Cancer Fighting Drug Found in Dirt 184
firesquirt writes "From an article in LiveScience, the bark of certain yew trees can yield a medicine that fights cancer. Now scientists find the dirt that yew trees grow in can supply the drug as well, suggesting a new way to commercially harvest the medicine."
Time and time again... (Score:4, Insightful)
Silly monkeys.
Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Time and time again... (Score:2, Insightful)
You're an unscientific babbling Slashtard; I'm amazed at how fast you people creep out of the fucking woodworks to preach your gospel and screed to us. You're rated insightful when you deserve a completely off-topic and even flamebait moderation. You're not talking about the study, you're not talking about the nature of the findings that were reported, you're just shitting all over this discussion with your ignorant cut-throat idealistic diatribe about how stupid we are. Fuck.
Surely your like-minded goons will hop to your aid to hush me, moderating me down and nodding me off as "just a conservative whacko", but I speak for many with "shut the fuck up". If you're such an idealist, go live in a cave and stop promoting the ecosystem-damaging resource consumerism that yes, even your using this computer whose case is likely comprised of many plastics and synthesized oil by-products is promoting. The epic volume of clothes barely covering your gargantuan Slashdotter body? Yep, you guessed it, something you're wearing is likely synthesized as a by-product of crude oil! This preachy shit is getting you nowhere, buddy. Either contribute to the discussion or leave. Don't worry, us silly monkeys will stick around and do the heavy thinking.
Now, back to your regularly scheduled discussion.
So much for our parents telling us not to eat dirt (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Here we go again (Score:5, Insightful)
It's good, clean soil. (Score:1, Insightful)
Re:Next headline... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Next headline... (Score:5, Insightful)
Uninformed conspiracy nuts seem to think Pharm companies do all the medical research. The NIH (National Institutes of Health) will spend more than 28+ Billion on medical research this year (your tax dollars at work). I do research funded by them. My work is all published in journals you are free to subscribe to, or browse for free at your local research university's library.
Re:Next headline... (Score:5, Insightful)
There is no grand conspiracy as you would have others believe to keep cures hidden. As I said, NIH does most of the basic research for exploring biology and finding new drugs. Pharm companies do some drug exploration, but the bulk of their research dollars are spent on clinical trials which are *extremely* expensive. Many times there are candidate drugs which don't go on to clinical trials. These are not 'hidden'. Anyone is free to look at the literature to see them. And many researchers I know who have published new exciting results, try to get a story in the more general public news. This gets their name out there, and the Institute/University they work at gets some press that they love. Once again, not hidden. No conspiracy.
Patents are an entirely different issue. Patents are public record. Once again, they aren't hidden from you. Drugs generally have a use patent, so it's easy to see exactly what disease they are for the treatment of. Nothing hidden. Also patents don't last forever. Anyone with a patented drug that works will try to sell it like made for several years, because the patent is going to expire, and then anyone will be able to make a generic version of it, with no patent worries.
If the company patented a drug and sits on it because they don't think they will recoup as much as it would cost to do the trials/manufacturing, well, the patent is still going to expire, so others will be able to use it then. Nothing hidden again. No conspiracy.
Now, if the original company didn't want to go through the expense of doing clinical trials for it because they didn't think they would recoup their money, no one else is likely to want to foot the bill entirely either, since when they get it passed, all their competitors are then free to manufacture generic versions as well.
It all boils down to clinical trials, and who pays for the huge expense of them. No one wants to foot the bill for unpatentable or patent-expired drugs because it's 100+ million down hole for the company doing the trials, and a free ride for all their competitors. It's just terrible business sense. No 'conspiracy' involved at all.
Put away the tinfoil hats. It comes down to simple business decisions a 12-year old should be able to grasp. Blaming pharm companies and academic researchers for 'conspiring' to keep them off the shelf is simply stupid.
If you want a better system for orphan drugs, then lobby your congressmen to expand NIH funding to include drug trials for orphan drugs. Public dollars would be well worth spending in that area.
Re:Next headline...The tinfoil is not all wrong (Score:3, Insightful)
Mostly, I agree with you; but, there are cases where the "tinfoil hat" IS the business decision that the twelve-year-old can grasp:
"Cure vs treatment". The profit motive (by itself) would far rather sell a treatment than a cure.
So they are hiding the cures because they want to sell a treatment? Who is hiding it? Who discovered it that has that motive? As I said before, NIH dollars fund the most basic research which leads to new biology/drugs. Pharma does a little of that, but most of their dollars go into the clinical trials. So the academic researcher working for NIH funds has *ZERO* motive to hide the cure. *ZERO*.
So your tin-foil-hat theory rests on the key discovery being made by smaller amount of primary research being done in Pharma companies. Who do you think does the research, runs the bench experiments, crunches the numbers in those Pharma companies? Is it the high-end management who stands to make a killing from corporate profits? No. It's done be Ph.D. scientists and lab techs. A decent sized group of them.
Do you honestly think someone lab tech with a B.S. biology degree is going to be paid enough money to shut up about some great disease cure that is found by their group?
How about the Ph.D.'s in the group? Earning a Ph.D. is a long long haul. Most folks doing that are pretty smart and could have made much more money going to business school if making money was their number one priority. Most scientists care about knowledge, care about cures, and yes, like the prestige and recognition for making a major discovery. How likely is it they are going to keep a disease cure secret so the top management can get big bonuses? Not very freaking likely.
Even if some would do it, all it would take is one in the group to leak it. Keeping secrets in groups just doesn't work very well. Now stop to think what if a friend/family-member/loved-one of a member group has the disease? Not that unlikely with any decent sized lab group. Still think they are going to keep a cure secret? Please.
But as an example, consider the minor ailment athlete's foot. It's a huge industry. It's a fungus. It's absolutely not impossible to get rid of. But you will get marketed treatments, not cures (it'll cure the fungus on your foot, but you'll quickly get reinfected from your shoes, socks, shower, and so on; and they don't ever try to sell you anything to fix the problem once and for all. Doing so would be a poor business decision.) People don't have it in Japan, hence, no huge stinky-foot industry either. From a business point of view this is just lost profits!
Umm, Bullshit. Where do you tinfoil hat nutters come up with this stuff. Yes, they get athlete's foot in Japan. Need me to google for you? http://www.japancorp.net/Article.Asp?Art_ID=12391 [japancorp.net] Now, if you want to claim Japan has a lower incidence, I might believe you because I've never bothered to look up the statistics. However if that is in fact the case, that might be due to a more rigorous cleaning of public pools/showers, (places where it is most likely to be transmitted) in Japan than in the states. Not some secret cure that the American pharm companies are hiding from us.
Anti-bacterial drugs are relatively easy to make because you can often simply target the cell wall. Fungi are eukaryotes, like humans, and don't have a cell wall. One of the problems that comes along with that is that drugs that damage fungus, also tend to damage humans. Lamisil is a drug you often see marketed on TV. Take enough of it and it is absolutely guaranteed to cure your Athlete's foot. The cure is not hidden from you at all. The problem is it may well also kill your liver before all the athlete's foot is gone. Fungi are hard to kill without killing human cells. Ask any researcher who has had to deal with fungus in their tissue culture.