injured patients who often suffer from mass amounts of blood loss,” Irby said. “With blood loss the patient’s temperature will start to drop. With this drop in temperature the patients lack the ability to stop the internal bleeding.”

I love this kind of thing. Bravo.

What makes a good commando? More than just mental and physical toughness, apparently. Recent tests have shown that special operatives who can handle the stress of tough situations the best all have something in common: elevated levels of a hormone called neuropeptide-Y (or NPY). (No permalink, look for November 6th, 2003 entry.)

Candidates, many of whom were already experienced infantrymen, were put in situations where they were tired, had little sleep, and then given difficult chores to accomplish in a short amount of time. Those who were best at this were selected, and the selections proved accurate. Similar selection and training methods continued after World War II. But now blood tests of these elite warriors, compared to regular infantrymen, shows that it's all in the blood. More specifically, the elite warriors have highly elevated levels the hormone neuropeptide-Y (or NPY). Not much is known about NPY, although it appears to be a natural relaxant. Produced in the brain and intestine, NPY is also involved with appetite control, heart function and the quality of ones sleep. If you are one of those people who just naturally have a lot of NPY, you tend to be cool under pressure and very capable of handling stress. We all know people like this. But if you want to be a successful commando, you really need NPY. This is because even commandos generate large quantities of the stress hormone cortisol when under pressure. Without NPY to handle the cortisol, you will be just as stressed out and exhausted as a normal person. It's not normal to have a lot of NPY. But a commando is more than some buff, aggressive guy with a lot of NPY. While there appears to be a lot of blood and brain chemistry issues going on here, there are also the more traditional items like motivation and physical fitness. But these have always been easier to measure. In the future, it looks like more blood tests will also be part of the selection process. Another spin off from this research will probably be an attempt to create drugs that will give all soldiers the same advantages. Troops have been taking ability enhancing drugs for nearly a century. Amphetamines have been the most popular, as sheer fatigue has long been a major, and often fatal, problem on the battlefield. But dealing with stress is nearly as big a problem. An effective anti-stress pill would be welcomed on the battlefield, for it would increase chances of survival in an often fatal occupation.

The benefits of modern medicine and pharmaceuticals are amazing to me.

Pornographers -- or as I like to call them, "pornologists" -- are more market-savvy than music executives, judging from this article describing the present woes of the "adult publishing" industry and the adjustments its making.

NEW YORK - After 35 years in the business of titillating and offending, pornographer Al Goldstein says his magazine can't compete anymore. The audience is just as large, he says, but the Internet has transformed the product and its delivery. ...

Goldstein said circulation woes throughout the field show "we are an anachronism; we are dinosaurs; we are elephants going to the bone cemetery to die. ... The delivery system has changed, and we have to change with it if we want to survive." ...

Hustler Magazine publisher Larry Flynt, who says his company has succeeded in the new marketplace, agrees that magazines are a dying breed.

"This past decade has been very, very bad for men's magazines and it could become worse," he said by phone from his office in Los Angeles. "I'm not going to say it's going to become extinct because some people will always want to feel that magazine in their hands, but it's never going to have the impact it once had."

Porn isn't completely analogous to music -- anyone can produce porn but (supposedly) good music is harder to come by. Nevertheless, it's amusing to me that the porn industry is scrambling to stay ahead of the technology curve, while the more more highly-respected music industry is still hanging onto its prehistoric business model.

I had been struggling for a few weeks with some strange behavior I was getting from my dissertation project. I developed my software using the GPL'd Quake 2 engine, and I was surprised when it started crashing unexpectedly and displaying all sorts of weird artifacts. John Carmack and his cohorts are great programmers, and I knew there weren't bugs like this in the commercial game... but I also knew that I hadn't touched any of the code that was throwing me memory violations.

So I spent a few weeks debugging, and didn't get anywhere. I excised the entire collision system and reduced the frequency of fatal errors, but the system still wasn't stable enough to run for more than a few hours. Plus, I really want to use the collision system.

Most of my changes were to the standard data structures, particularly edict_s (which I use to represent my animats -- my artificial creatures). I added a three-dimensional array to keep track of each animat's world knowledge -- one dimension holds the "layers" of knowledge (like food locations, enemy locations, unexplored territory, &c.), and the other two dimensions represent the XY coordinate plane of the world. The world is a square 2048 units per side, and I didn't want the arrays to be that large, so I collapsed the XY plane into a 32x32 grid of "sectors", with each sector being 64x64 units in size; my knowledge array could then have 32x32 entries per layer (0 - 31 in each dimension), rather than 2048x2048.

Because of this granulation, however, I needed a routine to translate an animat's real coordinates into its sector coordinates, so I wrote the following:
#define GRIDX(x) ((int)x->s.origin[0]/C_GRIDSIZE)

#define GRIDY(x) ((int)x->s.origin[1]/C_GRIDSIZE)

Those macros take the X or Y coordinate of animat x and then divide it by C_GRIDSIZE, which is 64. No problem! Except... near the edges of the map it's possible for an animat to nudge itself slightly past 0 or 2047! The knowledge array in the animat structure only goes from 0 to 31, but occasionally these macros would return -1 or 32, or even worse! When I would then try to write to the array, I wasn't writing into the knowledge map at all, I wrote to other locations in the animat structure!

