vaccine for cancer

Dispatches recently turned its attention to the new Human Papilloma Vaccine. The Human Papilloma virus comes in several strains, not all of which cause cervical cancer, but for those that it does affect, it can be a serious, extremely painful and embarrasing condition.

I’d love to say that no matter how much money is spent, it’s worth it if even one life is saved. And whilst that is true,  we do not have infinite resources and its a question of whether spending the money here is more worthwhile than spending the money elsewhere.

Another point raised in the program were the dubious methods employed by the pharmaceutical company to profile its vaccine prior to licensing. There a number of different opinions on both points, but when you consider this issue at the individual level it becomes rather simple:

Does the vaccine work? If ‘Yes’ then would you vaccinate your daughter?

I would. Even if I had to pay the £250 myself.

getting rid of Darwin

Olivia Judson has a point. But are we to lose the name of Darwin, allow him to be lost in some dusty history book because someone with a creationist viewpoint wants a kindergarten style lesson in current evolutionary theory?

If you study it, even if all you do is read a couple of popular science books, you’ll realise that Darwin was only the father of evolution, and, as children will, the theory changed, was expanded to include various mechanisms whereby it operated.

I don’t think it matters if Darwin is named in conjuction with biological evolution, the world and his wife think they understand it because its biology, not physics, and they see it as a threat. Eradicating the term ‘Darwin’ as opposed to the name will just seem like a cheap trick and the other side (unfortunate term) will call us on it.

Evolution stills threatens the six-day story of Genesis (lovely word) no matter how shiny you make the packaging.

oh, Captain Ham-merr!!

You’re right! The Science-Nerds ARE moving over to the side of EVIL! We shall invent out Science-Gadgets and make our Science-Ingredients and have them in every home in every corner of the globe!! Bwahahahaha! Until the day we TAKE over the WORLD!!

WORLD DOMINATION AT OUR FINGERTIPS!! BWAHAHAHAHAHA!!

support PZ!

Apparently some guy kidnapped a communion wafer. Some Catholics went nuts about it. The wafer was returned. P Z Myers laughed. A lot. Like most of us.

Now they want him SACKED!

Here’s the kidnap story

Here’s the campaign against Myers

Here’s the campaign FOR Myers

Now Donohue says:

Catholic League president Bill Donohue responded as follows:

“The Myers blog can be accessed from the university’s website. The university has a policy statement on this issue which says that the ‘Contents of all electronic pages must be consistent with University of Minnesota policies, local, state and federal laws.’ One of the school’s policies, ‘Code of Conduct,’ says that ‘When dealing with others,’ faculty et al. must be ‘respectful, fair and civil.’ Accordingly, we are contacting the President and the Board of Regents to see what they are going to do about this matter. Because the university is a state institution, we are also contacting the Minnesota legislature.

“It is hard to think of anything more vile than to intentionally desecrate the Body of Christ. We look to those who have oversight responsibility to act quickly and decisively.”

Donohue says that Myers’ blog, “Pharyngula”, can be accessed from the university pages. Actually, it used to be accessible from the yellow square that is Myers internet presence on the UMM website; but its gone now, I can only assume he’s been asked to remove it. Regardless of that fact, the university’s webpages must be ‘respectful’, it says nothing about enforcing its own rules on any websites it happens to link to. Donohue either wants to control the entire web and make every link ‘respectful’, or can’t tell the difference between UMM and Scienceblogs. Needless to say I’m with Myers on this one. Below is my email:

President Robert H. Bruininks

Dear Sir,

I am … writing to you in support of Dr P Z Myers of your staff whom, I understand, has recently received a deluge of hate mail, including death threats over his report of the communion wafer kidnapping debacle.

Whilst I can appreciate the symbolic nature of the wafer in question and the dismay it may cause those who see the Eucharist as an essential part of Catholic life, I cannot condone any action that threatens Dr Myers life, family, possessions or livelihood.

I therefore must add my voice to those who have already rallied in support of Dr Myers, his work and his wit, which lighten the workload and bring a feeling of kinship to those of us in the scientific community and beyond. I would urge you to not be swayed by those who choose to place sentiment and superstition over someone’s career. Their life in point of fact, as few in the scientific community do not merely do what they do as a daytime job but as a lifetime commitment that is as great a calling as those who are artists or healers.

Thank you for having taken the time to read this, and my best wishes to you and your staff.

And that’s pretty much it. Take a look at the campaign for Myers on RDNet. Email address is there, it doesn’t take long folks.

The Last Word: You know what makes me laugh, I mean really laugh about all this? It’s over a CRACKER, a small circle of stamped flatbread. Instead of sending a flood of letters and emails to the head of UMM that require counteracting so someone doesn’t lose their job; maybe Donohue and his posse should be sending letters to the President of USA telling him to quit withdrawing support for clinics in the third world unless they promote only abstinence.

