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Is all animal research inhumane? (More from the vault)

This post, originally posted 8 January 2006 on the old site, responds to an email I got after the last post. Given John's recent post on Pro-Test, the questions are still timely. * * * * * I received an email from a reader in response to my last post on PETA's exposing of problems with the treatment of research animals at UNC. The reader pointed me to the website of an organization concerned with the treatment of lab animals in the Research Triangle, www.serat-nc.org. And, she wrote the following: Some people may think that PETA is extreme. However, the true "extreme" is what happens to…

Dembski Responds

Over at Uncommon Descent, Dembski has responded to my critique of his paper with Marks. In classic Dembski style, he ignores the substance of my critique, and resorts to quote-mining. In my previous post, I included a summary of my past critiques of why search is a lousy model for evolution. It was a brief summary of past comments, which did nothing but set the stage for my critique. But, typically, Dembski pretended that that was the entire substance of my post, and ignored the rest of it. Very typical of Dembski - just misrepresent your opponents, create a strawman, and then pretend that…

Dembski's Latest: "Life's Conservation Law", and why it's stupid

So. William Dembski, the supposed "Isaac Newton of Information Theory" has a new paper out with co-author Robert Marks. Since I've written about Dembski's bad IT numerous times in the past, I've been getting email from readers wanting me to comment on this latest piece of intellectual excreta. I can sum up my initial reaction to the paper in three words: "same old rubbish". There's really nothing new here - this is just another rehash of the same bankrupt arguments that Dembski has been peddling for years. But after thinking about it for a while, I realized that Dembski has actually…

Darwin and the vermiform appendix

Last night, I asked for a copy of an article (I have plenty now, thanks!) that was getting a lot of press. The reason I was looking for it is two-fold: the PR looked awful, expressing some annoying cliches about evolution, but the data looked interesting, good stuff that I was glad to see done. Awful and interesting — I'm a sucker for those jarring combinations. My favorite pizza is jalapeno and pineapple, too. I'm going to split my discussion of this article in two, just to simplify dealing with it. This is the awful part. I'll do the interesting part a little later. The paper is about the…

Get Thee Over By Me, Satan

Note: This is a lightly revised version of a post from ye olde blogge (actually ye older blogge, the original Casaubon's Book). At the time I wrote it, I didn't know about Dan Savage's brilliantly funny book on the seven deadly sins _Skipping Towards Gomorrah_ and if I had, I probably wouldn't have written this, since it seems so derivative in retrospect. But since I didn't, and it was a fun one to write, I'm re-running it here. I got a very funny email from a correspondant who asked that I not use his name when I write this. He tells me that he's newly aware of peak oil and climate change…

Gulf Oil Spill Disaster: Spawn of the Living Dead for Atlantic Bluefin Tuna?

tags: ecology, marine biology, conservation biology, endangered species, habitat preferences, Northern Bluefin Tuna, Atlantic Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus, Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, fisheries, PLoS ONE, researchblogging.org,peer-reviewed research, journal club An adult Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus. A recently published study, intended to provide data to commercial fisheries in the Gulf of Mexico so they maximize their catch of Yellowfin Tuna, Thunnus albacares, whilst avoiding bycatch of critically endangered Atlantic (Northern) Bluefin Tuna, Thunnus thynnus…

The problem with the White Power symbol

You all know about this: It is being said that the OK sign is used to indicated "White Power" and this use has been spotted among politicians and celebrities everywhere. Is this real? I don't know. Is it a valid symbol for "White Power"? Certainly not. The problem with the white power symbol is that it is not a symbol. Or, if it is a symbol, it is a baby symbol that doesn't know how to be a symbol yet, so don't expect much from it. Semiotics Ahead Index (not an icon, not a symbol, but yes, it is a sign. With a sign on it.) Try this. Move your hands in front of you as though you were…

Is Coach K Bad for Basketball?

