Become a fan of Slashdot on Facebook

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Re:Uhg, not Cass Sunstein (Score 3, Informative) 530

Do you actually know what happened there?

CFC's re replaced with HCFC's. They're not as bad for the ozone layer. They're only 98% as bad.

DuPont got paid to:
1) Recycle all the freon.
2) Make machines to do 1)
3) Make all the HFCF's
4) Make all the machines fo use 3)

A former Dupont exec I met in first class once said they'd pretty much made it all up. Notice we cut back, not eliminated CFCs? Hows the ozone layer doing 30 years later now ?

It's easy to spot a manufactured crisis for commercial gain after the fact.

Comment Re:Exciting Times (Score 1) 217

"but the primary causes of cancer aren't your damn food."

No, just the phytoalexins required to reverse tumors. You are wrong and should read more.

Cancer is caused by a number of things. Cosmic rays can do it. It's quite natural and nearly all the time the body takes care of it' cancerous cells can be fond at all times in all living things, they're just cells that didn't divide properly for whatever reason. You cam never stop that not do you need to. What needs to be addressed is the inability of some people under some conditions to have their immune system destroy these defective copies. This turns out to be because of a nutritional deficiency caused by industrial tampering in our food supply. See my comments near the top to see the actual molecular biodynamics involved.

Comment Re:What is this stuff? (Score 1) 217

Bingo. There's a huge lag in the discovery and acceptance of new ideas.

In the 1600s Jaques Cartier sailed from France to Canada and a planned return to France in the fall was delayed and they were forced to stay on the ship in a Montreal winter (notorious for being extra cold; you always want to buy a winter coat made in Montreal, not Toronto). They of course began getting ill from scurvy and when close to death the natives were finally asked for help. One them went to look at the men, shook his head, scraped some bark off a pine tree, boiled it in tea an the next day they were all better.

They get back to France and tell of this wonderful cure for the scourge of the seas (thought to come from "foul vapors" from the bottom of the ship) and what was the reaction of the "medical establishement" in Europe? "We have nothing to learn from savages" and the discovery of vitamin C was put back a while.

Modern medicine is utterly brilliant at surgery - we can fix nearly anything now. But chronic disease? Check for yourself, there's been no appreciable progress in what... 50? 100 years?

What it always comes down to in the end is a fundamental choice of therapeutic modalities, do you:
1) create synthetic drugs to manage the symptom
or
2) identify the biochemical fault and correct it.

that is, it's always better to work with the body and fix the broken bits (it's been said all non-infectious chronic disease is a nutrient deficiency of some sort) then to introduce synthetics to manage a particular symptom the additional complication being when the body sees a molecule it recognizes it knows what to do with it, but synthetics - since they're foreign to human biochemistry there are without exception side effects. In the US alone there are > 100,000 deaths every year from prescription "medicine", currently the third leading cause of death after heart and cancer. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iatrogenesis

"In the United States, figures suggest estimated deaths per year of: [1][18] [19][20]
12,000 due to unnecessary surgery
7,000 due to medication errors in hospitals
20,000 due to other errors in hospitals
80,000 due to nosocomial infections in hospitals
106,000 due to non-error, negative effects of drugs
Based on these figures, iatrogenesis may cause 225,000 deaths per year in the United States (excluding recognizable error). An earlier Institute of Medicine report estimated 230,000 to 284,000 iatrogenic deaths annually.[1]
The large gap separating these estimates from annual deaths from cerebrovascular disease suggests that iatrogenic illness constitutes the third-leading cause of death in the United States; after heart disease and cancer.[1]"

Comment Re:What is this stuff? (Score 1) 217

ASA controls inflammation which is often the source of mutagenesis.

Like all NASIDS they impede the formation of E2 series prostaglandins which control inflammation, so there's a short-term/long-term component to think about.

ASA hasn't been shown to do much here afaik, cite 'em if ya got 'em.

Comment Re:What is this stuff? (Score 1) 217

I'd point out it works, and your team has no clue. At this point the number of cancer cures from intravenous C exceeds those cured by radiation and chemo combined[1] - which often cause more cancer than they cure.

