I never thought I was particularly good at writing about science and science-related things. I always felt as though there was someone who knew more, someone who could convey my ideas better than I could. I also felt as though it was a relatively new niche. I discovered quickly that I had been mistaken. It is for these reasons that I am no longer going to be writing about science and related interests.

While writing for polyscience.org, I always got the most enjoyment from writing about medicine. Specifically adding commentary to news articles written by journalists whose first area of study was certainly not medicine. In the meantime, I’ve also picked up quite an interest in business, and so it only seemed natural to marry the two ideas.

Thus, On The Pharm was born. I’ve been writing there for a few days, I can honestly say that writing for it does not feel like work. Indeed, it’s more fun than anything else, probably because 1) it’s easier and 2) I don’t have to learn so many ideas from scratch like I did when writing about science as a whole. I can focus on my niche, and that’s what I want to do. I also like the look of the site much better. So without further ado, here is my latest work-in-progress:

URL: http://onthepharm.net
Feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/OnThePharm

Some stuff will be technical, some will be fluffy, some will be business-oriented, and some of it will be tongue-in-cheek. And all of it will likely be informal. I prefer to talk in my posts as though I’m talking to a person, and I hope that comes across, unlike here where I pretended to be an omniscient narrator. I’m writing for it every day (so far), and I have a small backlog of material from the last two weeks, but I’m slowly clearing it out.

I can only hope that it’ll find a niche of readers so I’m not listening to myself echo in cyberspace, because isn’t that what every writer wants? Readers?

[tags]writing, On The Pharm, Pharmacy, medicine[/tags]

Back in July of 2005, Google launched Google Moon, a map of the moon similar to their map of the Earth. Of course it doesn’t have roads and such because there aren’t any, and you can’t see things like the remains of the Apollo moon missions for reasons that I outlined in this post — namely the resolution of the lunar satellites and space telescopes don’t have the resolution to pick up the debris objects (yet).

Well, Google has launched a similar service for Mars, called — drum roll — Google Mars. Right now it defaults to a topographical map of the terrain (which is arguably the most interesting view). The resolution isn’t terribly spectacular, but Google plans to update it with the newest imagery from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter which entered orbit on March 10 as soon as its available.

[tags]Google, Mars, Google Mars, Google Moon, Google Maps[/tags]

Intelligent design has become the US’s newest “intellectual” export. It has been included in the syllabus for biology produced by the OCR exam board under the guise of “teaching the controversy“. Of course, there is no controversy except that which was invented by the Discovery Institute several years ago as a part of its Wedge Strategy.

Naturally, critics of the inclusion say that the move elevates ideas like Intelligent Design to the same playing field as the theory of evolution, which is testable and conforms to the most basic principle of scientific theories: falsifiability.

James Williams, science course leader at Sussex University’s school of education, told the Times Educational Supplement: “This opens a legitimate gate for the inclusion of creationism or intelligent design in science classes as if they were legitimate theories on a par with evolution fact and theory.

“I’m happy for religious theories to be considered in religious education, but not in science where consideration could lead to a false verification of their status as being equal to scientific theories.”

Let’s hope this nonsense stops before it really starts for our friends overseas.

[tags]creationism, intelligent design, evolution, teach the controversy, education, science education, wedge strategy[/tags]

Drudge report has a copy of the press release scheduled to be released today at 2pm.

NASA’s Cassini spacecraft may have found evidence of liquid water reservoirs that erupt in Yellowstone-like geysers on Saturn’s moon Enceladus. The rare occurrence of liquid water so near the surface raises many new questions about the mysterious moon.

[...]

“Other moons in the solar system have liquid-water oceans covered by kilometers of icy crust,” said Andrew Ingersoll, imaging team member and atmospheric scientist at the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, Calif. “What’s different here is that pockets of liquid water may be no more than tens of meters below the surface.”

Liquid water, of course, is one of the things that most scientists consider necessary for life to potentially develop, which makes this announcement so exciting. While there may be liquid water, my money is on there not being life on Encedalus. Time will tell.

[tags]Enceladus, E.T., alien life, Saturn, NASA[/tags]

Another, new study suggests that gladiators did, in fact, kill one another, though they did so according to a set of rules — a code of conduct, if you will.

The lack of multiple injuries and mutilation shows that the very strict nature of combat rules for gladiator fights was adhered to, they say.

However, despite the fact that most gladiators wore helmets, 10 had died of a squarish hammer-like injury to the side of the head. A possible explanation is that the injuries were inflicted after the fight, possibly by a backstage executioner who struck the doomed victim’s head, as has been suggested in artworks and literature.

These findings come from Ephesus, one of the largest Roman cities in western Asia. I’d be interested to know if gladiator combat was different in Ephesus than it was in Rome. In any event, these bones date from the 2nd century AD, and the findings from last year are from the same time period, which would seem to rule out gladiator combat changing over the course of a century or two.

Last year’s findings are more inferential in nature, pulling from artwork from northern Italy and Germany, whereas this year’s findings are the result of CT scans and microscopic analysis of actual bones. Given the idealistic nature of artwork in Greek and Roman times, it would seem to cast some doubt on the findings from January 2005: artists may have depicted the clashes between gladiators as how they would have liked them to be rather than how they actually were.