Adam Packer at In the Agora has addressed an entire post to me because I am a Duke fan (the contributors to that site are almost all Indiana fans) and we've had some go-rounds in the past on the subject. Adam writes: Attention Ed Brayton: Sportsline writer Gregg Doyel dressed down Duke University men's hoops coach Mike Krzyzewski in a recent column, and in doing so, put into the mainstream the thoughts and snickers many college basketball fans (including some right here at ITA) have circulated amongst themselves for years. The thesis: Coach K works and berates the refs all game, and by the…

Coyne Lays an Egg

Ronald Reagan famously defined the eleventh commandment to be, “Thou shalt not criticize a fellow Republican.” I'm a big fan of the spirit, if not the substance, of that statement. Generally speaking, I try to avoid criticizing my own side. The way I see it, there are dozens of bloggable items that come across my desk every day, and I can only write about a tiny fraction of them. So why should I waste time on some obscure commentator or blogger who defends something I believe in with somethng less than complete rigor? There are plenty of other bloggers on the other side perfectly happy…

Sullivan's Latest

The blogalogue between Sam Harris and Andrew Sullivan on the subject of the reasonableness of religious faith continues. We pick up the action with Sullivan's latest salvo. He is responding to the following question asked by Harris: “What would constitute “proof” for you that your current beliefs about God are mistaken? (i.e., what would get you to fundamentally doubt the validity of faith in general and of Christianity in particular?)” Let's consider Sullivan's reply in full: I have never doubted the existence of God. Never. My acceptance of God's existence - of a force beyond everything…

St Olaf talk

We had a good time at St Olaf tonight — it was a small group, I gave a short talk, and we had lots and lots of stimulating conversation afterwards, along with my favorite pizza (jalapeno and pineapple). I've tucked what I sort of said below the fold. I am here to bring you some good news. The universe is about 13.7 billion years old, plus or minus a few hundred million, and the earth itself is about 4.6 billion years old. How do we know this? The work of astronomers in measuring cosmological constants, in calculating the age of stars and the size of our universe; the work of physicists on…

Test essay 4: Diffusion of innovations for group work in a firm

See what a "test essay" is in the introduction to my previous essay. This is a question another doctoral student was assigned. The question asked for a lot of details, so nothing is covered very thoroughly. I did only minor editing just now, and those edits are marked with []. The question: "A large firm is acquiring technology to enhance group work. because of the great expense, management is very concerned about assessing the adoption process at various times over the next two years and taking steps, as necessary to insure its successful adoption within the firm a) define "successful…

Myles Power's dishonest defense of evolutionary psychology

Back around the 11th of July, I saw a few comments by a guy named Myles Power, a science youtuber, who was quite irate that Rebecca Watson criticized evolutionary psychology five years ago. There were the usual vaguely horrified reactions implying how annoying it was that some mere communications major would criticize an established, credible, true science like EP, and how she was prioritizing entertainment over scientific validity (not all from this Power guy; Watson is a magnet for the same tiresome bozos making the same tiresome complaints). So I told him that no, her criticisms were not…

A sad, premature death cynically exploited by antivaccinationists

I must admit, I've been enjoying my vacation thus far and have hardly paid attention to the blog, other than a couple of quick posts. For me, this is quite amazing. Still, every so often there pops up a story that I can't resist commenting on, particularly given that I'm just sitting around watching the Olympics, and I'm deadly tired of beach volleyball. (As an aside, notice how it's always women's beach volleyball that NBC shows, not men's, no doubt because the powers that be think that toned young women in bikinis playing volleyball translate into big ratings. Unfortunately, they seem to be…

I thought I'd seen it all: Epigenetic birth control

Epigenetics. As I've described before, to alternative medicine practitioners, epigenetics seems to mean something akin to what the word "quantum" means: Magic. I've covered, for example, the woo-filled stylings of Deepak Chopra invoking things like "quantum consciousness," and seemingly for quite a few years the best way to slap a patina of "sciencey"-sounding credibility on a pseudoscientific medical treatment has been to add the word "quantum" to it. Perhaps the epitome of this tendency was the infamous Quantum Xrroid Consciousness Interface promoted by a rather—shall we say?—flamboyant…

Your Friday Dose of Woo: In which I am given a woo-ducation in neuroscience

Every so often, real life intrudes on blogging, preventing the creation of fresh Insolence, at least Insolence of the quality that you've come to expect. This is one of those times, thanks to R01 deadlines. So enjoy this bit of Classic Insolence from back in September 2007 that, shockingly, as far as I can tell I've never "rerun" before. Remember, if you've been reading less than three years it's probably new to you, and, even if you have been reading more than three years, it's fun to see how posts like this have aged. As I usually do on Thursday nights, I was perusing my legendary Folder…

Bill Maher and "anti-science"

Last week, I expressed my surprise and dismay that the Atheist Alliance International chose Bill Maher for the Richard Dawkins Award. I was dismayed because Maher has championed pseudoscience, including dangerous antivaccine nonsense, germ theory denialism complete with repeating myths about Louis Pasteur supposedly recanting on his deathbed, a href="http://oracknows.blogspot.com/2005/12/bill-maher-anti-vax-wingnut.html">hostility towards "Western medicine" and an affinity for "alternative medicine," a history of sympathy to HIV/AIDS denialists, and the activities of PETA through his…

