"You Bet Your Life"

Bob Doyle: Poppy Runs for Congress

During the second nominating convention for Carter, there was a big scandal in Franklin County, the sheriff was indicted. He resigned, and they were looking for a clean candidate. The treasurer of the  Democratic State Committee came into our hotel room to tell Poppy that they were considering her for appointment by the Governor as Sheriff of Franklin County. Things were going along swimmingly, and the next day on the convention floor Governor Dukakis came up to her, he looked down and he said, "Are you pregnant?" She said, "Yes." He said, "Oh -- congratulations." And that was the end of the Sheriff job. The vaunted liberal couldn't fathom the idea of a pregnant sheriff, even in Greenfield, Massachusetts. We've got this huge reputation of being a liberal state, but it's nonsense. We're more tight-assed than Oklahoma, and we don't have any patience for uppity, unconventional women.

Since we were active in Mo Udall's Presidential campaign, we went to the meeting where they elect delegates to the Presidential nominating convention who serve on the National Committee for four years. We got to the meeting and Charlie Flahrety who was the speaker of the House at the time and a good friend of Poppy's & mine, suggested that she run for delegate, to be on the National Committee. It sounded alright to Poppy and so we went around and politicked.

The Udall delegation split right down the middle on Poppy. She was the most liberal woman in the room, but there were a few problems -- she had a firearms I.D. card because I always had a shotgun in the car for bird hunting and she didn't want to get arrested. She didn't quite meet their litmus test, so only about half of them voted for her. I can see Poppy's having trouble with the Udall people. Some of the Carter people voted for her too, but their vote was split. There was a lawyer named Al Faricci, one of the spokesmen for the Wallace delegation. Al was one of these guys who was constantly in trouble with the Massachusetts Supreme Court. He was a vigorous advocate on behalf of his clients, who were usually charged with mob crimes . . . Al had no patience with the establishment, let's put it that way. He's saying about Poppy, "Hey, that broad's a real liberal!" and Dapper O'Neil, a city councilman from Boston, says "Yeah, yeah, she's liberal all right, but she's a broad you can talk to, just vote for her!" Poppy got the entire vote of the George Wallace delegation, and she became the National Committeewoman.

We got kind of friendly with Tip O'Neil -- Poppy was kinda his delegate to the National Committee. She was doing a lot of politicking, around the state and in Washington. So she finally got the bug, decided she wanted to run for Congress in 1980 against Silvio Conte. Tip O'Neil froze her, because of Conte.  He was ranking Republican on appropriations, among other things. . . He'd been Tip O'Neil's roommate, and Eddie Bolan -- who was the Congressman from Springfield's best friend. He and Tip and Eddie Bolan hung out together. So she started a campaign. We went to Washington, we went to all the women's organizations. One, either N.O.W, or some other women's group, made me sit in the anteroom, they wouldn't let me go in when Poppy talked to the people who were trying to decide whether to give her money. The next group we went to wouldn't allow me in the building. When I walked into the reception room with her they said "I'm sorry, we don't allow men here, you"ll have to wait outside." They didn't mean outside the office, they meant out on the street. They didn't give her any money. Nobody gave her any money, because O'Neil and Conte put the kibosh on the money. Poppy went to a union local in Pittsfield, Conte's home town. I can't remember which local it was. Pittsfield's a big industrial town. Conte had stood by while General Electric moved out, and he just patted them on the back as they left town.

They were huge contributors to the campaign. Poppy went over to address the union. They accused her of being a liberal, and asked her what her stand on gun control was. She reached into her wallet and said, "I got my firearms I.D. card, how many of you guys got one?" She didn't ever tell them her stand on gun control, which wasn't exactly compatible with theirs. So the local voted her their contribution, and called Washington to tell'em to send it to Poppy, and in Washington they said, "It's too late, we sent it to Conte. You don't get a vote on that."