Or banning guns? Or helping the poorest people in the US out of poverty? Or sending food supplies to the starving? Or stopping the monopoly by Big Company ™ on trade? or stop burger mills from razing rainforests to the ground? Or supporting cloning in medical research? Y’know, something useful?

But then again, that might require him to think.

And before anyone gets on my back over this, I’m pretty sure there’s hundreds of Catholics out there who’d gladly crush all the communion wafers they could get their hands on if it brought an end to hunger in the third world.* Don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t desecrate a communion wafer out of hand, for no reason, I don’t like upsetting the nice people. But keep it in perspective. A cracker is not someone’s life; nor their livelihood.

*I know, I said ‘third world’, how politically incorrect am I!!

The End of Science…?

Is the end of the scientific method upon us? Erm, well no, unless you believe this article on Wired. For these strapped for time, the gist is that we can now collect so much data so quickly, that we do not need to devise and test theories, but can instead mine the huge amount of data for correlations and results instantly. This doesn’t require us to understand why something is happening or behaving as it is; if we can see that it is happening just by looking at the data, then that should be good enough.

This seems pretty daft to me. Surely the whole point of science is to answer the great questions of “why” and “how”? Observing a statistical relationship in data is only ever the starting point, not the answer. Just because we have more data as a starting point doesn’t mean that our job is done. Plus what’s to be done when we require information outside of the data range? This is where the real benefit of modelling can be found; to help expand and understand the data we already have.

If humanity had simply accepted that things work exactly as they appear to, and never bothered to ask why, how far would we really have (or indeed, will we) progress as a species…?

postscript by ldk:

Bob pipped me to the post. I had a loooong rant about this to those unfortunate enough to share my living space and planned on posting something about it. Unfortunately I had a bit of research to do on a particular point first and then promptly forgot about the whole thing!

Forget taxonomy, ontology, and psychology. Who knows why people do what they do? The point is they do it, and we can track and measure it with unprecedented fidelity. With enough data, the numbers speak for themselves.

Riiight! We don’t need to know anything about phylogeny right, the data says that most people call this species a cat, so its a cat. Do we need to know what it’s related to somewhere back in the family tree? Who cares why people get depressed or commit suicide, they just do, right? How about cells? We know some cells produce insulin, does it matter why?

Let’s be generous here. Let’s take the insulin thing. The data says that a certain group of people with one thing in common fail to produce insulin. So we give them insulin. But without experimentation, we don’t know why they fail to produce it. Perhaps its for different reasons? Wouldn’t it be so much better if we could prevent rather than simply treat?

Without the scientific method, without these models to hypothesise why something is the way it is, we can only ever react, we cannot be proactive. We know something with four legs, a tail, sharp teeth that says ‘meow’ is a cat. But why is it a cat? How did it get to be a cat?

These questions may hold no interested for you Mr Data-Cloud, but some of us aren’t quite ready to give up on science and simply go by the numbers.

more on the LHC

Yes! my first Physics-style post… and its funny!

Here and here.

And for all you spangly biology nuts out there, there’s this!

happy birthday to the rEvolution

And it was a revolution, one hundred and fifty years ago today. Evolution was a stunningly simplistic view of the the living world and how it developed. From simple clay-modelling creator we opened our eyes to a world view that showed us a breath taking vista of life’s potential. The most seemingly simple creatures could move the metaphorical equivalent of mountains. Through the past century and a half we have refined Darwin’s original thesis, evolution is far more complex than perhaps even Darwin and Wallace dreamed.

Someone said, ‘if you think you understand quantum physics, you don’t understand quantum physics’. Evolution works that way, and like physics, chemistry and the rest of biology, it’s well worth the effort it takes to understand it properly.

The complete works of Charles Darwin are online, information about Alfred Wallace, and more on evolution’s birthday at the Natural History Museum. The birthday celebrations are going to be lengthy, culminating in Darwin’s 200th birthday next year on February 12th.  Oh yes, you might have seen the books but just for a bit fun…

genetic education

If you  have an interest in genetics, and want to know more, there’s a lovely little site with some animations and straight talking:

The Basics & Beyond

Take a gander, and educate yourself with a little science. Today!

BigDog Robot

I saw this video on youtube.com today…

How cool is this? It almost looks like a fake at some points, but I think it’s genuine. Here’s the company’s website. It seems so ‘alive’ that I actually felt a bit sorry for it when it slipped on the ice and struggled to stay upright. That’s some pretty amazing robotics.

Countdown to “Doomsday”

As a follow-up to my Doomsday Scenario post, you can see a countdown to the first activation of the LHC (Large Hadron Collider), as well as a collection of articles relating to this massive project.

Link courtesy of Sven.