"Researchers at Rice University, along with a company called Nanospectra Biosciences, have determined that gold-covered nanoparticles, 20 times smaller than a red blood cell, will quickly pool in tumors when injected into the bloodstream. The nanoshells, when illuminated with a near-infrared laser (which otherwise passes harmlessly through living tissue), will heat up sufficiently to incinerate the tumors completely, in every test."
It will be a while before we see human trials, but this (and other options mentioned in their post) are encouraging.
Glenn Reynolds has suggested that nanotech has the potential to utterly change the economic structures of the globe. I think he's right, but it won't come automatically.
Still, right now the world is in a highly imbalanced state, with the gap between rich and poor not only being large (it always has been since the Bronze Age), but now being in everyone's face. Internet, radio, TV, CDs ... traditional societies can neither join the global economy easily nor avoid its presence all around them. Makes for a very unstable system.
It will be interesting to see if those who claim to be advocating for poor, traditional societies embrace nanotech for its potential to bring wealth and stability around the world or if they oppose it viscerally, as with crops that have been genetically modified in the laboratory.
It will also be interesting to see what sorts of governmental structures evolve in response to this technology over the next 30-50 years.
Joe;
Do you have any idea how much good would come if even 25% of the money being thrown indiscriminantly down the Iraq Hole was instead being invested to increase support for biomedical research in this country?
As someone who frequently posts about such innovations, I think you would probably appreciate the benefits to human health that drastically increasing support for basic research would elicit.
In an interview on Charlie Rose in the last year, James Watson, the "Father of DNA", noted that now that the human genome has been sequenced and access to the data is continually being improved, the only impediment to discovering the causes of major genetic diseases is lack of funding.
Instead, we have this and this.
When a President can wave his hand and give Donald Rumsfeld an amount equal to the total money being spent each year on health research to spend as he sees fit in Iraq, you have to wonder where their priorities lie.
So worng, on so many levels. And such an old, tired argument. I mean, this one was old when my grandparents were young. One wonders where to start.
[1] Do you know how much I could accomplish if only 25% of my mortgage payments each month were invested in other things? Except, you know, it's kind of nice to have a place to live, and pretending that this isn't necessary won't improve my life. This may come as a news flash, VT, but it's possible to die for non-pathogenic reasons. Like other people trying to kill you. Policies to address that are also a legitimate health issue. So problem #1 is blindness.
[2] Escalating dollars into any particular field has a power-curve effect. Marginal return begins dropping after a certain point, then becomes negative. Talent is not evenly distributed, and increased funds draws a lot of people into the field who are there for other reasons (this has been observed in the technology industry as well). So #2 is ignorance of basic social science.
[3] Note the dishonest assumption buried in VT's post - that only public dollars count or exist. There are, last I checked, fairly hefty private economic incentives to do a lot of this work. If you add it up, I suspect you'll find a rather large figure for private investment, all spent within a system that is proven to produce better results than the public model. So #3 is dishonesty.
[4] This knowledge of genetics and disease has collateral effects, too, some of which can be weaponized. Throwing more of this information into the public domain sooner, without addressing issue #1 or considering collateral safeguards, is not intelligent. #4, somewhat unique to this case, is lack of foresight.
So, VT, if you're wondering why the money spent over the last century on planes, bullets, tanks, WW2, etc. hasn't simply been invested in medical advances despite a long history of facile arguments very much like yours, the above may offer some initial clues.
Believe it or not, it may well be possible to both value our civilization for the stunning advances it produces (advances which have no comparable record outside of the West), and wish at the same time to defend it lest its ideas and contributions be lost.
The motto of this blog indicates the seriousness with which we take both sides of that equation.
Joe;
You are wrong to claim that my argument is wrong "on so may levels". To start with, you have ignored the comment from James Watson, which indicates more money can be spent on research right now and the benefit would not taper off for sociological reasons that I am apparently ignorant of. You are presuming a steady-state in making this argument.
You are being insulting to suggest that there is a dishonesty imbedded in the claim that the vast majority of basic biomedical research being done in this country comes from the NIH. It does. As someone who draws a salary from this source, I should know. The private dollars you suggest, while there, have another more directed purpose. They would be useless, however, if they couldn't build on the foundation of publicly-funded basic research. Ask anyone who works in R&D for Big Pharm to tell you where their ideas come from.
I don't know where your claim that "all spent within a system that is proven to produce better results than the public model" regarding private funding of research comes from. I don't think you have any idea what you're talking about here, so chalk one up for dishonesty in accusing me of dishonesty in making my argument. The public model works beautifully, if only all government money distribution systems worked as well as NIH grant funding does. Once again, I speak from personal experience as someone who has participated in this process.