She had a lot of people stand on line with her at factory gates, and she did very well, very well. Essentially we ran a campaign for Congress on $17,000. At one point she showed at 70% in the polls. Jimmy Carter came to Boston, he had a $1000 fundraiser, and one of the Polish farmers out here in the Pioneer Valley, very active in Democratic politics, came up with the $1000 and went down to the luncheon for Carter for the sole reason of going up to Tip O'Neil and saying "You're a lousy Democrat. You're screwing Poppy Doyle. I know you're doing it, and I want you to know that we all know you're doing it. So  the next time you stand up to say what a wonderful Democrat you are, just remember that we all know you're not." He paid $1000 for that. It didn't help the campaign any, but we had a thousand laughs.

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Bob Doyle was born, in 1937, at Northampton, Massachusetts. He attended public schools and graduated from Holy Cross College (1959), and obtained his law degree from Georgetown (1963). He served in the U.S. Navy from 1959 to 1961, mostly at the Pentagon on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations. He has practiced law in Northampton from 1963 to the present and has been active in Democratic politics ("it seems forever"). He lives in the foothills of the Berkshires. With his friend and colleague, Peter D'Errico, he has for the past decade represented, among others, traditional native peoples and nations. He is married to Poppy McCluskey and they have eight children.

Breastfeeding May Lower Risk of HIV for African Babies

       Breastfeeding May Lower Risk of HIV for African Babies

March 29, 2007

As the person who sent it to us remarked, "I won't even begin to try to make sense of this one." However, I will comment that the best modern medical science appears to be able to do to solve the perpetual public health problems of Africa [now called HIV/AIDS] is to "strongly" recommend circumcising men and breastfeeding babies.

Women infected with HIV who exclusively breastfeed their babies reduce the risk of transmitting the virus, researchers in South Africa have found.

Infants who were given solids in addition to breast milk were almost 11 times more likely to become infected compared with those who had only breast milk, the team reports in Saturday's issue of the medical journal The Lancet.

Infants who received formula milk or animal milk in addition to breast milk were nearly twice as likely to be infected.

In comparison, the risk of transmission to infants fed only breast milk was four per cent.

"The question of whether or not to breastfeed is not a straightforward one," said study author Prof. Hoosen Coovadia from the Africa Centre.

"We know that breastfeeding carries with it a risk of transmitting HIV infection from mother to child, but breastfeeding remains a key intervention to reduce mortality."  [Continued]

Peter Duesberg Website Information Request: Why Make It Mandatory?

Dear Dr.Duesberg,

I am an Italian 39 year old man, married, with two children. I have been working for the United Nations World Food Programme (WFP) since 2000, here in Rome.

Some years ago the UN started a massive campaign of 'information' about HIV/AIDS in all its agencies. I attended a one-day training in July 2005. I want to highlight the fact that in that period I did not know of you, had not read your book yet, nor was I informed of the existence of another hypothesis about AIDS.

During the above mentioned training I had a strange feeling; I felt that their target was to convince us of the absolute necessity to do the HIV test. Not only once, because: "Unfortunately there is the possibility of false negatives". And more: "If you have tested negative it is better to re-do the test after a couple of years because things happen!" (He was talking about sexual intercourse!)

After this "training",  I was really scared, but I kept on feeling something very strange about it. I thought that they just wanted to have as many people as possible to go for the test. But I did not understand why -- until I read your book, last year, which gave me many answers.

Another point: This training was "mandatory" for all UN staff. Why "mandatory"?

Why not to do a mandatory training on the correlation between smoking cigarettes and cancer, on abuse of alcohol, of drugs? In Italy eight thousand people die every year from problems caused by pollution due to cars. Nothing is being done for this. FIAT is one of the biggest cars producers, based in Italy!

Then I also discovered that  a new division was created in WFP, named "HIV/AIDS". I do not really know what they do, but I do not understand why we should not create other divisions for all the diseases killing hundred thousand people every year.