The cranks pile on John Ioannidis' work on the reliability of science

Pity poor John Ioannidis. The man does provocative work about the reliability of scientific studies as published in the peer-reviewed literature, and his reward for trying to point out shortcomings in how we as scientists and clinical researchers do studies and evaluate evidence is to be turned into an icon for cranks and advocates of pseudoscience--or even antiscience. I first became aware of Ioannidis two years ago around the time of publication of a paper by him that caused a stir, entitled Contradicted and Initially Stronger Effects in Highly Cited Clinical Research. In that study,…

A field guide to biomedical meeting creatures, part 2: Poster time!

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts, most of which are more than a year old.) These posts will be interspersed with occasional fresh material. This post originally appeared on April 27, 2005. Since I've started blogging, I notice things that I probably wouldn't have noticed before. I suspect it's…

Vacation purity contaminated

While I am on vacation, I'm reprinting a number of "Classic Insolence" posts to keep the blog active while I'm gone. (It also has the salutory effect of allowing me to move some of my favorite posts from the old blog over to the new blog, and I'm guessing that quite a few of my readers have probably never seen many of these old posts.) These will appear at least twice a day while I'm gone (and that will probably leave some leftover for Christmas vacation, even). Enjoy, and please feel free to comment. I will be checking in from time to time when I have Internet access to see if the reaction…

Beth Israel joins the Academic Woo Aggregator!

I feel bad. I realize that I've been completely neglecting my Academic Woo Aggregator. You remember my Academic Woo Aggregator, don't you? It was my attempt to compile a near-definitive list of academic medical centers that had "integrated" woo into their divisions or departments of "integrative medicine" (i.e., departments of academic-sounding quackery). Perusing it, I now realize that it's been over five months since I did a significant update to it. You just know that, given the rate of infiltration of unscientific medical practices into medical academia as seemingly respectable treatment…

Tai chi for fibromyalgia in the NEJM: A triumph of the Trojan horse

I tell ya, I go away for a few days and something always seems to happen that I'd be all over if I were at home and blogging normally. Either something major happens in the anti-vaccine movement or there's a new study being touted by woos or womthing else big happens. In the old days, I'd try to cover it anyway, but lately I've learned just to let it go until I get back home. If I'm still interested in it, the end result will usually be better, and if I'm not still interested in it then it's probably better that I never bothered writing about it anyway. This particular bit of blog material…

Another pointless "acupuncture" study misinterpreted

At the risk of once again irritating long time readers who've hear me say this before, I can't resist pointing out that, of all the various forms of "alternative medicine" other than herbal medicines (many of which are drugs, just adulterated, impure drugs), acupuncture was the one treatment that, or so I thought, might actually have a real therapeutic effect. Don't get me wrong; I never bought magical mystical mumbo-jumbo about "meridians" and "unblocking the flow of qi" (that magical mystical life energy that can't be detected by scientists but that practitioners of woo claim to be able to…

A field guide to biomedical meeting creatures, part 2: Poster time!

Orac is currently away at the ASCO meeting in Chicago. Shockingly, he was so busy that he didn't bother to write anything last night. Fortunately, he found something from the archives that's perfect for this occasion. Although it's not about ASCO specifically, ASCO is an even bigger meeting. This was originally written in 2005 on the "old' Respectful Insolence blog and then reposted in 2006. That' means if you haven't been reading at least three and a half years, it's new to you. It's also related to scientific meetings. Hmmm. This reminds me. I really should update this or do more…

Richard Moore: Swallowing antivaccine lies, hook, line, and sinker

There are few things more dangerous than a reporter with no understanding of science who, though the arrogance of ignorance, somehow comes to think that he has found the "next big story." We've seen it before in various incarnations. One of the first such reporters to fall down the rabbithole of vaccine pseudoscience, thinking he found a huge story, was, of course, David Kirby, whose "investigations" produced resulted in his 2004 book Evidence of Harm: Mercury in Vaccines and the Autism Epidemic, A Medical Controversy. Together with Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. and his steamy, drippy turd of fear…

How does a scientist or doctor become a crank?