The red-herring argument that national defense would be compromised if we put the money into research instead is really much more tired and old than any I have made.
Your #4 reply just totally misses the mark and has nothing to do with my post.
The fact remains: $25 billion to Rumsfeld as "walking around" money in Iraq vs. $28 billion total dollars spent in a year on medical research. More lives would be saved and more improvements in our health, safety and security by investing in Research. None of your arguments can refute this.
Perhaps what we need is a leader who can enlighten people like you, Joe, to the basic and unarguable benefits of this for everyone.
And perhaps I presumed too much in thinking your casual interest in science belied a better understanding of how it works and what purpose it serves. My apologies.
VT,
This is just a restatement of your position that the liberation of Iraq wasn't worth it. Obviously, if you hold that position, you are going to think the money is better spent on something else, with your salary obviously being the leading example.
Providing for the national defense is a constitutional duty of our government. Subsdizing development of technologies for domestic - and even foreign - businesses is not.
Lurker;
This is not simply a restatement of my opposition to the war in Iraq. But Iraq presents a historic opportunity to illustrate the imbalance in government (i.e., Bush Admin.) priorities.
And again you raise the red herring argument; at no time did I mention anything related to national defense. Of course, Iraq has nothing to do with that. If it does, it is only in the most peripheral of ways, once again raising the issue of priorities.
And you are way off if you believe that public support for basic biomedical research is a "subsidy" for the "development of technologies for domestic...business." This research is for the improvement of public health, and it is in the constitution that the govermment should provide for our general welfare. Which investment in basic research achieves much more cost effectively than a war such as that being waged in Iraq, without a doubt.
As with Joe, I think a little better understanding of modern basic research would go a long way here in helping you to understand these important distinctions.
So tell us which of the enumerated powers apply?
Not to be unnecessarily snarky, Greg F, since I have all the sympathy in the world for your position but you are a kidder. We haven't had a government of enumerated powers since before I was born.
It's actually "promote the general welfare", not provide in the preamble.
Some might disagree that the money spent in Iraq is actually doing just this, just as spending that money on nanotech research or stem cells or what have you.
Damn you Dave! LOL ... You are indeed correct. I suggest it is still important to shine a light on those that would twist the meaning to suit their agenda.
hOmi;
Thanks for clarifying that, but my meaning is not lost.
And you are correct to say that some might disagree that the money spent in Iraq is doing "just that", because that is my point. The money is better spent on research. By any objective measure.
Greg F;
As with Joe and Lurker, you are in sore need of an education on the benefits of basic research. This is not a constitutional argument. Promoting public health by supporting research is unarguably one of the most cost-effective and far reaching ways of doing this. Think about that next time you wash your hands or take an aspirin or get in your car or put on bug spray or want to have children but are having problems or any one of a hundred things people do every day, because science has brought them to you for your betterment.
The world you live in is made possible by science, by research. The basis for American pre-eminence is as much (or more) science as politics. That this is not apparent to every American is sad but certainly not incurable. And yes, scientists themselves are partly to blame for this because it is far more satisfying to discover something than to have to make sure everyone understands why it is significant.
And I might add that support for basic research has been bi-partisan, that is until the advent of this radical administration, which apparently views science as a threat to their hold on power and has treated it as it does any such threat, real or perceived.
So, unless you think your world has been made wonderful by chance, you cannot disagree that more research equals a better life for everyone.
VT you said:
You got caught showing your ignorance with regard to the Constitution. Rather that admit your mistake you go into attack mode and build a straw man. You seem to think you know what I think. Please indicate where I said anything about basic research. And since I have not said a thing about 'basic research' how is it you seem to think you know what I think? Are you a mind reader?
"...because science has brought them to you for your betterment."
Please show me where I have said anything contrary.
I don't contest that this field of research could certainly use some extra money (and if this pans out as a surgical technique for tumor destruction, that's fantastic), but at the same time, you can play the "money is better spent elsewhere" game all day every day and not get anywhere.
What about energy research? Even a ten percent reduction of the US's oil consumption would have a drastic effect on our foreign oil dependency. So why not plow the same amount into fusion research? Or space technologies to allow for orbital solar platforms? It would even make sense to divert money being used for military action in the middle east into those fields, given the nature of the oil economy.
Heck, why not pull it out of highway construction funds? Wouldn't you spend an extra half hour every day commuting if the results gave you another five years of life?
Or you could get it from school budgets (if there's no real correlation between funding and performance, we can stop throwing good money after bad there.) Why not out of Social Security? You're going to be spending it on medical advances which will benefit the elderly anyway, right?
Military actions tend to get well-funded because taking half-measures is a good way to lose wars, and because the results of screwing up are immediate and obvious. That's not a defect of the system, but application of the "for the want of a nail" cautionary story.