Enjoy your high salary while you can.

[1] Brian Sparkes, pers. comms. 2009
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brian_Sparkes

Comment Re:What is this stuff? (Score 1) 217

If you're trying to suggest it doesn't work (without actually knowing what it does) you have the problem of explaining what it is than that reversed the cancer in the 11 people in those three clinical trials.

And you also need to explain this:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F06%2F02%2FMNI11ORI84.DTL

"I don't have time to debunk your misunderstanding about science"
Translation: "I haven't read anything you're talking about but I know it's wrong" - the logical fallacy of the argument from ignorance. It's a shame you didn't even notice the refernces and pointers given, let alone actually read them.

There's a chance P53 doesn't work the way you think it does.

Here's an easier to digest synopsis for those short of time:

The Cytochrome P450 enzyme CYP1B1 [1] only occurs in cancer cells [2]. When certain phytoallexins such as reservetol and salvestrol are ingested these phytoallexins are converted by the P450 enzyme into picetannol [3], which is fatal to cancer cells but not human cells [4].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CYP1B1
[2] http://cancerres.aacrjournals.org/content/57/14/3026.short
[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Piceatannol
[4] http://www.nature.com/bjc/journal/v86/n5/abs/6600197a.html

This is old and there are newer references now but this should at least explain how the idea works and gives you some explicit papes to go chase down.

At this point chemo and radiation are total dead ends and should be stopped immediately.

Also curious is Potter had convinced the British government to give this stuff to everyone, big pharma talked them out of it.

Comment Re:What is this stuff? (Score 1) 217

You need to read medical history. Cancer was virtually unseen prior to 1900. But it has been known for 7000 years at least.

The first notice of work/toxin related cancers were chimney sweeps in the late 1800s. Enough of them got testicular cancer that a causative link was established. This was the first of the industrial cancers. Come 1900 and radical modernization of industry and the rate just starts shooting up culminating with the post-WWII idea that without antifungals (which turn out to be the thing that's doing the bees in) chemical fertilizers and pesticides we can't grow enough food to feed the boomers.

No go back 50 years prior to and read a gardening book from that era, say "Garden magic". The number of times they advise to spray "lead arsenate" in that book is phenomenal. Try doing that today. Point is that seemed quite reasonable in the day.

It's not our ability to detect it that's changed, it's how soon we can detect it that's changed. That's why people are living longer with cancer. They're not really, we can just identify it sooner. The cure rate has not changed since 1900; thats why Potter's stuff is so exciting, we've actually figured out what part of the body failed and why.

Comment What is this stuff? (Score 5, Interesting) 217

I wonder if it's real or some really horrid chemical they can't quite get safe enough to use without dissolving your veins. That's the problem with that "discovery" in Sask. that cured cancer in rats. That's because rats can't scream as their veins dissolve.

Put on your thinking caps, why has cance shot up since 1900? What changed?

In 2007 or so, a Cytochrome B enzyme was found - CYP1B1 that only occurs in cancer cells. Fresh off the end of a successful prostate cancer drug, the first one with a new paradigm - something other than "kill ALL of the cells and pray" (See: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=%2Fc%2Fa%2F2012%2F06%2F02%2FMNI11ORI84.DTL) that exploited CYP17, Potter then set out to make a more generalized one based on the nearly universal CYP1B1. He designed the molecule then set about to make it and while looking for precursors noticed the exact same molecule occurs in fruit, made in response to mold.

So they tried it, and it worked. Every time. It gets converted in cells with CYP1B1 to picotaneol which is fatal to cancer cells but not regular cells. If you google "Salvestrol case studies" you'll find three clinical trials where cancer was reversed in every case. It's not patentable...

So, the current hypothesis is, since we began spraying anti-fungals, there's no mold so the plant doesn't make this chemical in response to mold, so non-organic fruit contains only 10% of what unsprayed fruit has. And it's a very bitter chemical and we breed bitterness out...

