U.S. says genes should not be patented

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Major news: The federal government in the United States has declared that human and other genes should not be eligible for patents because they are part of nature. This is a reversal of a rather longstanding policy; the new position will have a huge impact on medicine and on the biotechnology industry.

The ruling is likely to draw protests from some biotechnology companies that say such patents are vital to the development of diagnostic tests, drugs and the emerging field of personalized medicine, in which drugs are tailored for individual patients based on their genes.

Opponents, on the other hand, say that genes are products of nature, not inventions, and should be the common heritage of humanity. They feel that locking up basic genetic information in patents actually impedes medical progress. Proponents, however, say genes isolated from the body are chemicals that are different from those found in the body and therefore are eligible for patents.

But the government disagrees: It now contends that the mere isolation of a gene, without further alteration or manipulation, does not change its nature. "The chemical structure of native human genes is a product of nature, and it is no less a product of nature when that structure is 'isolated' from its natural environment than are cotton fibers that have been separated from cotton seeds or coal that has been extracted from the earth," the Department of Justice brief said. Moreover, the government suggested that such a change would have limited impact on the biotechnology industry because man-made manipulations of DNA, like methods to create genetically modified crops or gene therapies, could still be patented.

I'm pleased with this ruling, but admittedly concerned. I think the DoJ's reasoning is a bit flawed and will likely be overruled in short order. I'm also concerned that such a restriction will in fact inhibit innovation in these areas, particularly as far as the health sciences are concerned. But where I'm happy is in the suggestion that our genes, whether they be native or synthetic, remain under our own personal ownership. The idea of having a corporation own a patent for a genetic sequence in your DNA is a bit distasteful and potentially problematic to say the least.


Meta-research and the exposure of bogus science

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Image credit: Robyn Twomey/Redux

Disturbing, revealing and even somewhat unsurprising, The Atlantic has published a piece on how medical researchers are consistently coming up with conclusions that are misleading, exaggerated and even flat-out long. In the article, titled Lies, Damned Lies, and Medical Science, the work of meta-researcher Dr. John Ioannidis is explored; he has spent his career challenging his peers by exposing their questionable science. And just as importantly, he asks the question: Why are so many doctors still drawing upon misinformation in their everyday practice?

One of the researchers, a biostatistician named Georgia Salanti, fired up a laptop and projector and started to take the group through a study she and a few colleagues were completing that asked this question: were drug companies manipulating published research to make their drugs look good? Salanti ticked off data that seemed to indicate they were, but the other team members almost immediately started interrupting. One noted that Salanti’s study didn’t address the fact that drug-company research wasn’t measuring critically important “hard” outcomes for patients, such as survival versus death, and instead tended to measure “softer” outcomes, such as self-reported symptoms (“my chest doesn’t hurt as much today”). Another pointed out that Salanti’s study ignored the fact that when drug-company data seemed to show patients’ health improving, the data often failed to show that the drug was responsible, or that the improvement was more than marginal.

Salanti remained poised, as if the grilling were par for the course, and gamely acknowledged that the suggestions were all good—but a single study can’t prove everything, she said. Just as I was getting the sense that the data in drug studies were endlessly malleable, Ioannidis, who had mostly been listening, delivered what felt like a coup de grâce: wasn’t it possible, he asked, that drug companies were carefully selecting the topics of their studies—for example, comparing their new drugs against those already known to be inferior to others on the market—so that they were ahead of the game even before the data juggling began? “Maybe sometimes it’s the questions that are biased, not the answers,” he said, flashing a friendly smile. Everyone nodded. Though the results of drug studies often make newspaper headlines, you have to wonder whether they prove anything at all. Indeed, given the breadth of the potential problems raised at the meeting, can any medical-research studies be trusted?

That question has been central to Ioannidis’s career. He’s what’s known as a meta-researcher, and he’s become one of the world’s foremost experts on the credibility of medical research. He and his team have shown, again and again, and in many different ways, that much of what biomedical researchers conclude in published studies—conclusions that doctors keep in mind when they prescribe antibiotics or blood-pressure medication, or when they advise us to consume more fiber or less meat, or when they recommend surgery for heart disease or back pain—is misleading, exaggerated, and often flat-out wrong. He charges that as much as 90 percent of the published medical information that doctors rely on is flawed. His work has been widely accepted by the medical community; it has been published in the field’s top journals, where it is heavily cited; and he is a big draw at conferences. Given this exposure, and the fact that his work broadly targets everyone else’s work in medicine, as well as everything that physicians do and all the health advice we get, Ioannidis may be one of the most influential scientists alive. Yet for all his influence, he worries that the field of medical research is so pervasively flawed, and so riddled with conflicts of interest, that it might be chronically resistant to change—or even to publicly admitting that there’s a problem.

Read more.


Want to feel good at 100? Here’s how.