If  you wish to publish my letter, or part of it, please do not share my name, I think the organization where I work would not like it! (I do not even bring your book in the office, I understood it is better for my career.)

Thank you so much for your attention to my letter, and please accept my best congratulations for your work.

Best Regards,  Anonymous Italian

Caro Anon,

Thanks for your informative letter.  It does confirm the global manipulation of the HIV-AIDS dogma once again.

Have a look at the new "$bn AIDS Quiz" at duesberg.com. It may shed some light on your 'unanswerable', in any simple sense, question.

Saluti and stay in touch,  Peter D.

Peter Duesberg is a professor in the department of molecular and cell biology at the University of California (Berkeley), and a member of the United States National Academy of Sciences.

Roberto P. Stock: The Orders of The Church of AIDS - In the Spirit of Erwin Chargaff and Umberto Eco

Similarities between the Church of HIV-AIDS (CHA) and the Roman Catholic Church (RCC) are obvious. Recognized limitations of analogical thinking notwithstanding, our understanding of the current statu quo of applied wisdom might be improved by indulging in some jocular pursuit of these facile analogies; the exercise may provide a framework for a better understanding of how some subsets of orthodox “scientists” of the CHA react to critical analysis.

We may, to begin, broadly classify the orthodox “scientists” into three types: Jesuits, Dominicans and Franciscans. We will examine each with the understanding that there are numerous shades and “in betweens”, and some unusual exceptions to the generalities and generalizations put forth. These musings do not intend to constitute an exhaustive taxonomy of the Faithful.

The Jesuit Order is relatively young. It was born in the XVI century, a time when the RCC was under imminent threat of fragmentation (as it did fragment). St. Ignacio de Loyola, its founder, was responsible for providing the RCC with brain power to counter the infinitely attractive arguments – as well as the much higher moral ground – of the reformers. This brain power should operate subtly and profoundly but, very importantly, should never question the authority of the Pope and the necessity of only one truth for Salvation. As anyone trained in analytical thinking knows, this is a difficult task; one never knows where the pursuit of ideas will lead. The intellectual prowess of the Company of Jesus and their relentless drive to educate the princes during the Counter Reformation, made the Order the standard-bearer for the educational concerns of the RCC. It has been said that the Jesuits have given both the best and the worst of the legacy of the RCC to the world. Their legacy includes translation/preservation of many jewels of oral wisdom in conquered/annihilated peoples during the European expansion into the world, educational institutions that for a long time were of enviable quality, the Missions of the New World, and even important parts of that broad movement which has been called Theology of Liberation.

The true Jesuit of the CHA is educated. He/she can think rigorously and point out fallacies and inconsistencies in the heretic’s argument. He/she has accomplished “something” regarded of value in the lab. He/she “knows his/her stuff”. He/she can handle the paradoxes of HIV “variability” and invisibility, can defend the notion of “quasi-species”, will remember the error rate of reverse transcriptase and will admit that failure to isolate is indeed a serious problem. He/she will craft the cleverest smoke-screens and dialectical obstacles. However, he/she will not question the fact that all this, added together, may actually mean that the dogma is wrong.  Jesuits of CHA are not abundant. Maybe, in the beginning, David Baltimore was a Jesuit; Howard Temin certainly was. Current exponents of this subtler yet bounded mode of thought subscribe the idea that simplistic statements of the sort “HIV kills like a truck” (St. Gallo dixit) or “direct cytocidal effects” are false. But, as a true Jesuit, will continue to believe that HIV is doing “something important, even essential” anyway, and will proceed to spend as much (mostly tax-payer) money as they can studying all possible combinations of differentiation markers in the cells apparently injured, directly or otherwise, by “HIV disease progression”. The Jesuit will not give up on dogma until ordered to do so from higher up, which would probably mean an irreversible upheaval of the CHA. As with the RCC with the various crowns of Europe, the CHA is bound to other power systems (such as the pharmaceutical industry and the HMOs) so tightly that it is very likely that the toppling of one will mean the demise of the others (at least in the present form). The Jesuit is faithful to a well established discipline of unified thought.