Sorry for all the exclamation points, but it's no wonder I was seeing strange behavior. I just changed the macros as such:
#define MIN(a, b) (a<b?a:b)

#define MAX(a, b) (a>b?a:b)

#define GRIDX(x) MIN(MAX(((int)x->s.origin[0]/C_GRIDSIZE),0),C_XMAX-1)

#define GRIDY(x) MIN(MAX(((int)x->s.origin[1]/C_GRIDSIZE),0),C_YMAX-1)

Everything seems to be quite stable now, and I'm going to leave it running overnight just to be sure. The lesson is: always bounds-check your arrays!

TMLutas at Flit concurs with my assessment of SDB's space elevator skepticism -- namely, that such skepticism is not warrented, and that the science and technology are available to make the project work.

But how far beyond? Jay Manifold discusses the potential limit of civilization, and links to another article on the same topic titled "The Physics of Extra-Terrestrial Civilization". Lots of somewhat-reasonable speculation, that's fun to think about.

Personally, I'll be quite surprised if we ever find extra-terrestrial intelligence, and I'll be only a little less surprised if we find ET life of any sort (after all, if there's any life, then there's probably intelligent life somewhere). Rather than waste time searching for such things, I think we should concentrate on getting as many people off the planet ASAP.

If you've got the time and energy, I highly recommend reading through Brian C. Anderson's article titled "We’re Not Losing the Culture Wars Anymore". It presents a fascinating and (honestly) awesome account of the ascension of conservative views in the media, largely due to the increased ease-of-access brought about by the internet, and good old capitialism. I'll quote a few paragraphs to whet your appetite, but really, do yourself a favor and go read the whole thing.

Adds Bernadette Malone, a former Regnery editor heading up Penguin’s new conservative imprint: “The success of Regnery’s books woke up the industry: ‘Hello? There’s 50 percent of the population that we’re underserving, even ignoring. We have an opportunity to talk to these people, figure out what interests them, and put out professional-quality books on topics that haven’t been sufficiently explored.’ ” Bellow puts it more bluntly: “Business rationality has trumped ideological aversion. And that’s capitalism.” ...

All these remarkable, brand-new transformations have sent the Left reeling. Fox News especially is driving liberals wild. Former vice president Al Gore likens Fox to an evil right-wing “fifth column,” and he yearns to set up a left-wing competitor, as if a left-wing media didn’t already exist. Comedian and activist Al Franken’s new book Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them is one long jeremiad against Fox. Washington Post media critic Tom Shales calls Fox a “propaganda mill.” The Columbia Journalism School’s Todd Gitlin worries that Fox “emboldens the right wing to feel justified and confident they can promote their policies.” “There’s room for conservative talk radio on television,” allows CNN anchor Aaron Brown, the very embodiment of the elite journalist with, in Roger Ailes’s salty phrase, “a pick up their ass.” “But I don’t think anyone ought to pretend it’s the New York Times or CNN,” Brown sniffs.

But it’s not just Fox: liberals have been pooh-poohing all of these developments. Dennis Miller used to be the hippest joker around. Now, complains a critic in the liberal webzine Salon, he’s “uncomfortably juvenile,” exhibiting “the sort of simplistic, reactionary American stance that gives us a bad reputation around the world.” The Boston Globe’s Alex Beam dismisses the blogosphere with typical liberal hauteur: “Welcome to Blogistan, the Internet-based journalistic medium where no thought goes unpublished, no long-out-of-print book goes unhawked, and no fellow ‘blogger,’ no matter how outré, goes unpraised.” And those right-wing books are a danger to society, grouse liberals: their “bile-spewing” authors “have limited background expertise and a great flair for adding fuel to hot issues,” claims Norman Provizer, a Rocky Mountain News columnist. “The harm is if people start thinking these lightweights are providing heavyweight answers.”

Well. The fair and balanced observer will hear in such hysterical complaint and angry foot stamping baffled frustration over the loss of a liberal monoculture, which has long protected the Left from debate—and from the realization that its unexamined ideas are sadly threadbare. “The Left has never before had its point of view challenged and its arguments made fun of and shot full of holes on the public stage,” concludes social thinker Michael Novak, who has been around long enough to recognize how dramatically things are changing. Hoover Institute fellow Tod Lindberg agrees: “Liberals aren’t prepared for real argument,” he says. “Elite opinion is no longer univocal. It engages in real argument in real time.” New York Times columnist David Brooks even sees the Left falling into despair over the new conservative media that have “cohered to form a dazzlingly efficient delivery system that swamps liberal efforts to get their ideas out.”

Mr. Anderson also mentions an earlier topic of mine, America's youth are becoming more conservative than their parents. (Thanks for the pointer, Mr. Hobbs.)