Amtrak has been at least as expensive as air flight for a sometime, and it hadn't provided much of a benefit to general public, much less the poor population, for a while now.

Citation needed. I'm guessing you haven't travelled by Amtrak over this span of time. I was traveling to western PA from FL last December for the holidays, and the round trip cost me $250. Flights would've easily cost me considerably more, because connections end up being cheaper through Amtrak than through United Airlines, which is the sole carrier at my hometown's airport. (This is even before we get into baggage fees!)

Last December's Snowpocalypse sent a considerable number of travelers to Amtrak -- I can attest to this, because the train south was packed to the gills with people who were stranded in New York and Philadelphia. This influx was in addition to that which already crowded trains -- often people who can't afford round trips by air, or for whom the length of the trip (maybe across the state) would make air travel impractical. I can remember making the trip across PA to NYC several times... and never, over all the trips I made over the years, did I travel on a train that didn't have a fairly significant number of people in each car. Amtrak gets a lot more use than most people give it credit for, which I imagine is part of the reason it doesn't do as well as it can, and its national route system is terribly sparse when you get beyond the NE corridor. Still, with what it has, it does fairly well.

Someone who is more into biotech could probably do better than I could with this, but here goes...

1) You could. The problem is that the person wouldn't necessarily have been previously exposed to the antibody that would cause the reaction. Sensitization is a lot more likely once your body's been in contact with the stuff for a while. If someone had some sensitivity to the antibodies[1] before gene therapy even began, it's entirely possible that they've got bigger problems in front of them than getting vaccinated against HIV, and I have to ask why they're in this trial/program. (The sensitivity also could've cropped up a lot earlier than this procedure in such a case, to boot.)

2) Not necessarily a good idea at this stage of research and understanding. If gene therapy consists of pasting a gene somewhere into a chromosome, you've got to define (as best you can) where you're going to do the pasting, just so you can get your material (of variable length, depending on what you're trying to do) incorporated. Wherever it ends up and however you can narrow that down, you hope it works. Going in and messing with all of that to get rid of or change what you did in the first place is a little bit like blindfolding someone, spinning them three times, then holding them over a patient to make a surgical incision, leaving them blindfolded, spinning them three times again, and expecting them to both find and suture the original incision. Granted, there are markers and other means of identifying where genes are, but I don't think we're near the point that "turn off the original gene therapy" is considered any better than something way, way easier said than done.

[1] Antibodies are generally like screwdrivers with interchangeable bits. The handle and shaft don't change much, so a sensitivity to them seems very unlikely. As for the bits themselves? Hard to say. I don't know enough immunology to say one way or the other, but I'd think that the antibody itself wouldn't tend to be treated like an antigen. Of course, it probably depends quite a bit on the antibody in question.

OpenSim's been around for years. Slow news day, Slashdot?

Frequently the software doesn't start in a given academic lab, so much as it starts somewhere in a given research community and propagates to the academic labs as research needs dictate. ImageJ, for example, started at NIH, but now it's available to all and in use all over the place (including my lab).

Other software is developed cooperatively, and then academic contributions are added as they're needed to enable someone's research. If you run R (the statistical program) and start looking through all the extensions available in CRAN, you'll see tons of additions that have been generated in academic labs and released for use by the wider research community.

I work in biomechanics, and I've seen a few programs come out in that field through largely academic development. AnimatLab began (I think) at Georgia Tech, and I think Cofer et al. are still developing it within the university. OpenSim started at Stanford as an open source musculoskeletal simulation program, and is vastly preferable to the godawfully expensive SIMM, which does pretty much the same kinds of things. OpenSim is still alive and well at Stanford, although the developer network spans multiple institutions, academic and otherwise.

Much as I might wish that I could spend more of my time developing programs and playing with software within the academic sandbox, more often it's simply more practical to cast the nets for software from someone, somewhere doing somehow similar research, and then using the software you find if it's useful to your work, rather than reinventing the wheel in favor of advancing academic software development.