Dominicans of the CHA are, however, a completely different kettle of piranhas. [Continued]

---

Roberto P. Stock is a senior investigator at the Institute of Biotechnology of the Autonomous National University of Mexico in Cuernavaca.

Anthony Fauci Explains Science and the Media in the Age of AIDS

 
The media are great equalizers in science, which is most disturbing to us scientists. Any scientist quoted in the media becomes an “expert.” We know reporters must consult more than a single source and make room for dissenting opinions. But many people consider what is in the media to be true by definition. One striking example is Peter Duesberg’s theory that HIV is not the cause of AIDS. I laughed at that for a while, but it led to a lot of public concern that maybe HIV was a hoax. The theory has extraordinary credibility just on the basis of news coverage."

"My barometer of what the general public is really thinking is my sister Denise. My sister Denise is an intelligent woman who reads avidly, listens to the radio, and watches television, but she is not a scientist. When she calls me and questions my integrity as a scientist, there really is a problem. Denise has called me at least ten times about Peter Duesberg. She says, “Anthony”—she is the only one who calls me Anthony—“are you sure he’s wrong?” That’s the power of putting someone on television or in the press, although there is virtually nothing in his argument that makes scientific sense. People are especially confused when they see divergent reports about the same thing."

"Journalists who make too many mistakes, or who are too sloppy, are going to find that their access to scientists may diminish." -  Fauci, A. 1989. Writing for my sister Denise. The AAAS Observer, Sept. 1.

[Sadly, Tony's not-so-veiled threats appear to have been considerably more effective than his AIDS policies.]

Anthony Fauci and David Ho Disprove an Old Adage

Harry Smith on Western Civilization and Science

One thing that was customary in the so-called Old World was the domestication of animals, whereas the New World specialized in the domestication and development of new species of plants. Plants like corn and beans and so forth. Most of them have the property of being herbal in nature. We seldom think of food as having--you know, being good for us, being food that cures.

Of course, in 1480, the--I don't know what you call them, "Natives," I guess--because America is just another Italian... Anyhow, whoever lived here were extremely healthy, they had a life expectancy much longer than that of Europeans at the time. On his second voyage, in 1492, Columbus bought 1,200 specimens of things: men, seeds, cuttings for planting chic peas, wheat, melons, onions, radishes, salad greens, sugar cane, and fruit stalks for planting orchards.

As far as disease is concerned--strongly, debate still goes on, regarding the origin of syphilis -- it is however the only ambiguous case of serious disease. All of the diseases transmitted from one continent to another, went Westward.

Smallpox, measles, typhoid fever, tuberculosis, cholera, diphtheria, plague, etc... This, now,--it mentions tuberculosis here but what causes tuberculosis? Is it the tuberculosis bacilli that causes it? Or is it poverty and malnutrition?

It doesn't take much thinking to decide that, ah, it's not the germs really. It gives you some idea how serious these epidemics were, at Mandan, which you may have seen George Tatlin's painting of, at the beginning of 1837, there were 1600 people. In July, only about 31 were left.

The Europeans also had other bad habits, such as associating physical labor with status. It was hard for them--you must remember that Cortez was a contemporary of Henry VIII. It gives you one idea why the Europeans were unhealthy -- they had so much clothing on.

In one famous formulation of this idea, of this kind of view, the amoeba and Einstein used the same method, which is trial and error.

If truth were equated with that which increases the probability of survival, then science would certainly be untrue because it increases the possibility of non-survival through various types of human or natural disaster. But, the Europeans had always been willing to exchange good health for cultural complexity. They would rather see a clock tick than live--ha ha, after they'd invented one--ten years longer. Their fascination with machinery is very strange.