As a physician and scientists who's dedicated his life to the application of science to the development of better medical treatments, I've often wondered how formerly admired scientists and physicians degenerate into out-and-out cranks. I'm talking about people like Peter Duesberg, who was once an admired scientist thought to be on track for a Nobel Prize; that is, until he became fixated on the idea that HIV does not cause AIDS. True, lately he's been trying to resurrect his scientific reputation with his chromosomal aneuploidy hypothesis of cancer, but, alas, true to form he's been doing it…

Bioethicist Art Caplan: The Darwin-Hitler claim is a form of "Holocaust denial"

I knew there was a reason why I like bioethicist Art Caplan. Leave it to him not to be afraid not only to wander a bit afield of medicine than usual but also to call it as he sees it, mainly his argument for why Expelled! and its claim that "Darwinism" led directly to the Holocaust is not only historically incorrect but a form of Holocaust denial. I don't quite agree with him, but he makes a compelling argument: The movie seeks to explain why, as a matter of freedom of speech, intelligent design should be taught in America's science classrooms and presented in America's publicly funded…

A finger in the dike isn't enough

Every so often I wonder what the status is regarding the infiltration of pseudoscience into medicine. It's something I've been writing about on a regular basis for nine years now, a phenomenon known as "quackademic medicine." It's simultaneously a depressing and energizing topic, energizing because it's something I'm passionate about, but depressing because at times it seems like an unwinnable battle. Times like now. What depressed me this time was article that popped up in my feed on Medscape entitled, Do Clinicians Base CAM Recommendations to Patients on Evidence of Efficacy? Since "…

Odds and ends left over after the Panorama Burzynski Clinic report: Burzynski versus his own SEC filing

I realize that I've been focusing on Stanislaw Burzynski the last couple of days, but it's just been one of those weeks. Between the release of Eric Merola's latest paean to the Brave Maverick Doctor and BBC Panorama's report on Burzynski and his activities, it's been an eventful week. My review of the second Burzynski movie and the Panorama report explain a lot, but there are some loose ends left over. So I might as well take care of that today before resuming regular blogging topics. (Yes, I know Stanislaw Burzynski is a regular blogging topic, but too much of a bad thing can get tiresome,…

Is homeopathy the end of vaccines? Only quacks would think so...

Yesterday, I wrote about an antivaccine "march on Washington." As is often the case with antivaccine rhetoric, if you listened to the people organizing the conference and planning to speak there, you'd think that they were fighting an apocalyptic battle for the very future of the human race. Certainly, Kent Heckenlively seems to think so. I'm not going to write about this march again, at least not today. It's too soon. I don't know how ridiculous, how pathetic it was, mainly because, as I write this, it hasn't happened yet. What I can write about is something I came across while researching…

What's good for the gander isn't always good for the goose

Sexual dimorphism in organisms is nothing new; it has long been known that in certain species one sex is often larger, flashier, or somehow markedly different than the other. In some species like the Indian Peafowl (Pavo cristatus), the mail carries a brightly colored train that is used to advertise to prospective female mates, while in the deep-sea anglerfish Suborder Ceratioidea the males are absolutely minuscule when compared to the females, fusing to the bodies of the larger sex and ultimately becoming little more than a sperm supply. Such differences are contrasted with the almost non-…

Getting the Story Right: The Peak Oil vs. Climate Change Inanity Continues

The IEA has pretty much conceeded peak oil, announcing that growth to meet demand in the coming decades will come from entirely mythical sources. Ok, they didn't say that, what they said in the latest World Energy Outlook was that the majority of oil production by 2030 will be coming from "fields yet to be developed or found." But what that means is "we're hoping someone with magic powers will come and reverse the long-stand trend towards decline in oil discovery." Because we know that oil discovery peaked in 1964 and has been declining ever since, so that we are consuming oil five times…

FDA Favors Industry Science on BPA

by Sarah Vogel On Friday, August 15, the FDA released its draft assessment of the safety of bisphenol A (BPA).  To the frustration and deep consternation of many, the regulatory agency upheld the current safety standard for human exposure to BPA in food.  The agency based their decision on two large multigenerational studies funded by the American Plastics Council (part of the American Chemistry Council) and the Society of the Plastics Industry.[1]   As for the large body of literature on low dose effects of BPA that originally raised concerns about the chemicalâs ability to disrupt…

Spring Forward, Fall Back - should you watch out tomorrow morning?