Cancerous cells can be found in any animal at any time, the body takes care of them. The problem arises when it can't, and we find Gene P53 is deactivated in those people. This reactivates it; once the body has the correct raw materials it gets down to work.

It's always better to help the body do what it does naturally and has for millions of years compared to some synthetic noxious substance. If nothing else understand that with a chemical that's already in the body all the time, the body knows what to do with it. With man-made drugs there are always side effects in every case as the body has no idea what to do with the molecules it doesn't recognize and they latch on to places they shouldn't and hellooo side effects.

There are 30,000 deaths a year from these side effects.

This chemical is found in tangerines and prune plums, strawberries, asparagus and so on. Tangerines have the most. Which raises an interesting question. Do areas that grow a lot of tangerines have a lower cancer rate. That would be Morocco.

It's not on the list of per capita cancer rates WHO keeps, that's quoted in Wiki. That list ranges from South Africa as the lowest (about 250) to Denmark with the highest at 387 or something. Note also that poor countries have less, developed countries have more... poor people grow their own food and can't afford chemicals.

But, if you poke around on the Moroccan government website long enough, you find their per-capita cancer rate: 100. Less than half the lowest stat WHO has for any country. And besides having all the tangerines, they pretty much invented chain smoking there. But still: 100.

So, if these guys are using this mechanism and trying to make a patent end run, bad. If it's something else, some noxious chemical, it's equally worthless. If however they have a new agent that also uses the pro-drug paradigm Potter found, then that would be good.

But there's a reason they don't give any details on this compound and I'd really like to know what it is.

Comment Re:Really? (Score 1) 421

I figured that out one day and assumed anybody who ever looked at a gaussian curve of IQ thought the same thing. Draw a line down the middle. The half on the left are not even of average intelligence.

Now make a small circle on the right most bit. You are here. Next time you think "Fuck, is everyone stupid?!?" remember this.

Comment We've been here before (Score 1) 240

Pretend you used unix from the start and the web comes along decades later and you have your stuff set up all nice and lo and behold all seventeen web pages work and nearly 700 people a year look them and next thing you know your buddy wants his bread clip collection to have it's own home page and your girlfriend's friends wants to put an anthology of lesbian vegan poetty online so you go fuckit and cut and paste their stuff up then that want to update it themselves so you show them vi wish them the best of luck and get back to fixing sendmail.

Fast forward years later and 300 people are using your stuff and you've written enough tools so you never have to talk to them again they can be busy little beavers updating merrily and rarely call. When they so you slip into root, fiddle with something and they're done.

Now, when you have root on a web server it's very different from having one user account on a machine and the later is really how you want to do this. It's convenient as hell to be logged in as root all the time, everything works. But it's really not a good idea. So in the past decade everybody I know has tried to do that. And it seems to work. With enough stuff in place you really don't need root in normal operation. In fact I'd go so far as to say other than catastrophic failure or radically new hardware there is never any reason to use root that can't be accomplished by the proper tool. I'm 99% sure this is true. Maybe 99.9.

So, I don't see why the android/root issue is any different from what happened with unix as we went from logging into a VT-100 as root to now where it's been years since I've had to.

So I think his point is very valid. Doesn't mean this doesn't bother me though; if I pay for it I get to decide what fucking code it will run and thank you very much, I'm not buying a service here.

I think in the end companies that make more sensible hardware will do better than ones that pull stupid stunts like this. One has to wonder where the real motivation behind it originates.

Comment Re:ha? (Score 1) 707

Correct. If you read the Amazon one star review they point out how the test results were biased and could only prove vitamins didn't work. When your only test patients are only very sick guys that happens.

Ben Goldacre in his Ted Talk exposes how and why this happens.

Wikipedia lists the fines levied against the pharmaceutical companies. Go look at it. It's impressive.

Wiki will also point out, Iatrogenesis, death as a side effect of modern medicine is the third leading cause of death in the US.

Number of deaths from vitamin overdoses: 0. In over 100 years. Deaths from patent medicines: 30,000 a year in the US alone.

Slashdot Top Deals

There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.

Working...