[tags]Gladiators, Roman history, combat, history[/tags]

Hot on the heels of budget concerns due to priority shifts, NASA has decided to cancel its Dawn asteroid missions citing cost overruns and the mission’s relatively low priority. The Dawn mission was originally supposed to study the two largest main-belt asteroids, Vesta and Ceres, but estimated cost overruns of around 20% and the nation’s shifting focus toward putting a man on Mars had placed the project on the back burner.

The 50% completed spacecraft will largely be used in other missions, with the notable exception of its ion engines.

NASA is looking into using the spacecraft’s hardware for other missions and future efforts to build ion propulsion engines will benefit from the lessons learned by Dawn engineers.

In other NASA cancellation news, the NuStar X-Ray observatory has been cancelled along with the Keck observatory outrigger program.

[tags]NuStar, Keck, Dawn, NASA, asteroids[/tags]

Jupiter seems to be growing a second red spot as you can see in the image above. The official name is Oval BA, but Red Jr seems to be a better choice. Red Jr first appeared in the year 2000 when three smaller spots collided and merged. It is the same color as the original red spot which is at least 300 years old and is twice as wide as the Earth. Red Jr. wasn’t always red:

“The oval was white in November 2005, it slowly turned brown in December 2005, and red a few weeks ago,” reports Go. “Now it is the same color as the Great Red Spot!”

Why it’s red, no one is precisely sure. The theory goes that the storm is so powerful, it has picked up material from deep beneath Jupiter’s clouds and lifts it to high altitudes where UV radiation produces the brick color by some unknown chemical reaction. Raising such material would require a tremendous amount of energy: the Great Red Spot towers some 5 miles (8km) above the surrounding clouds. It maybe be that Red Jr. has become powerful enough to do the same.

[tags]Great Red Spot, Oval BA, Jupiter, solar system[/tags]

Access to the BBC’s extensive news archive is seen as giving the British public a chance to share and keep “the punctuation marks in the stories of our lives”.

The Open Earth Archive

Dying at home ranked 24th on the list of 28 factors. “[T]o have trust and confidence in the doctors looking after you” and “not to be kept alive on life supports when there is little hope for a meaningful recovery” were the most important to terminally-ill patients. It’s interesting to note that family members rated dying at home 14th on a list of 26 factors.

Dr. Heyland, head of the study will conduct several more studies to ultimately learn more about how patients make decisions at the end of their lives:

They will also examine how satisfied patients are with their care; how they make decisions about the kinds of treatments they receive at the end of life; the importance of where they die; and how aware patients are of the course of their disease and the odds of recovery.

“Our research focus is to describe, understand, evaluate, and ultimately, improve communication and decision-making at the end of life,” says Dr. Heyland. “We believe the knowledge and tools generated by our research efforts will inform strategies to improve the quality of and satisfaction with end of life care.”

How do you approach someone about taking part in such a study? In the interest of full disclosure, the patient must be informed that its an end-of-life study. I wonder how many are angry at being asked versus how many are willing to share what they think?

[tags]palliative care[/tags]

Imagine my dismay, then, when I came across an article that I’d printed out from the New York Times back on February 15 about Avastin, a drug from Genentech that shows significant effect in terminal cancer patients suffering from colon cancer as well as late-stage breast and lung cancer. Avastin will cost upwards of $100,000 a year for treatment. While most patients that take Avastin won’t last a year, that breaks down to over $8,000 a month. (The average colon cancer patient on Avastin takes it for 11 months.) Naturally, insurance companies are reluctant to pay for the medication, and one can hardly blame them. (Contrary to popular belief, most insurance companies are not minting money.)

$8,000 a month.

What makes this price exorbitant even by my standards is how the price is justified. While there are drugs out there that are more expensive than Avastin, most of those drugs are for niche diseases which afflict only a handful of people. Avastin, on the other hand can be used for thousands of patients. Traditionally the high price of patent medicines has been explained away by talk of R&D costs, which as I mentioned yesterday, average $500 million per New Chemical Entity (NCE) regardless of whether that NCE actually makes it to market or not. Genentech, however, has justified their high price by citing the inherent value of life-sustaining therapies. That is, they’re using a patient’s desire to stay alive to justify the high cost of their drugs.

This, in my opinion, has crossed the line from being ethical to simple profiteering. Some patients aren’t taking other, similar medications because they can’t afford to, or because the benefits don’t outweigh the costs: Avastin and Tarceva (another cancer drug) cure cancer. They simply prolong life.

But Dr. Desmond-Hellmann, the Genentech product development chief, said she would recommend that Mr. Minrath be treated with Tarceva. “I don’t think any patient should go without a Genentech drug for an inability to pay,” she said. “If this is about money, that would disturb me.”

Because it only costs a fraction of what Genentech charges to manufacture Avastin, many doctors expected the price of Avastin to come down if (more like when) the drug is approved for lung and breast cancer, where doses can be as much as doubled compared to colorectal treatments. Dr. Desmond-Hellmann had this to say:

“We don’t actually know whether physicians will actually use Avastin as was used in the clinical trials,” she said.

Be disturbed, doctor. Take the blinders off and look around you and see what’s going on here. It’s called fleecing.

[tags]Avastin, bevacizumab, Tarceva, pharmaceutical companies, Genentech[/tags]