If you live in (most places in) the United States as well as many other countries, you have reset your clocks back by one hour last night (or last week). How will that affect you and other people? One possibility is that you are less likely to suffer a heart attack tomorrow morning than on any other Monday of the year. Why? Let me try to explain in as simple way as possible (hoping that oversimplification will not lead to intolerable degrees of inaccuracy). Almost all biochemical, physiological and behavioral parameters in almost all (at least multicellular) organisms display diurnal (daily…

Growing in So Many Ways

We came back from the developmental pediatrician yesterday in a jubilant mood. Two of my sons came to us with significant developmental delays. Both of them have made wonderful progress, so last night was an occasion for celebration. A lot of parents have children who are delayed in some ways. Some kids catch up. Some catch up part of the way. Some never do. It can be a huge struggle to trust that you are doing things "right." After almost 16 years of parenting kids with significant disabilities, I've come to feel that as long as you are in there working to support your kids and get…

Matt Ridley, Anti-Science Writer, Climate Science Denialist

Matt Ridley is a British journalist whom some in the science community are now quietly referring to as an “anti-science writer.” He has taken up the cause of denying the widely held and deep scientific consensus on climate change. He has a recent blog post he seems to have been compelled to write in response to a new study on the use of tree rings as a proxyindicator for past temperatures. I’ll be writing about that research in a day or two. Ridley’s post is embarrassing, and especially annoying to me because for several years I used his book on evolutionary biology as a recommended (or…

Teachers: Be on the alert for this anti-science mailing!

A well known anti-science "think" tank has sent around, to teachers, a mailing including an antiscience book, a movie, and nice letter and, oddly, a pamphlet exposing the fact that the mailing is entirely politically motivated. Most science teachers will ignore this. A few science teachers are science deniers, and they already had the material in the mailings. So, I think this was a huge waste of money and effort. But it happened and you should know about it, and you should warn anyone you know that is a teacher. The real concern, in my opinion, is not this falling into the hands of science…

Why Do Men Hunt and Women Shop?

The title of this post is, of course, a parody of the sociobiological, or in modern parlance, the "evolutionary psychology" argument linking behaviors that evolved in our species during the long slog known as The Pleistocene with today's behavior in the modern predator-free food-rich world. And, it is a very sound argument. If, by "sound" you mean "sounds good unless you listen really hard." I list this argument among the falsehoods that I write about, but really, this is a category of argument with numerous little sub-arguments, and one about which I could write as many blog posts as I…

Global Warming Battles On The Blogs

Over the last few weeks, there has been quite a bit of discussion on the Blogosphere about certain global warming related issues. Denialists have come on strong with two major and widely disseminated distortions of scientific reports and consensus, and scientists and those interested in saving the Earth and who love puppies have countered with numerous well thought out and well done responses. But it is hard to keep track of all this chatter. Pursuant to making that job easier, I've assembled a bunch of links that will help you track this discussion. There may be missing items, and if so…

Ahistorical garbage from the producers of Expelled

The gang of prevaricators behind Ben Stein's Expelled movie had their own way of celebrating Darwin Day: they wrote a blog post that was a solid wall of lies and nonsense. In a way, I'm impressed; I'd have to really struggle to write something that was such a dense array of concentrated stupid, but for them, it seems to be a natural talent, allowing them to blithely and effortlessly rattle off a succession of falsehoods without blushing. Let's begin with the beginning. You don't even have to be a biologist to be embarrassed by these wankers. Until the late 1980's when the generic "President…

It's bad enough that all men are rapists. Please don't be stupid about it as well.

Last week, a very bad thing happened to me, a life changing experience, the kind of thing many people with blogs would tell everyone about, trolling for sympathy and making everyone feel bad. Well, I am certainly not above doing that, but strategically I've decided to tell only a few people what is going on, and everyone else ... well, I'm going to leave you in a state of wondering. Which, of course, is my own narcissistic way of getting attention. Honorata Kizende looked out at the audience and began with a simple, declarative sentence. ... "There was no dinner," she said. "It was me…

In which I disagree with Brian Deer on the issue of how to deal with scientific fraud

I admire Brian Deer. I really do. He's put up with incredible amounts of abuse and gone to amazing lengths to unmask the vaccine quack Andrew Wakefield, the man whose fraudulent case series published in The Lancet thirteen years ago launched a thousand quack autism remedies and, worst of all, contributed to a scare over the MMR vaccine that is only now beginning to abate. Yes, Andrew Wakefield produced a paper that implied (although Wakefield was very careful not to say explicitly) that the MMR vaccine caused an entity that later became known as "autistic enterocolitis" and later implied that…

