ramanujan

http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/23/counsyl http://techcrunch.com/2013/04/25/sv-angel-health-informatics

http://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/1a51xx/now_that_its...

  [Submitted March 12]

  It's DanielTaylor again and I wanted to create a simple yet 
  intuitive post to explain the folks out there what happened  
  a couple of hours ago. This might also be useful for 
  bloggers or journalists who might be going to write about 
  it in the following hours.

  TL;DR

  The programs that read the blockchain, the bitcoin ledger, 
  disagree.

  Due to a bug in 0.7, it says that HIS is the correct 
  version of this ledger and 0.8 says that HIS is the correct 
  version.

  Miners (the people who add pages to the blockchain) are 
  told to switch to the 0.7 program so that this version 
  gains more support and the other one is discarded. 
  (orphaned).

  Regular users are not affected. Their transactions are 
  included in both ledgers and don't need to change any 
  programs.

  During that time, though, there is a slight chance of a 
  double-spend ocurring. That is why people recommended 
  merchants and exchanges to wait until there is one single 
  blockchain again before processing purchases and 
  merchandise.

  ...

  What's a double-spend?

  This is the reason why some merchants and exchanges stopped   
  processing incoming bitcoins for a couple of hours.

  The bitcoin network prevents people from spending the same 
  coins by mantaining this unique ledger, the blockchain. But 
  now that there were two of them, it was theoretically 
  possible to broadcast two different transactions with the 
  same coins and still get some confirmations.

  With some luck, someone could sneakily sneakily* buy a 
  television to a merchant who was reading the 0.8 ledger and 
  have the transaction confirmed. At the same time he could 
  have sent the same coins back to himself and, with some 
  luck, have the transaction confirmed on the 0.7 ledger.

  What happens is that, in the end when 0.7 wins, the thief 
  will have the television and his bitcoins. Remember that 
  there were two different versions of the same coins!

  This is not something easy to do and requires a lot of luck 
  because the blocks mined (the pages added to the ledger)  
  must be mined precisely in the correct order. But still, in 
  this situation it was easier to pull off and so it was 
  recommended for merchants and exchanges to temporarily stop 
  processing incoming transactions.

  Now the situation has resolved and the blockchain keeps 
  growing happily, page by page, block y block.

  People can inject just about anything they want into 
  themselves

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?page=4&xmldoc=19981...

  In Court, Plaintiff argued that he should have the right to 
  take whatever treatment he wishes due to his terminal 
  condition regardless of whether the FDA approves the 
  treatment as effective or safe, and that to prohibit him 
  from taking the treatment he wishes violates his rights 
  under the United States Constitution.4 The United States 
  Supreme Court previously addressed and rejected this  
  argument in Rutherford. In Rutherford, cancer patients 
  requested the right to use Laetrile, arguing, as does 
  Plaintiff, that for terminally ill patients the 
  effectiveness or safety of the proposed treatment is 
  irrelevant since such treatment is a last chance effort. 
  However, as identified by the Supreme Court in Rutherford, 
  to permit terminally ill patients to seek any type of 
  treatment regardless of the effectiveness of such treatment 
  would create a cottage industry existing solely to provide 
  potential panaceas to highly vulnerable patients. The 
  language of the Supreme Court in rejecting the Laetrile 
  argument is equally applicable here.

  "If history is any guide, this new market would not be long 
  overlooked. Since the turn of the century, resourceful 
  entrepreneurs have advertised a wide variety of purportedly 
  simple and painless cures for cancer, including liniments    
  of turpentine, mustard, oil, eggs, and ammonia; peat moss; 
  arrangements of colored floodlamps; pastes made from   
  glycerin and limburger cheese; mineral tablets; and 
  `Fountain of Youth' mixtures of spices, oil, and suet. In 
  citing these examples, we do not, of course, intend to 
  deprecate the sincerity of Laetrile's current proponents, 
  or to imply any opinion on whether that drug may ultimately 
  prove safe and effective for cancer treatment. But this 
  historical experience does suggest why Congress could 
  reasonably have determined to protect the terminally ill, 
  no less than other patients, from the vast range of self-
  styled panaceas that inventive minds can devise."

The absolute worst case scenario is that they lose some money and die a little sooner. The best case scenario is that they live!

