touching ... it is because our nature does not bother us with the essentials, those which are rolling down, permanently, in every cell, in every organ, at the chemical level. You must know and assume it. Your life has a hidden chemical essential language. You do not notice all the time, but is there working.
Your heart has a rhythm, variable, allows you go faster, and sleep quiet. Your arteries and veins respond to heat and cold. Your stomach responds to hunger, to that strong roast, to poisons, and the sweetness of the cake, more than your taste buds. Your body will tell you sometimes that you are tense, or you are tired (maybe of your boss!), or will depress you, or you will feel cowed, or will throw you in bed with fever, if someone sneaks into your blood, as a virus, as a bacterium. These are all responses, what runs continuously. Some information never is visible, but is there: the instructions to repair the swelling of your spleen, the instructions to recover from diarrhea, how to fight against cells that turn crazy. The body not always knows how to answer, but has thousands of mechanisms. And all of them are important, very important.
Changes in the activity come from many causes: a very hot day, a lack of water, a drink dirty water, too much noise for eight hours daily, to breath powder all the day and more: many years eating little amounts of preservatives, salts and sugar substitutes, months or years adding small amounts of pesticide residues, small and "dumb" slowly accepted quantities of metals. Furthermore, you help this with your own habits: you do not walk like any animal in its natural condition, always used the same foods unable to do without them, and your body makes very little "work" day: driving long, long time. So things happen, invisibly, imperceptibly, every day, on the recommendation of not know how many stupid advice on TV.
By other side, the set of genes that we have, may contain a right set, may have a lack or absence of material, may have changed, be duplicated some of them, modified, mutated, harmed, and even being forced to the expression or be silenced by other genes or molecules acting into the cells, all this naturally. These questions are matter for work in bioengineering, genetics, or pharmacy. The intervention along the chain of events between genes and genes or molecules and genes, is a path widely opened in research, as makes sense, but also implies to do many questions about the how, the when, the where, and very important, why and what.
Faces of the research.
The scientific method is based on the hypothetical-deductive reasoning. First we observe (1), we formulate the questions (2), we propose the hypothesis (3), make predictions about the assumptions that provide the answers to questions (4), and experience the congruency and infallibility thereof, must be this measurable and quantifiable (5). Thus, we can give way to a theory. Wonderful, so far so good, and it is right! But in light of the use made in some cases (many) of science, applied to technology, it is clear that something more than the scientific method is necessary. And who finally applied science through technology must necessarily be responsible for meeting targets previously defined by society. It is not reasonable to allow the opposite: it would mean continue with a free license to do anything.
A story about drugs can show the two faces that the science has: knowledge and the purpose of its use. We have a list of different chemicals that operate as venoms, and the kind of related effects that may appear. It was discovered some years ago that the basis of the electrical transmission (under a chemical basis) into the nerves is identically found in simple animals as well in humans or mammals, but the patterns may be different according the specialization of the animal, their body and structures or systems.
One between many uses that have drugs, e.g., are the mitigating or relieving of pain, specially when morphine is unable to do it (this one is the case of the Prialt drug). And it is perfect. Yes, that is science applied; all can recognize that it is an application and desired use of science. When one source of chemical compounds like the natural compounds from these cute cone snails, a huge source of venoms that can reach the number of 200,000-500,000 is discovered, even a 1% of these substances can be applied for purposes which are far from be therapeutic goals. The same applies to oil derivatives, or traditional chemicals. These chemical compounds interact with biologic systems "hassling to another,” by altering any of its functions, organs or systems.
No one can say that the seeking to build research drugs is being made deliberately to annoy people, no, of course not. But must be understood how the scientific world actually is doing research. When a chemical company has a research or sales budget as large as a medium-developed country, when is participating with shares in other companies in related fields, when becomes the only support research that is done, when defines the only business that can be done, when defines what to investigate, when recommends and sets "scientifically" with its scientists what is smart and what not, it becomes easier to understand how thrive the only existing research projects, which are of real importance and significance. Somehow, to free the researchers from this slavery is a needing, and this would allow to asking them for other goals closest to earth.
The ultimate success of projects is an issue that is negotiated in the aisles, also in the same corridors leading to the Nobel Prize, or in laboratories, as well as in the halls of address or research universities: here there is not scientific knowledge, there is not a single sentence of those attributed to Einstein, just negotiation, the possibility of action, contract, create businesses, open markets, making more profitable those existing, because there is another side to all this more than the economic. Any assay, trials, study, research, statistics, are part, and expensive part of ... finally a business. Today, although despite the little publicity that has this fact, the peer review is suspected to be too perfect, too fast, always including the same direction, which in science is truly something so difficult to achieve, given that scientific facts cannot be prepared in advance. And some thesis proposals seem to be visionary.
A second story that shows how things happen in the real world of research might be the following. Less than one year ago, I managed to contact a reduced group of chemists and biologists who have begun privately a hard work: building a map of industries, researchers, products and related treatments, clearly referencing when and why the studies are promulgated by land or throw any compound benefits searches in medicine. They have focused their task (as they say) in only 250 compounds, the most widely used, but the map requires a long work estimated at more than three years, because as they said, everyone is related. From the brief exchange of views, and before starting to mistrust me (as I expected to happen) left me an example of their work, which does not always lead to discover anything good or anything bad, but always the economic dynamics.
They wrote me (not literally): the sodium dichloroacetate (DCA Na) is a salt derived from the DCA or dichloroacetic acid, a strong acid, but used for the treatment of lactic acidosis in humans. A recent study published in Cancer Cell (2007) leaded by researchers at the University of Alberta, found the possible applying of DCA to restore, by recovering the mitochondrial function, the expected cell apoptosis (programmed cell death, a natural event for cells), allowing thus to cancer cells the self-destruction, and with this shrink the tumor. Well, It must be proved. Against this possible effect, other sites published other studies, as was this study from the McKnight Brain Institute, University of Florida (BMI). They also reminded me that the BMI was initially founded by the manager of 3M, William L. McKnight (the company which poured the perfluorinated chemicals or PFCs, in the Mississippi River, and one of its facilities was named as Superfund site) and the Department of Defense of the US; and they let me know that BMI is related as other foundations (e.g. Robert Wood Johnson Foundation) with chemical companies that support them (J&J, P&G...). I saw they were not extremists, they pointed me recently other opinions more cautious and never friendly of easy science or pseudoscience were considered. A later result from new trials shown the same effect, but the newspapers never said that trials were conducted with more treatments than DCA, as it was actually done with chem
ical treatment. By other side, the DCA is a non-patentable compound, but finally a treatment was patented by the University of Colorado, being today in Europe yet under examination. As other chlorine compounds, at some dose levels, start to show other side effects as carcinogenicity or neurotoxicity.
After all it, they said me: remember, “3M has been a company as other more, reached a strong position by making the programming of results, and that is what are using all companies. For a drug company, a treatment will be profitable according its period of applying and its cost, and if they need find treatments for six-month, they will do”. You can see: “today, Roche has the approved drug Kadcyla (from Genentech, Inc.), which increases the life for six months “more,” and think about, whilst the patent of former formulation of trastuzumab will be dead soon. The cost of treatment rose from the former $4,500 to now with $9,800 monthly”. A line of work lasts as lasts their patent, and treatments must be as long as lasts the purse. Finally, they gifted me a little pearl hot: GlaxoSmithKline and Avandia: As drug
An Invisible Chain of our Time Page 37