Personally, given that the funds won't be spent to assist the Japanese animation industry in order to benefit my pocketbook, I'll vote for the energy research.
Hopefully, everyone agrees that some level of spending on defense is prudent and everyone also agrees that spending on research can be wise. It becomes a matter of tradeoffs. That’s why we have a political process.
VT's idea is that the money spent on OIF may have been better spent on basic research. Maybe so, it is certainly debatable. But, if we can't even agree that liberating Iraq was worthy, then that debate, in this forum anyway, is not going to be productive.
Maybe I wasn't clear before about my other point. Much of our government paid research is provided to private enterprise, to then be exploited for profit. As far as I know, the government is never compensated to the extent that all costs are covered. How many times have we seen professors at prestigious universities use government subsidies to open a new line of research and then take the fruits to cash in at a private start up? Some of this free riding is even done by foreign companies. Thus, our tax dollars are being used to subsidize foreign companies. This just ain't right.
We especially see this in the pharmaceutical industry, where not only is the development of new drugs subsidized by our government, but Americans are then forced - by decidedly non-market factors - to pay the highest drug prices in the world. We're paying to get screwed. It happens with any long-standing government program.
Working as I do for a medical school engaged in biomedical research (I'm not researcher myself, I'm in admin) -- here's my two cents:
1. I have no interest in the research $$ vs. Iraq $$ debate, so I'm not going to address it. Beyond that, I'm basically agreeing with VT.
2. The funding provided by governments in the the West to biomedical research is a drop in the bucket. I agree with Joe that there is a point where you reach diminishing returns. The publicly-funded biomedical research industry is nowhere near that point.
Most people simply do not realize the costs involved if you want to be seriously "in the game" in leading edge science. We're talking about an industry where you can spend anywhere from $50k to $1.5m on a microscope, depending on your needs, and where you have to constantly keep upgrading because you're equipment can go obsolete in the blink of an eye.
Plus, virtually all "government" funding grants are competitive. That is, experts in the field review competing proposals from many different public institutions, and only give money to the best ones. Lots of projects deemed otherwise worthy are turned down due to a lack of available funds.
3. Yes, there is some non-public funding available to some researchers. A lot comes from philanthropy either directly (e.g., the Institution raises the funds itself) or indirectly (e.g., a third party like the Heart and Stroke Foundation raises it and then gives it to the Institution). How much of a role it plays at any given institution can vary quite a bit. At mine its about 10-15%. It counts, sure, but that's about as far as it goes.
4. Pharmas do do a lot of research on their own, and they employ a lot of talented people in doing so. The pay is better, the hours are better, and you get access to lots of high-end technology. However, Pharmas are also looking to make a profit, so they put much of their resources into making commercially viable products. Most (not all, but most) of the best pure science is still done in public institutions -- and every year we are losing talented people to go work on the next Viagra because of the reasons stated above.
5. I'm sure goverment funding going to extra-national for-profit companies happens. Honestly don't know to what degree. Not an issue where I work.
6. You bet if a researcher comes up with some commercially viable intellectual property, they're going to try to sell it. Nevertheless, I don't know a single researcher who specifically tries to do that, and believe me, NONE of them got into it to get rich. Do you have any idea what a PhD "worker bee" in any given lab makes? Any good car salesman (not to denigrate car salesman -- just an example of a job that doesn't require a lot of education to succeed at) does better.
Also, because these people are NOT businessmen, many institutions provide commercialization services to their investigators -- for a hefty chunk of the pie.
7. I suppose the weaponization of biotechnology is a concern. If you haven't read Richard Preston's "Demon in the Freezer" and want to spend a sleepless night or two, that's a good place to start.
But really, right now this is a government to government threat more than anything, and in my view the benefits of supporting biomedical research far outweigh the risks, especially considering the enormous investment in time, money and people required to get anywhere at it. For most governments, tanks are cheaper (and you don't need PhD's to run them), and so is sarin.
That said, I don't discount the threat because there are plenty of Russian bioweapons specialists who lost their jobs when the Communists lost theirs. You know they all went somewhere. I just don't think the threat itself is a reason not to engage in research.
"I agree with Joe that there is a point where you reach diminishing returns. The publicly-funded biomedical research industry is nowhere near that point." Could you go into that a little more? I'd be interested in your thoughts as to how--if, say, the funding were doubled--the money could be best spent.
Seems to me that in most fields, there is an awful lot of trendiness and fad-following, and when large influxes of money are made, they tend to become even worse (at the expense of truly important and creative work). This certainly happened in the computer/Internet space in the late 1990s, for example. To what extent is research effectiveness now being lost because people want to work on whatever has been declared "cool"?
