Fixing problems

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

I expect some traffic from people following the Huffington Post article about Peter Rubin.

I always get a few butterflies in my stomach when I talk with a reporter who contacts me out of the blue. As with most things, trust is important. Also, I have a tendency to babble a lot on the phone, especially when talking extemporaneously, so I always worry if I will say something that does not exactly fit what I really mean. I hope I did not sound like too much of a Pollyanna.

I think Arthur did a reasonable job, particularly since he was talking with me for the first time and having to deal with my speech patterns.

The point I had is that I’m torn because there are vitally important reasons for some companies to need the expertise of some people so I do not want to prevent access to their expertise. But I also do not ant to see people using their position, particularly if it is a tax=payer supported one, to simply enrich themselves.

How to remove the latter without harming the former?

One big point I made to Arthur Delaney, who was the reporter that called, was that openness and transparency are a huge part of solving what is a difficult problem. Shining a light into this process makes it much less likely that people will game the system. Not impossible but less likely.

It seems to me that much of the misbehavior that many people partake in comes from the fact that they can carry out this bad behavior, and escape its consequences, because is happens in the dark, behind the scenes.

Most people – not all, I’m not that much of an idealist – may modify their misbehavior if they know that others can see it. And if they know that there will be consequences if they do misbehave.

There are lots of important, legitimate reasons for organizations to need the expertise of a range of people who have worked in government or for a company or for an NGO. To be successful, specialized expertise is sometimes needed. This expertise can be critical, particularly for small companies.

We need to make sure that those types of interactions are not harmed.

Real openness should not harm them. At least I hope not.

Who am I? I’m nationwide

[Crossposted at SpreadingScience]

I figure that I may be getting some traffic from the Huffington Post article so an introduction.

I’ve been working in the field of biotechnology since the early 80s, spending 16 years as a researcher at Immunex, the premier biotech in the Seattle area until it was bought by Amgen. It was an incredible crucible of top-notch researchers working with little money to find cures for important diseases. There were, I believe, less than 50 employees when I started and several thousand when I left. So I had first hand knowledge of many of the needs of a small biotech as it grew. I was a small part in the development of a biologic that changed people’s lives – ENBREL.

I left Immunex when Amgen finalized the merger and spent some time thinking about what to do next. Luckily Immunex stock options, which were given to all Immunex employees when I started, provided some economic buffer. I worked with the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association on several projects and helped form a philanthropic organization called the Sustainable Path Foundation, where I am still a Board member.

I started a blog called A Man With a PhD, something I continue to this day, as well as a science-based blog called Living Code for Corante, that Forbes picked as the 3rd best Medical blog in 2003.

In 2004, I became the third employee of a startup biotechnology company called Etubics. As VP in charge of Research, I did everything from ordering lab equipment, growing cells, negotiating contracts and having to fly cross country to talk with suppliers. All while trying to raise money so we could have a hope of producing the vaccines that I believe can change the world.

So I got to see firsthand and at the highest levels, what it takes to start and run a company. I left last year as the company was entering a new phase, where clinical development and manufacturing were at the forefront and research was on the back burner. Not only were these areas I did not have a lot of expertise or interest, but I also was pretty well burned out. The stress of a small company is enormous, particularly in an industry where it takes over 15 years for a therapeutic to get from the research lab to the patient.

I left to pursue one of my real passions – how to understand why Immunex was such a powerhouse of research, why it is was one of the few biotech companies started in the 80s to produce a blockbuster drugs, along with several other good drugs, and whether this could be replicated.

That is what SpreadingScience is about – how to create organizations that are resilient to change, that can adapt in ways that increase the successful outcomes need. You can read some of the material or follow my blog to get an idea of how I am accomplishing this.

Record highs, recod lows – not a good ratio

Weather Channel asks, “July in April?” – Record smashing heat-wave hits nation
[Via Climate Progress]

CP: So it’s friggin’ hot in DC and much of the country.

Audience: How hot is it?

CP: It’s so hot that:

• I saw a dog chasing a cat and they were both walkin’.
• The robins are laying their eggs sunny side up.
• I saw squirrels fanning their nuts.
• Even meteorologists are doing stories about human-caused global warming.

Settle down, anti-science disinformers who try to shout down any talk of a link between climate change and extreme weather — these are only jokes. We all know that you can’t use a single weather event as evidence for or against climate change — unless of course that weather event is a big snowstorm [see "Massive moisture-driven extreme precipitation during warmest winter in the satellite record — and the disinformers say it disproves (!) climate science].

[More]

Luckily, the Pacific Northwest has been on the opposite temperature track for some time. When it was snowing in the East, it was warm back here. Now that it is frying in the East, we are actually starting to get our snowpack closer to normal levels.