Another thing that's typical of the Western hemisphere are the child training practices, that lead to theories on 'aggression' that Lorenz and Konburgen and Morris, etc, consider innate and universal. But this is untrue. Ashley Montague made an analysis of a great number of cultures, and... it usually revolves around people who are emotionally deprived. I don't have to go into this because you already know it.

[The above remarks are from an impromptu talk Mr. Smith delivered at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado in 1990 to a gathering of students, faculty and guests. The transcription is by Eric Malone.]

---

Harry Smith (1923-1991) was a filmmaker, ethnomusicologist, painter and 'underground', cultural icon of the last half of the 20th C. The photograph at top is by his good friend and patron Allen Ginsberg.

Michael Geiger: "The More Things Change ... "

Mercury oxide (calomel) combined with bleeding was the preferred treatment for almost all illness by the first US Surgeon General and Chief Doctor Benjamin Rush [1], and especially for yellow fever, which unknown at the time, is spread by mosquitoes. An epidemic of yellow fever, along with Surgeon General Benjamin Rush's promotion of calomel (and bleeding 4/5ths of a patient's blood), decimated one quarter of the population of Philadelphia in the summer of 1793.

At the time, Philadelphia was the capital city of the federal government, and the entire government, including Washington, Jefferson and Adams all went to Washington DC before the buildings and roads were even finished to escape the epidemic.

A small minority of doctors, who had success with recommendations of rest, good food, fresh air and moving away from the swamps around the city, fought against the bleeding and mercury dosing at the time, but were quite unsuccessful at getting the practices stopped. The powerful Dr. Rush and the other leading doctors claimed that they were absolutely correct and were saving lives, and called those who disagreed with them killers and murderers of the innocent, who were withholding life saving treatments. They maintained until their deaths that the proof calomel and bleeding treatments worked was that the outbreak of yellow fever ended in November (coincident with the first frosts and the disappearance of mosquitoes until the next spring).

In 1805, Thomas Jefferson sent Northwest Expedition explorers, Lewis and Clark, to see Dr. Rush for medical advice for their upcoming expedition to explore the American Northwest territories. Rush gave them several "bleeders" for slicing veins open, and a box full of Calomel for the trip, the only medical supplies they carried along.

The following popular song (to the tune of "Oh Tannenbaum") from the mid 19th C. concerns calomel. Even so, many physicians continued to prescribe it until the 1930's.

"Ye doctors all of every rank
With their long bills that break the bank,
Of wisdom's learning, art, and skill
Seems all composed of calomel.

Since calomel has been their toast,
How many patients have they lost,
How many hundreds have they killed,
Or poisoned with their calomel.

lf any fatal wretch be sick
Go call the doctor, haste, be quick,
The doctor comes with drop and pill
But don't forget his calomel.

He enters, by the bed he stands,
He takes the patient hy the hand,
Looks wise, sits down his pulse to feel
And then takes out his calomel.

Next, turning to the patient's wife,
He calls for paper and a knife.
" l think your husband would do well
To take a dose of calomel."

The man grows worse, grows bad indeed
" Go call the doctor, ride with speed."
The doctor comes, the wife to tell
To double the dose of calomel.

The man begins in death to groan,
The fatal job for him is done,
The soul must go to heaven or hell,
A sacrifice to calomel.

The doctors of the present day
Mind not what an old woman say,
Nor do they mind me when l tell
I am no friend to calomel.

Well, if I must resign my breath,
Pray let me die a natural death
And if I must bid all farewell,
Don't hurry me with calomel.

[from: American Ballads and Songs]

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Michael Geiger is a member of the board of directors of HEAL San Diego

"You Bet Your Life" Leads, Newsweek Follows

 

From: Begley, Sharon
To: gmiklos@
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 5:24 AM
Subject: hcgp

Dr. Miklos, I am working on a story about the human cancer genome project, and dug out your Nature Biotech paper from May 2005 on it. I was hoping to ask whether you still have the concerns you expressed there, and whether some of the initial results of tumor-genome sequencing (as from the Vogelstein group late last year) lay them to rest or confirm them (or neither).