I wouldn't call PA school "graduate-school education." I'd call it a post-bac program, but let's not call it graduate school. I hear that from enough starry-eyed undergrads that think all programs (PA, MD, MS, PhD) programs are the same, so they should be able to bide their time in one (MS, PhD) while they wait for an acceptance from another (MD, PA).

Um... no. At least, not necessarily.

I worked for a blood bank for several years, and because blood banks by definition supply both pharmacologics (plasma fractions, IIRC) and biologics (practically everything else), they are subject to FDA regulation as defined in the CFR for those types of agents. My particular blood bank was under a consent decree with FDA for failing to follow those regulations in whole and/or in part, and that failure to follow can have real consequences for the patient -- accidental infections with things like CMV become a whole lot easier when your controls over CMV status labeling are lax, for example. In that case, an otherwise healthy adult might just get flu symptoms. In someone who is ill (or someone who is not yet an adult, or even an adolescent), which a recipient would generally be, the consequences can be significantly more dire.

Why does that matter?

It's truly amazing just how many corners blood banks like mine were willing to cut in the name of building product numbers, because ultimately, they're really just manufacturers pushing a product for maximum profit -- sure, any time we'd send letters to anyone we'd play up the non-profit jag and ask them to use their own stamps on the SAE we'd send them for their reply, but all management really ever cared about was pumping up profits. If the regulations weren't in place to cover things like labeling, it's a fair bet the manufacturers wouldn't bother to enact those policies on their own. If they're not held to a given standard, they won't expend the money to maintain that standard. Labelers, training, equipment, testing supplies, testing contracts, and other related recurring expenses are exactly the type of expenses management doesn't want to incur. Patient health really only matters if it could bring legal ramifications, and if there's no law being violated or regulatory standard in place, it's actually fairly easy for the manufacturers to get off scot-free -- even in a civil trial. Regulatory infractions come up in civil trials all the time.

Blood banks in particular demonstrated this fairly clearly in the early 1980's, when HIV started to show up on the scene. HIV itself wasn't immediately apparent, but a tremendous uptick in Hepatitis B cases was -- and at the time, the technology did indeed exist to test for that virus. Blood banks advised that testing for Hepatitis B was not acceptable... because of cost. Bayesian false positives didn't come into it. Faults with the general theory of testing didn't come into it. Fears of HIV infection didn't come into it (at least, at the testing phase). The reason blood banks didn't want to test for HepB was the cost to institute a testing program, and it was FDA's mandate that ultimately got them to start testing and getting the bad blood out of the supply. (It was also FDA's regulation that pegged Abbott Laboratories, I think, with bad HepB testing supplies... here again, without regulation, nothing would've been done, because nothing would've been illegal.)

The expense of regulation isn't a 100% honest deal, because there are always going to be corrupt regulators. At the same time, I would much rather have legitimate regulators working from a pool that includes a few corrupt ones, and dealing with that, than to have the corporate health care industries strictly regulate themselves, because as has been proven numerous times (blood banks, contaminated food cases, contaminated drug cases, improperly tested drug cases, I could go on...), they will do no such thing with that inherent conflict of interest.

Sure, and particularly on the chance that the experimenter didn't know anything about effect sizes. A study will be considerably better received if the experiment is designed to include enough subjects (and therefore data points) to substantiate the claims in its conclusion. "Chance" resulting from a too low n doesn't cut it.

I'm fairly certain ol' Winnie's waiting on your insight with bated breath.

Literally, in fact.

Why sue everyone with an internet connection when you could just surcharge the connection? There are surcharges on blank discs and burners in various places on this planet, so why not start nickeling and diming at the source here?

Eeurgh. I'm not so sure if it's more revolting that it's plausible or that there have been approximations of this already done successfully.

In terms of avoiding legal messes of the bribery kind, sure. In terms of objectively judging whether or not an industrial operation should or should not be doing something? Um... no. Industry does not tend to be more ethical with its information than it is with its money.