The price of anti-vaccine fanaticism, part 2

I have a bit of a love-hate relationship with the antivaccine propaganda blog Age of Autism. The reason for the hate part should be obvious. AoA is, without a doubt, a cesspool of pseudoscience and anti-vaccine propaganda. All while oh-so-self-righteously denying that its agenda is "anti-vaccine," AoA on a daily basis lays down articles blaming vaccines for autism, while setting up websites attacking vaccine science, taking out full page ads attacking vaccines as causing autism, gloating when learning of declining vaccination rates in the Ukraine, and high-fiving (blogospherically speaking)…

Dawkins and eugenics revisited

When I wrote a post about how Richard Dawkins was being unjustly smeared as supporting Hitler-style eugenics by the religious blogosphere, I figured I might provoke some criticism, particularly since I didn't just stop there. No, in a bit of what some may consider blogging hubris, I couldn't resist trying to discuss under what circumstances eugenics might be morally justifiable and under what form. (Of course hubris is almost a job requirement to be a blogger; so none of this should be surprising.) In any case, not surprisingly Vox Day wasn't all that happy about what I wrote. (If you're…

Another teen refusing chemotherapy, another court ruling

You wanted it. You've been pestering me about it for days now. So now you've got it. You might be surprised at what I say about it though. I realize that I've written time and time again about children with cancer who refuse chemotherapy in favor of quackery. It's been one of the recurring story types that I've blogged about because, depressingly, such stories are not uncommon. It began with Katie Wernecke and Abraham Cherrix several years ago, the latter of whom is still around but was continuing to battle recurrences of his Hodgkin's lymphoma when last we revisited his case nearly two…

"Autism-induced" breast cancer

Gayle DeLong has been diagnosed with what she refers to as “autism-induced” breast cancer.” She’s even given it an abbreviation, AIBC. Unfortunately, as you might be able to tell by the name she’s given her breast cancer, she is also showing signs of falling into the same errors in thinking with respect to her breast cancer as she clearly has with respect to autism. As a breast cancer surgeon, regardless of my personal opinion of DeLong’s anti-vaccine beliefs, I can only hope that she comes to her senses and undergoes science-based treatment, but I fear she will not, as you will see. Her…

Stanislaw Burzynski's counteroffensive against the FDA and Texas Medical Board continues

The year 2013 finished with serious setbacks for Stanislaw Burzynski and his unproven cancer treatment that he dubbed "antineoplastons" (ANPs) way back in the early 1970s. As you might recall, in November, two things happened. First, the FDA released its initial reports on its inspection of the Burzynski Clinic and Burzynski Research Institute (BRI) carried out from January to March 2013. They were damning in the extreme, pointing out the shoddy operating methods of the institutional review board (IRB) used by the BRI to approve and oversee Burzynski's "clinical trials" (and I use the term…

The Galileo Gambit

Over the last couple of weeks, I've been discussing How "They" See "Us," which is basically that "they" see "us" as pure evil. Well, maybe not always sheer evil, but certainly not good, and even more certainly as having ulterior motives, the most common of which is filthy pharma lucre. As a result, when a grant deadline approached, I reposted a post about the "pharma shill gambit." However, how do these brave maverick doctors see themselves? Given that I'm traveling (and my plans have been impacted by the big storm heading through Kansas and Missouri now, it seemed appropriate given that I…

The Galileo Gambit: Just because your quackery is rejected by the establishment does not make you Galileo or Semmelweis

[Orac note: A combination of power outages, travel to Seattle, and trying to write something for my not-so-super-secret other blog conspired to leave me with nothing for this morning. So I thought I'd resurrect this old gem, which hasn't been reposted in at least four years. I actually did try to remove the dead links (this post dates back nearly 12 years in some form or another), but I probably missed a couple. I also changed the post a little, just to remove clearly outdated stuff. In the mean time, be assured that, with no more travel planned and our power restored, things should get back…

The Republican Party is on the verge of nominating has made an antivaccine loon named Donald Trump its presumptive nominee

[Note: Since this was written, Donald Trump won Indiana and Ted Cruz has suspended his campaign. This is why I changed the title of this post on Tuesday night. Meet your presumptive nominee, Republicans.] I haven’t written anything about Donald Trump and vaccines in a while. When last I did write about him, I enumerated his long, sordid history of making ridiculously pseudoscientific antivaccine statements linking vaccines to autism dating back at least to 2007. That was when I first discovered him and referred to him as the latest celebrity antivaccinationist drinking the Kool Aid of vaccine…