But the figure above is a useful one and is an interesting way to visualize the data. Here is another attempt, from a paper that put his all into perspective:

The data in the top graphic might remind you of this figure from a must-read 2009 study led by National Center for Atmospheric Research (see “Record high temperatures far outpace record lows across U.S.“):

This graphic shows the ratio of record daily highs to record daily lows observed at about 1,800 weather stations in the 48 contiguous United States from January 1950 through September 2009. Each bar shows the proportion of record highs (red) to record lows (blue) for each decade. The 1960s and 1970s saw slightly more record daily lows than highs, but in the last 30 years record highs have increasingly predominated, with the ratio now about two-to-one for the 48 states as a whole. (©UCAR, graphic by Mike Shibao.)

In the 90s, the ratio of record highs to record lows was higher than any previous decade. In the last decade, this had increased, resulting in twice as many record highs as record lows. Not a good trend.
But the paper also states this:

The modeling results indicate that if nations continue to increase their emissions of greenhouse gases in a “business as usual” scenario, the U.S. ratio of daily record high to record low temperatures would increase to about 20-to-1 by mid-century and 50-to-1 by 2100.

Now, you can just away the models for no really good reason but they indicate pretty extreme changes in the weather well within the lifetimes of many of us today.

I feel that even if there is only a 5% chance that the models are right, we should take action now because the terrible effects on humans will be much more expensive than any adaptations we have to make in our economy.

What probability of the models being right do you feel should result in taking real action?

Perhaps we just aren’t smart enough

by nestor galina

Oil’s attack on California climate law
[Via All Today's News - Sightline Daily]

Several Texas oil companies are bankrolling a petition drive to suspend California’s path-breaking climate change law in a move that may prove a bellwether for national efforts to address global warming.

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Maybe we are genetically hardwired to screw ourselves. Every other animal seems to be. They will overbreed and overuse the world around them until a population crash as the population increases past the carrying capacity of the environment.. Eventually, they reach an equilibrium with nature, keeping relatively close to the carrying capacity.

Of course, when the environment changes, even, locally (i.e. a bad winter) the equilibrium changes. Not fun for the animals.

Because we are so good at manipulating our environment, we have been able to increase our carrying capacity tremendously. But we do not seem to have escaped the need to overuse. Nor to move past the actual ability of the environment to support us.

And we may not be smart enough to escape the backlash when the environment changes too much for us to easily recover or adapt to.

That is my worry and we seem to keep presenting examples to back up that worry.

Child with an iPad

Two and a half year old feels right at home using an iPad [Video]
[Via Edible Apple]

If you ever want to showcase just how intuitive a product is, put it in the hands of a young child and see if they can figure it out. As you can see in the video below, this two and a half year old feels right at home with the iPad.

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I expect we will see a lot of these. The girl looks like she may have had some experience with iPhones but watching her explore the iPad was a lot of fun.

My thoughts on the ‘ethical’ practice of copying e-books

by goXunuReviews

Format shifting dead trees: can e-book piracy be ethical?
[Via Ars Technica]

A question of ethics: say you want a new novel bad—really bad—but you want the digital version for your Kindle/iPad/Sony Reader. The publisher, hoping to goose sales of the book in hardcover for $28, isn’t about to offer a $10 e-book version until the novel comes out in paperback. So you buy the hardcover and then pirate a homebrew e-book, which someone has helpfully made available in one of the darker corners of the Internet. Should you be fitted for an eye patch and peg leg?

As a matter of law, you probably are a pirate (or, to be accurate, an infringer). But the interesting question isn’t one of law, it’s one of ethics, and New York Times syndicated columnist Randy Cohen tackled the conundrum in last week’s “The Ethicist” column.

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Ethics and the internet? Usually those sorts of discussion degrade pretty fast. This one actually provokes some interesting discussions.

I would suggest, and so did several others did also, that the ethical gray area would be using someone else’s e-book copy. If I bought a book, and created a digital copy on my own for my own personal use, I would suspect that even the Supreme Court might see that as permissible. After all, we are allowed to record TV programs into a digital format, as long as we only watch it ourselves.

Copying the book to the digital realm and then giving it to others – not so permissible. The copy is not being produced for personal use. That person has no way of knowing whether the people who download that copy already have a hardbound version or are simply pirating. Their actions do not seem ethical, as well as being illegal.

So, by downloading the book, even though it might be ethical to do for one individual, also supports an illegal act. That would make seem to make the entire operation unethical.

Copy the book myself. Ethical. Download someone else’s copy, supporting a possibly illegal operation. Unethical.