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Good news: Studies are increasingly showing that the rate of physical decline caused by aging can be advantageously tweaked by a variety of interventions, and it often doesn't matter whether you're 50 or 90 when you start tweaking. You just have to get started—something I noted in my recent article, Get Stronger, Live Longer. And as Dr. Mark Lachs notes, author of the book, Treat Me, Not My Age, "The embers of disability begin smoldering long before you’re handed a walker."

For more along these lines, check out the recent NYT article, What to do now to feel better at 100:

Muscle strength also declines with age, even in the absence of a muscular disease. Most people (bodybuilders excluded) achieve peak muscle strength between 20 and 30, with variations depending on the muscle group. After that, strength slowly declines, eventually resulting in telling symptoms of muscle weakness, like falling, and difficulty with essential daily tasks, like getting up from a chair or in and out of the tub.

Most otherwise healthy people do not become incapacitated by lost muscle strength until they are 80 or 90. But thanks to advances in medicine and overall living conditions, many more people are reaching those ages, Dr. Lachs writes: “Today millions of people have survived long enough to keep a date with immobility.”

The good news is that the age of immobility can be modified. As life expectancy rises and more people live to celebrate their 100th birthday, postponing the time when physical independence can no longer be maintained is a goal worth striving for.


Markets Should Not Decide U.S. Energy Policy

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Two years ago, wind power was more of a going concern. Suzlon wind turbine blades that were each 150 feet long were moved into position for delivery to a new wind farm in Fort Bridger, Wyo.

We need more renewable energy, not less!  That’s why this is the saddest renewable energy story this year, and a cautionary tale of politics gone wrong.  Our government should be helping subsidize renewable energy like wind and solar, but apparently, that’s over with.  Or is the problem the “market”?  Our regional coal plants continue bellowing pollution and mercury because coal remains cheap to buy and use. Then today it was reported that this  factory is closing December 29th.

There will be no “next year” for this wind turbine plant.  It’s shutting down, and along with it goes hundreds of real and potential jobs.  At it’s peak, this green business employed 500 people.  Just think — 500 renewable energy green jobs, and now they’ll be gone.  Today there were two stories about this in the Star Tribune.  The first, the sad ending of a Minnesotan wind turbine plant.

Wind-turbine maker Suzlon Group will idle its Pipestone, Minn., plant, putting 110 workers out of jobs, because the once-booming U.S. wind energy market has lost headway.

The layoffs, to take effect Dec. 29, were announced Monday, the same day Suzlon, the world’s No. 3 wind energy company, reported a 70 percent drop in U.S. wind turbine installations for the first half of the year. It follows other industry reports of a deep downturn in the U.S. wind market.

Suzlon, headquartered in India, invested $8.5 million four years ago to open its first U.S. blade-making factory in the heart of southwestern Minnesota’s wind-power alley. The company took advantage of government offers of free land and JOBZ tax breaks. Factory employment, once at 500 workers, had declined to 143 before Monday’s layoff announcement.  Read more here.

The government can encourage renewable energy, or it can let the “market” determine our energy future and our response to climate change.  The market should not be deciding something so critically important.  The problem is that the U.S. has no energy policy.

It’s time to decide which way the wind is blowing

On the same day that Suzlon Group decided to shut its wind turbine blade plant in Pipestone, Minn., city officials in Jonesboro, Ark., were glowing from Friday’s grand opening of a $40 million wind turbine manufacturing plant by Denmark-based Nordex. And now many of those green jobs are in Denmark. In part, this is due to the fact that Republicans deny science, don’t believe in climate change, and feel that renewable energy should take a backseat to coal and oil.

This is a recipe for disaster, and despite Jon Stewart pleading with us all to be “sane”, there is no way to overstate the threat of climate change to our world.

Europe gets about 5 percent of its energy from wind, and in some countries the total is 10 [...]

Midterm Outcomes not Great for Climate or Science

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Rand Paul is just one of our newly-elected headaches. It’s going to be tougher than ever to stop climate change based on the results of the midterm elections. First the good news: California reelected Barbara Boxer, the head of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works. We really need her to fight for us in the Senate due to the Republican obstructionists like Jim Inhofe. Also, Jerry Brown won the governorship in California, presumably preserving the environmental headway they have accomplished there already. And from DemNow! some good news too.

California Voters Maintain Clear Air Rules

Voters also decided on 160 ballot initiatives nationwide. Two of the most closely watched measures were in California. Voters there defeated Prop 19, which would have legalized recreational marijuana use. In a rebuke of major oil companies, voters rejected Prop 23, a measure that would have suspended implementation of the state’s 2006 groundbreaking clean air legislation that requires greenhouse gas emissions to be reduced to 1990 levels by 2020. South Dakota also rejected a measure to legalize medical marijuana. Meanwhile, Oklahoma voters approved measures to ban the use of international law in state courts and allow opt-outs from President Obama’s healthcare reform bill.