Might there be a time when we are both awake (I am in New York) when I might chat with you about all this? Many thanks in advance for any help you can give me----

Sharon Begley
Science columnist
Newsweek
251 W. 57th St.
New York, N.Y. 10019

From: George Miklos
Sent: Thursday, March 1, 2007 4:12 PM
To: Begley, Sharon
Cc: bialy harvey; drbaird@
Subject: Human Cancer Genome Project discussion

Dear Ms Begley,

What a coincidence.

I have just written an article with a medical colleague on this topic and sent it to "You Bet Your Life", an online journal of which the editor is Dr Harvey Bialy (who was the Founding Scientific Editor oF Nature Biotechnology).

Our article is scheduled for publication early in March. Dr Bialy is the conduit for this article. However an embargoed copy can be sent to you for your perusal.

I can speak with you whenever you find it convenient. 8 am here in the morning in Newport Beach in Sydney is 4 pm in New York and I am always awake by 7am ... usually earlier.

My home office number is .... My cellular number is ....

In brief, the whole Vogelstein-type project is scientifically flawed and Dr Baird and I discuss why that is so, in a no nonsense medical/scientific manner.

yours sincerely,
george

From: Begley, Sharon
To: George Miklos
Sent: Thursday, March 01, 2007 9:20 AM
Subject: RE: Human Cancer Genome Project discussion

Thank you! I promise to respect the embargo. Might it make sense for me to read your latest, then call you around this time tomorrow? The only hitch might be if my column has to run before your online paper does, in which case I would either not cite it at all, or just note that it will come out---your call. But the earliest mine would run is likely to be March 12, so I'll cross my fingers the timing works.

Sharon

From me to Begley (cc Miklos):

Buenos dias Sharon,

The url for "You Bet Your Life" is http://barnesworld.blogs.com (its original url that went with its original name ... Barnes World before I began editing it back in Sept. of last year. I dare not change it for fear of destroying the amazing Alexa statistics it has accumulated since then).

I intend to publish the attached essay on Monday or Tuesday of next week, so there is plenty of time.

If I can be of any further assistance, do not hesitate to contact me at this email, or even by telephone. I have a broadband connection with a Beverly Hills area code, but it rings in a much more high toned bario in Cuernavaca, Mexico: 1 310 ...

Saludos, Harvey

From: Begley, Sharon
Date: Mar 1, 2007 8:31 AM
Subject: RE: Here is the article sans figures
To: bialy harvey

Got it---thanks very much!

And here, with no additional comment (ahem), is the story that Ms. Begley published "next week".

---

$1.5 Billion Doesn’t Guarantee Good Science

By Sharon Begley

Newsweek

March 26, 2007 issue - When the government dangles $1.5 billion in front of scientists, they rarely say, oh no, please, keep it, there are better ways to spend the money. But as the biomedical establishment gears up for yet another megaproject, some leading scientists are doing exactly that, making the heretical suggestion that this latest extravaganza is poor science and bad policy.

Called the Cancer Genome Atlas, it aims to identify mutations in tumor cells from the 50 most common kinds of human cancer. (A genome is the full set of genetic information in, in this case, all the malignant cells in these 50 cancers.) You can think of the mutations as misspellings in the cells' DNA; the hope is that designer drugs tailored to a patient's mutations will cure the cancer just as spellcheck cures typos. Now beginning a three-year, $100 million pilot phase, the atlas threatens to suck up ever-dwindling resources at a time of budget carnage at the National Institutes of Health, which funds it. But there's a bigger problem: the atlas's very premise may be fatally flawed.

"From a clinical and drug perspective, the cancer-genome project is so shallow it's worthless," says George Gabor Miklos, who has served as a consultant on genome projects, the holy grails of biology for a decade. NIH, he says, has "made an enormous mistake that will cost the taxpayer billions." Scientists from top institutions including the Mayo Clinic, the University of Chicago and Harvard Medical School are weighing in to denounce the project as "high-cost, low-efficiency," "not informative" and "naïve."

