Come back soon. We miss you.

Bob in HI

For your giggling pleasure, here’s our Jane from 01/07/05:

Shameless Plug for Blog Award

I’m up for the Middle-Class Punk Rock Slummer Anti-Award on Feministe, which I think I stand a good chance of winning because the first person to nominate themselves wins, and I have just appointed myself head of the nominating committee. (Kind of like Dick Cheney being the head of the committee to choose a Vice Presidential candidate in 2000, you know?) Anyway, I think I deserve it because my sole qualification for writing this blog in the first place is a lifetime of punk rock slackerdom and the fact that I’m educated way past my intelligence (as my father used to say). In addition, as a veteran of Jello Biafra’s mayoral campaign in San Francisco I know a thing or two about doomed Quixotic political endeavors. So cross your fingers for me, and check out the Feministe site, they’re pretty cool.

So the CFL party only has two members, and we’re expecting a schism in it? Fast work!

Is this thing on ??

is this a live thread – what’s the latest from the OR ? anyone ?

thanks!

Dab from CT @ 130

That’s good news! (It would be interesting to be a fly on JoeL’s office wall when he hears, wouldn’t it?)

Especially since the “CFL” party has been taken over by people whose “distain for Joe Lieberman will never subside”

UPDATE: Inevitably, someone is Waaaaaaaaaaahnnining

kirk murphy @ 123
The FDA’s “Office of Orphan Products Development” has been paying researchers to get DCA approved for the treatment of congential lactic acidemia: funding for the Phase II trial commenced in September, 1998 – as of last record (2005) the study was still accepting new patients.

Bargain Countertenor, I trust that you are sincere in your beliefs and are in no way out of touch with reality.

Peas.

Kirk,

Thanks very much. My knowledge of FDA practices in clinical trials are clearly way out of date. I lost touch with it when I left public health for the academy (I’m a statistician) more than a few years ago. Another case of a little knowledge being a dangerous thing, I guess.

I’m glad to know that things are rather different. I truly hope you are right. I lost my grandmother, four aunts and a cousin to cancer. Another aunt and my sister-in-law are breast cancer survivors.

BC

If I might chime in from a slightly different angle, but a conclusion not entirely different from km’s, a comment I left at Digby’s discussion of the topic:

My heart has been breaking for Jane the last couple of days and there’s nothing I’d like to see more than something to make it just go away. But I wanted to say a word on this article…

I can’t speak to the medical side, which presumably has different editors, but I can a little to the physics side of the New Scientist, where this article appeared. At least in physics, when it comes to speculative scientific developments, NS seems to have adopted a very “forward-leaning” approach to interpretation, which is not always supported by the actual data. (To be fair, that’s a different, and lesser, sin from being outright wrong or misleading.)

The article reports one among many promising avenues for attacking cancer. And there’s no question that the intellectual property system is screwed up in many ways, of which this is simply one illustration (which I think was Digby’s main point.)

I certainly hope that the solution has been found and will be cheap and plentiful, starting sometime this summer. But I think it’s unfair to hold out a lot of possibly false hope for that.