David, that's an awfully good question, and one I'm not really qualified to answer in any meaningful way. But I will say that, while trends in pure science do come and go, the fact is that there is still so much that we don't know that sometimes its really hard to even guess what type of research will yield valuable results. So we need to fund a lot of it.
For example, in my own place we had a guy named Patrick Lee who was working with a naturally occurring (can be found in the human GI tract) virus called reovirus. If you get it, you probably don't even notice, or you maybe feel like you have the flu. Pure science stuff -- totally unsexy. This guy was working on reovirus for years -- over a decade, I think. All publicly funded. One day (I'm REALLY simplifying this, of course) someone in the lab drops reovirus into a petri dish full of cancer cells. Kills 'em all. Turns out that in a laboratory setting it kills 18 out of the 24 most malignant strains of cancer. One of the studies on this I've seen was on brain tumor. Malignant brain tumors kill 98% of the people who get them within 2 years. That prognosis hasn't changed in 20 years. In the study they implanted human brain tumors in mice and let them grow for a while. Some mice they left alone. They all died. Some mice they injected the reovirus into the brain, others elsewhere (say, the leg). All those mice, they lived. No more tumors. Gone. They couldn't even find individual cancer cells in the mice after they put the reovirus in there. Now they're in clinical trials for brain, breast, prostate and other cancers.
Isaac Asimov once said something along the lines of (I can't remember the exact quote offhand), the most exciting phrase in science is not "eureka!", but rather, "that's funny..." It's true. In many areas we still don't even know what we don't know, let alone what we should be actively looking for. So you fund as much as possible.
So. #1 choice in my opinion? Genomics. We've only got about 10 percent-ish of the human genome phenotyped (i.e., figured out what the genes do) so far. Phenotyping a gene is extremely hard, extremely expensive and extremely time-consuming, and yet, knowing only what we know so far, gene therapy is promising huge strides against a whole host of human diseases. More money -- a LOT more money -- would speed this process up immensly, no question at all.
BooBear,
That certainly sounds like an exiting discovery. Maybe your description is incomplete, but it sounds as if the government paid to have those guys in the lab for no good purpose until one of those fortuitous accidents occurred. I'm not saying that's bad, or good. Certainly no private company would have funded that. Food for thought for sure...
Lurker,
You're absolutely right, no private company would have funded it, but that's far from saying the research was to no good purpose.
Remember, these people have to compete for their salary. At my medical school, less than 1/3rd of our researchers are funded through "hard" dollars. The rest earn their keep by being excellent scientists who win grant competitions for their salary. And if they don't regularly publish papers in top scientific journals (thereby definitively proving they are making important contributions to the body of human knowledge), the next time their grant comes up for review they're out of work. I've seen it happen lots of times.
Without public funding the discovery I described would never have happened, and what may turn out to be an important tool (it's a big leap going from mice to people) in the fight against cancer might never have been discovered.
So as a culture we have to decide: what's important to us? I like to look at Biomedical research as a long-term investment in the human race. Sure, it's high risk and may not pay dividends very often, but when it does... its worth it.
BooPear;
Thanks for taking the time to address some of the mis-conceptions that readers here seem to hold regarding basic research and the way it functions. Item 2 in your first post is, I think, is important because IMO government funding of basic research should serve as a model for how efficiently Federal money can be distributed.
Lurker (#25399);
I wasn't trying to claim that all the money being spent in Iraq could better be spent on research. I only wanted to illustrate the gargantuan imbalance by pointing out a line item in Bush's supplemental request that basically gives Rumsfeld the equivalent of the NIH annual budget to spend as he sees fit in Iraq.
It is, and was, a simple lesson in scale and priorities that I hope you are not missing.
And as I said before, if Americans want to be safer, healthier & happier, we would do well to elect leaders who understand these issues rather than view them as antagonistic to their short-term political ambitions.
I'll agree that medical research is important, but maybe for these next few years, the war on terror may be more important. Unfortunately, there's no straightforward way to tradeoff things like liberty, terrorism, and medical research. You are assumably referring to the stem-cell research restrictions. I don't support this ban and believe it to be a Luddite policy. But you are unfair to President Bush. (I didn’t vote for him, just so you'll know I have no ox Gore.)
The Christian right has just as much a claim to national policy as you or I. We have politics to sort this stuff out. As far as I - or you - know, Bush is sincere in his beliefs with respect to stem cell research. Writing off his policy as a mere sellout is an insult and not productive to the debate, especially if you wish to change the minds of Bush supporters. Remember, you have no monopoly on principles.
I suspect the NIH/CDC aren't corrupt enough to be able to get the optimum level of funding. Hence the imbalance.