bidness
mikethemadbiologist | March 17, 2007By 'End Times', I'm not referring to the significant global decrease in food production, or the Far East trade war over sand (I'm not kidding--Indonesia has declared a sand embargo against Singapore). Putting those two news items together does have an apocalyptic feel to it. No, what I'm referring to is that mortgage foreclosures and homeowner vacancies have reached record highs (also see here).
Over at Tapped, Dana Goldstein describes a cause of the phenomenon:
The story is always the same: clever marketing campaigns prey on families in blighted neighborhoods, promising them the American…
mikethemadbiologist | March 5, 2007...high levels of resistance to cephalosporins and beta-lactam antibiotics are sure to follow. Sunday, the Washington Post covered the FDA approval of the use of cefquinome in cattle to treat respiratory pneumonia. The article provides a pretty good synopsis of what happened, so I won't summarize the whole thing, but this decision represents a complete corruption of the regulatory process by industry. It's that simple.
Here's why cefquinome use in agriculture is really stupid: bacteria that evolve resistance to cefquinome, also become resistant to cefepime, a vital drug in the treatment…
mikethemadbiologist | February 9, 2007I'm at a meeting in D.C. about antibiotic resistance, so I've left the Blogerator 9000 to fire up this post from the archives about a drug company executive's explanation of how drugs are priced. It's remarkable--and frustrating--that nobody has picked up on the basic message: drug prices are consumer driven, not R&D expenditure driven.
This is a headline from the June 1st, 2005 edition of ScripNews (subscription only; so I'm a little behind in my reading-what scientist isn't?). Here's the punchline for lazy stupids that don't like to read: the head of Pfizer has admitted that the cost…
mikethemadbiologist | January 30, 2007Bush is trying to do an end run around the newly elected Democratic Congress. Because we all know the American people spoke clearly in the last election, and they said, "We want to gut environmental and worker protection!" From the NY Times (italics mine):
President Bush has signed a directive that gives the White House much greater control over the rules and policy statements that the government develops to protect public health, safety, the environment, civil rights and privacy.
In an executive order published last week in the Federal Register, Mr. Bush said that each agency must have a…
mikethemadbiologist | January 11, 2007Today, the Boston landmark Ritz-Carlton Hotel on Arlington Street is no longer: it has become the Taj Hotel.
I first found out about this when I attended a Back Bay Architechtural Commission hearing in December about some development plans in my neighborhood. (For anyone who cares, the ugly greenhouse-like thing at the corner of Exeter and Boylston--which used to be a TGIF--will remain because the proposed structure to replace it was even worse). I arrived at the meeting one hearing early, which happened to be the hearing for some minor renovations at the Ritz-Carlton/Taj Hotel:…
mikethemadbiologist | January 7, 2007...but Lindsay still kicked ass* with getting NYC to take the problem of illegal advertising seriously. Well done.
*For some reason the ScienceBlogs Blogerator is becoming the Blog Censor as it won't allow certain things to be posted. Here's the link.http://www.nypress.com/19/48/news&columns/feature.cfm
mikethemadbiologist | December 19, 2006...or at least, I was mentioned in Cell. Currently, we have very few new antibiotics in the pipeline, particularly for Gram-negative bacteria such as Acinetobacter. One of the things I'm involved with is a project to develop a not-for-profit screening library to find new antibiotics. From Cell:
Resistance of microbial pathogens to an increasing number of antibiotics is a serious problem. In the US alone, 90,000 people die every year from infections acquired while in the hospital. According to the Infectious Disease Society of America (IDSA), 70% of these deaths have been attributed to…
mikethemadbiologist | December 7, 2006A colleague looking to buy Christmas gifts went to the Discovery Channel store page and noticed that boys and girls had two different pages. It's nice to see that a company supposedly dedicated to scientific inquiry has decided that girls don't like or want science.
What do I mean? Well, here's the first five gifts for the boys:
Discovery Whodunit? Forensics Lab
Discovery Fingerprint Lab
Discovery Speed Detector
Radio Control Equalizer Stunt Car
Discovery Remote Control Chromashift Roboreptile
Here's what the first item looks like:
Very sciency. Now for the girls:
Discovery Ultimate…
mikethemadbiologist | November 23, 2006Ok, so after complaining about how no one reads my posts on antibiotic resistance, one reader read this post about the FDA overriding an expert panel that advised against using cefquinome in agriculture, and then went and read the recently released minutes of the hearing (all eight gajillion pages). Here's what the director of the Center for Veterinary Medicine of the FDA said (p. 211; italics mine):
And so from the FDA standpoint, what we did was we said to the company after vetting it through the VMAC, that you will be judged -- the microbial safety of your product will be judged based on…
mikethemadbiologist | July 17, 2006Just when I thought that after six years of Little Lord Pontchartrain, I just couldn't be shocked anymore, I find a heart warming story of profiting from the Sept. 11 Massacres. By way of The Big Picture comes this Wall Street Journal report (italics mine):
On Sept. 21, 2001, rescuers dug through the smoldering remains of the World Trade Center. Across town, families buried two firefighters found a week earlier. At Fort Drum, on the edge of New York's Adirondacks, soldiers readied for deployment halfway across the world.
Boards of directors of scores of American companies were also busy that…