To understand their concern, it helps to know some basics about how cancer kills and, paradoxically, how relatively unimportant the actual tumor is. The cancer atlas will catalog mutations in primary tumors—those solid masses in lung, breast, prostate and other tissues. But what kills an estimated 90 percent of cancer patients is not the primary tumor (you can live without a prostate). It is metastases. These are malignant cells that spread to a vital organ like the brain. "What matters for survival is not the primary tumor but the rare cells—1 in 50,000—in it that give rise to metastases," says Miklos. Identifying all the mutations in a tumor is overkill, especially since the atlas will not zero in on mutations that underlie metastasis.

The atlas may miss such mutations entirely. Metastatic cells often emigrate early in a tumor's life, points out cancer geneticist Christoph Klein of the University of Regensberg, Germany. But many mutations arise only when a tumor is larger than an inch, which is when biopsies tend to be done. "By this time, cells that give rise to metastasis have already left," says Klein. Mutations in primary tumors, which the atlas will identify, may therefore not provide good drug targets. As Miklos says, "Most of the millions of mutations in the tumor will be clinically irrelevant."

The dragnet will sweep up not only mutations that cause or sustain a tumor but also those that are innocent bystanders. How many of the latter do tumors have? Malignant cells accumulate mutations 200 times faster than normal cells, Lawrence Loeb of the University of Washington School of Medicine finds in a recent study. That works out to about 1 billion mutations in a single tumor. Scientists hope they can separate cancer-causing mutations from innocuous ones.

It gets worse. Different parts of a tumor can have completely different mutations. Biopsies usually sample one or two spots. Even if the research does lead to new drug cocktails, a doctor will logically choose drugs that target mutations he or she knows are there—that is, in the biopsied part of a tumor—leaving the very different mutations in nonsampled areas free to proliferate.

Proponents of the cancer atlas argue that it is already discovering new mutations. A 2006 study, led by scientists at Johns Hopkins University, found that breast and colon tumors harbor 191 important mutations in numerous genes, for instance. But even they admit the genetic dragnet hauls in mutations that are merely along for the ride. And while it's all well and good to identify prevalent mutations and hope you can craft drugs that target them, the malignant cells may hang on just fine by relying on their rarer mutations. This seems to be why the much-hyped new "targeted" drugs hardly extend survival; they block one pathway that cancer cells use to grow and lay down supply lines, so the cells take a biological detour to achieve the same end.

No wonder experts are pleading for "a note of caution" on the cancer atlas, as Klein puts it. Even Dennis Slamon of UCLA, whose work on breast cancer led to the highly successful drug Herceptin and who served on the panel that crafted the cancer-atlas project, has doubts. "It's a reasonable approach but certainly expensive, and based on a premise that might or might not bear fruit," he says. "At the end of the day, you still have to prove that the mutations you find are playing a role."

Cancer is poised to supplant heart disease as the nation's leading killer. Patients are understandably desperate for cures, and the genome establishments for projects that keep it funded. Neither motive produces good science.

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John Mellors Addresses the Fourteenth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections

"The rate at which an untreated HIV-positive person's CD4 cell count is declining is a poor predictor of the risk of AIDS or death in individual patients the Fourteenth Conference on Retroviruses and Opportunistic Infections was told this week".

"This means that medium term CD4 decline – the quantity Rodriguez said was poorly predicted by viral load – is itself a useless predictor of progression to AIDS, because it is so immensely variable. In fact it is so difficult to calculate the gradient of a medium-term CD4 decline which may in fact feature short-term, abrupt increases and decreases such that the average statistical error in the calculation is 55 cells – almost equal to the average annual decline. "In a quarter of the observations, the error of the slope is greater than the measurement of the slope itself,” Mellors said.. " [1]