In addition, the progressive Democratic Mark Dayton was elected as Minnesota governor, but he will go through a recount process because the vote was so close.  Mark Dayton is a green in the sense that he believes in the science and is committed to reducing pollution, supporting renewable energy, and doing what we can to mitigate climate change.  In that regard, the new governors of California, Minnesota, and other states can now work together to do what states can do what they can for the climate and energy.  If cap and trade was dead before, it’s even deader now that Republicans will be controlling Congress.  That means we will need state governments to step up and do what can be done about climate change now without waiting for conferences and legislation from Congress.  California and Minnesota can potentially be real leaders in fighthing climate change this year and next, even with a U.S. Congress succumbing to gridlock. 

The bad news is that so many climate change deniers were elected or relected.  Michele Bachmann was reelected to Congress from Minnesota, and she is a notorious, relentless climate change denier. She doesn’t even think it’s happening, much less being caused by human activity. She is joined by other Republicans in the Congress and Senate, people like Rand Paul.  Paul might not be as extremist and outrageous as Bachmann, but he does not think the government has any right to control greenhouse gas emissions.  That kind of thought would doom the human  race to extinction if it’s allowed to prevail, so we’ll be looking for ways around these people as much as possible in the next two years.  This is the good news.

There are plenty of gloomy predictions now that Republicans are taking over the Congress.  This headline [...]

Belgian Painter Involved with Futurism on display

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Jules Schmalzigaug

October 29, 2010 – January 23, 2011
The Royal Museums of Fine Arts: Museum of Modern Art (Brussels, Belgium)
Catalog by Michel Draguet, Valérie Verhack, Giovanni Lista and Willard Bohn

Jules Schmalzigaug (1882-1917) was the only Belgian painter who was involved in the development of Futurism during the pre-war period. To render an homage to this neglected pioneer who died prematurely, the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium organize a retrospective exhibition from October 29th 2010 to January 23rd 2011. Additionally, a catalogue of this exhibition will be published. In 1912, after his rather traditional artistic education in Germany and Belgium, Jules Schmalzigaug visits the exhibition of Italian futurists in Paris which constitutes for him a real revelation. During that same year he settles down in Venice, where he joins the local artistic avant-garde and appropriates the Futurist artistic language. In the spring of 1914 he participates in the Esposizione libera futurista internazionale in Rome where he displays his work next to that of the key figures of Italian Futurism and of other foreign Futurist artists. From autumn 2010 onwards his impressive oeuvre will finally be on show in the Royal Museums through a selection of paintings and works on paper.

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Film ‘ Il Futurismo. Un Movimento di Arte/Vita’ Premiered in Rome

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Anteprima Mondiale/ World Première

Il Futurismo. Un Movimento di Arte/Vita

November 1, 2010, 9:30pm
Festival Internazionale del Film di Roma
Casa del Cinema

Release Date: 15 Ottobre 2010
Genre: Docufiction
Studio: Overcom – Absolute – French Connection Films

Starring:

Riccardo Bàrbera – Eleonora Ivone – Edoardo Sylos Labini – Paco Reconti – Alex Pacifico – Hilary Mostert – Claudio Rosato – Ninni Cannizzaro – Claudio Patierno – Ruggero Mostert Manciati – Manuela Boni

Screenplay By: Alessandro Zambrini

Directed By: Luca Verdone

Produced By: Paolo Bruno – Marco Genone

Plot Outline:

Futurismo un movimento di arte vita é il primo documentario futurista sul futurismo. Una graphic opera che con il reenactment, le interviste ed un punto di vista emozionale, racconta la nascita l’evoluzione e l’impatto visionario che il movimento futurista ebbe sulle arti e la societa, dal novecento ad oggi. Marinetti in prima persona è Il narratore, una operazione resa possibile dalla costante consulenza della famiglia Marinetti e da una accurata ricerca storica.

Per Marinetti la comunicazione in tutte le sue forme fu il fulcro della rivoluzione futurista, la leva con cui concretizzare la visione del futuro. Di conseguenza ogni espressione della creatività poteva e doveva essere futurista. Attraverso le opere di Boccioni, Balla, Carrá, di Depero e dei molti altri che aderirono al movimento, si costruisce l’immagine che questi prefiguratori ebbero dei giorni attuali. Prestigiosi esperti italiani ed internazionali forniscono un aspetto storico e critico su quanto il movimento fece in Letteratura, pittura, scultura, musica, architettura, cinema, design e pubblicità, e come questo si inserì nel contesto sociale e storico.

Intervistati | Interviewees: Gino Agnese – Giordano Bruno Guerri – Achille Bonito Oliva – Simona Cigliana – Maurizio Calvesi – Günter Berghaus – Didier Ottinger – Claudia Salaris – Daniele Lombardi – Mario Verdone

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