To say that someone else can or should have the power to constrain another human in this way, to keep them from a chance at living, in the name of "protecting" them from doctors or companies...well, we are likely at a fundamental philosophical impasse. Which is why I return to my original point. Feel free to stay in the United States with the FDA. Those with a different cast of mind need a jurisdiction where we can take conscious risks, where we aren't "protected" from medical innovation.

http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv27n2/v27n2-8.pdf

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2011/10/and...

http://fdareview.org/harm.shtml

  The delay and large reduction in the total number of new 
  drugs has had terrible consequences. It is difficult to 
  estimate how many lives the post-1962 FDA controls have 
  cost, but the number is likely to be substantial; 
  Gieringer (1985) estimates the loss of life from delay 
  alone to be in the hundreds of thousands (not to mention 
  millions of patients who endured unnecessary morbidity). ... 

  If the U.S. system resulted in appreciably safer drugs, we 
  would expect to see far fewer postmarket safety 
  withdrawals in the United States than in other countries. 
  Bakke et al. (1995) compared safety withdrawals in the 
  United States with those in Great Britain and Spain, each 
  of which approved more drugs than the United States during 
  the same time period. Yet, approximately 3 percent of all 
  drug approvals were withdrawn for safety reasons in the 
  United States, approximately 3 percent in Spain, and 
  approximately 4 percent in Great Britain. There is no 
  evidence that the U.S. drug lag brings greater safety.

The only way to prove this definitively is a side-by-side experiment with a new jurisdiction in which patients and entrepreneurs alike are free to choose and the FDA has no power.

http://www.leagle.com/xmlResult.aspx?page=4&xmldoc=19981...

  Plaintiff requests that Dr. Davis be authorized to inject 
  Plaintiff with the with the experimental goat neutralizing 
  antibody drug [1] and that the FDA be enjoined from 
  interfering with Dr. Davis' treatment of Plaintiff. ...

  The Court is sympathetic to Plaintiff's situation. 
  However, the law is very clear, and under the current 
  statutes and regulations, Plaintiff's physician may not 
  administer the goat neutralizing antibody drug absent 
  prior approval of the FDA. In Court, Plaintiff argued that 
  he should have the right to take whatever treatment he 
  wishes due to his terminal condition regardless of whether 
  the FDA approves the treatment as effective or safe, and 
  that to prohibit him from taking the treatment he wishes 
  violates his rights under the US Constitution. ...

  This Court is in no way criticizing the intentions of 
  Plaintiff and his physician or the potential effectiveness 
  of the proposed treatment. Plaintiff's physician should 
  pursue approval of his Investigational New Drug 
  application as quickly as possible. Plaintiff's doctor 
  must obtain appropriate approval through the proper 
  regulatory authorities. As much as this Court may 
  empathize with Plaintiff, the authority to provide some 
  type of exemptions for individuals such as Plaintiff rests 
  with Congress and not with this Court.

http://blogs.wsj.com/health/2008/10/17/lance-armstrong-and-b...

  “We did a safety review, consulted with experts on PML, 
  and worked closely with FDA to come up with a risk 
  management program that allowed us to bring it back on the 
  market in a way that limited its use,” a Biogen 
  spokeswoman told the Law Blog. The plan prohibits giving 
  Tysabri for unapproved uses.

  Biogen Idec is running an early-stage trial of the drug in 
  multiple myeloma, but Baron doesn’t meet the criteria to 
  participate.

  Baron’s a prominent donor to the Democratic party, and 
  many of his powerful friends, including Lance Armstrong 
  and Bill Clinton, made appeals on his behalf. And the 
  family agreed not to sue if anything goes wrong.

  Ultimately, his doctors at the Mayo Clinic worked directly 
  with the FDA to find a “legal basis” for giving Baron 
  Tysabri. The deal was announced on Baron’s son’s blog late 
  yesterday.

But this is not really optimal. If you are an academic, you accept the concept of QC/quality checking, but you aren't stuck with just one journal to submit to. You can revise and resubmit somewhere else. And if you are an end-user, you don't have to take a reviewer's opinion into account when choosing between movies, books, bikes, or virtually any other physical good with star ratings on Amazon.com. Except for drugs. Then you, as the end-user, cannot opt-out and take the FDA's opinions with a grain of salt. In part this is because the FDA will sue you directly. In part it is because companies that even think of trying this route will get slapped by the FDA for trying to game the system, and subsequently find their approvals slowed or (nowadays) outright denied.

We need to carve out a jurisdiction where patients and entrepreneurs alike are free to take informed risks, recognizing up front that sick people do die in medicine, and also recognizing that society already allows people to take incredible risks in other contexts (joining the military, bungee jumping, walking tightropes). Whether that new jurisdiction is Singapore, or Estonia, or a seastead, or a medical cruise ship, or something else is to be determined. But that has to be the goal.

[1] In case a "goat antibody" sounds weird to you, it's a common thing in molecular biology. Google it, or see for example Thermo's web page: http://www.pierce-antibodies.com/custom-antibodies/goat-anti...