Check the article out below ... it's pretty revolutionary but scary.
FDA panel to consider approval of race-specific heart failure drug
An FDA panel this Thursday will consider whether NitroMed’s BiDil, a drug found to significantly improve survival among African-American patients with moderate to advanced heart failure, should become the first drug intended for use by a specific racial group, the New York Times reports. After being rejected for general approval in 1997 because of “inconclusive evidence” in clinical trials, BiDil in 2004 was called one of the year’s “top developments” by the American Heart Association after a study of 1,050 African-American heart failure patients found that the drug “significantly reduced death and hospitalization” by widening participants’ blood vessels. Industry analysts say that if BiDil is approved, NitroMed will be able to use the drug’s “racially specific indication” to extend patent protection by an additional 13 years; they add that the drug’s annual sales have the potential to reach $825 million. However, although NitroMed maintains that its decision to test the drug solely in African Americans is based on “solid science,” some medical ethicists and scientists worry that “race is too broad and ill-defined a category to be relevant in determining a drug’s approval.” For instance, a researcher who last year reviewed BiDil in the Yale Journal of Health Policy, Law, and Ethics said that the drug’s approval as an African-American-only drug “would give an official ring to the discredited idea that race is a biological category.” In addition, many physicians contend that BiDil may also work in patients of other ethnicities and say that tests are needed to determine whether the drug is more effective in African-American patients. The Times notes that if the FDA panel recommends approval of BiDil, it would “go well beyond where it has in the past in using race as a category to evaluate which patients respond to drugs” (Saul, Times, 6/13; Daily Briefing, 11/9/04). For more information about the results of the trial investigating BiDil in African-American heart failure patients and the debate about ethnically targeted therapies, please see the Nov., 18, 2004 Cardiovascular Watch.
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So I'm like thinking if they have the technology to make racial specific therapy drugs, doesn't this also mean they have the technology to make racial specific biological weapons or disease as well?
The conspiracy theorist in me is coming out!
Monday, June 13, 2005
Thursday, June 09, 2005
I stayed at this amazing hotel in Vancouver years ago, and for the life of me I couldn't remember the name of it. I was searching for another hotel today that I'm attending a seminar at tonight, and when I googled the hotel website I noticed they had a hotel in Vancouver. When I clicked on the Vancouver hotel, I saw the hotel I stayed at all those years ago.
Check it out - Pan Pacific Hotel - Vancouver. We had a great view of the bay, and I loved that the hotel looked like a yaht. Vancouver is such a great city to visit ... it's so clean and very, very beautiful.
Check it out - Pan Pacific Hotel - Vancouver. We had a great view of the bay, and I loved that the hotel looked like a yaht. Vancouver is such a great city to visit ... it's so clean and very, very beautiful.
Tuesday, June 07, 2005
I woke up this morning feeling good for the first time in a very long time. I was having a small health issue but it resolved itself this morning, and I’m starting to wonder if I was more than a little worried about what was happening.
I’m going to see the great Robert McKee on Thursday night, screenwriting guru made famous in the movie “Adaptation”. McKee is hosting his famous seminar in San Francisco this weekend and I would have signed up, but I have plans for both days. The seminar in pricey anyway, and it’s just not in my budget to spend that much money right now.
What else? I saw a Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” called “The Kyogen of Errors” on Thursday June 2. Kyogen is a type of Japanese theater. Below is an explanation I found on the Net on what Kyogen is:
Kyogen evolved from a form of indigenous theater called Sarugaku and reached the level of popular entertainment among the common people during the tumultuous Muromachi Period (1380-1466). During the Tokugawa Period, kyogen subsequently gained the acceptance and support of the ruling classes. At this time, for aesthetic reasons, it was paired with noh. While noh and kyogen are performed on the same stage, and there is a part for a kyogen actor in almost every noh play, they are two separate theater arts. Kyogen dialogue is a somewhat stylized form of the common spoken language of the Muromachi Period while the language employed in the noh theater is highly literary in style. While noh is historical and tragic, kyogen plays reflect the habits, customs and lives of ordinary people in short comic sketches. Short ballads (kouta) were popular among the common people in the Muromachi period, and a number of these songs appear in kyogen plays. Kyogen relied heavily on improvisation and it was not until the seventeenth century during the Edo Period that the oldest still extant plays were put into written form. Once many manuscripts of these plays had come into existence, there was a tendency not to expand the repertoire and there were also no substantial changes in the way the plays were performed. Kyogen plays are divided into several categories, depending on the type of character designated as protagonist (shite) or the overall theme of the play. Today some 300 kyogen plays are known and about 200 of them are still performed, but unlike noh, not even a single name is left to us of those who composed kyogen.
The performers wore these masks and they looked like cute little goblins on stage. They kept uttering this phrase throughout the whole play “ya ya ko shi ya”, which in Japanese means “It’s all very complicated”. The performers were all men, and two of men who were supposed to be imitating women wore the most beautiful kimonos. I saw this play at Shakespeare in Golden Gate Park a few years ago, and they used boy/girl twins in the role.
It was amazing how the performers were able to translate a Shakespeare play into a very old form of Japanese theater, and that as an audience member I could still recognize the play as what I remembered.
Here’s the Chronicle’s review - "Errors" does Shakespeare right.
I’m going to see the great Robert McKee on Thursday night, screenwriting guru made famous in the movie “Adaptation”. McKee is hosting his famous seminar in San Francisco this weekend and I would have signed up, but I have plans for both days. The seminar in pricey anyway, and it’s just not in my budget to spend that much money right now.
What else? I saw a Japanese adaptation of Shakespeare’s “Comedy of Errors” called “The Kyogen of Errors” on Thursday June 2. Kyogen is a type of Japanese theater. Below is an explanation I found on the Net on what Kyogen is:
Kyogen evolved from a form of indigenous theater called Sarugaku and reached the level of popular entertainment among the common people during the tumultuous Muromachi Period (1380-1466). During the Tokugawa Period, kyogen subsequently gained the acceptance and support of the ruling classes. At this time, for aesthetic reasons, it was paired with noh. While noh and kyogen are performed on the same stage, and there is a part for a kyogen actor in almost every noh play, they are two separate theater arts. Kyogen dialogue is a somewhat stylized form of the common spoken language of the Muromachi Period while the language employed in the noh theater is highly literary in style. While noh is historical and tragic, kyogen plays reflect the habits, customs and lives of ordinary people in short comic sketches. Short ballads (kouta) were popular among the common people in the Muromachi period, and a number of these songs appear in kyogen plays. Kyogen relied heavily on improvisation and it was not until the seventeenth century during the Edo Period that the oldest still extant plays were put into written form. Once many manuscripts of these plays had come into existence, there was a tendency not to expand the repertoire and there were also no substantial changes in the way the plays were performed. Kyogen plays are divided into several categories, depending on the type of character designated as protagonist (shite) or the overall theme of the play. Today some 300 kyogen plays are known and about 200 of them are still performed, but unlike noh, not even a single name is left to us of those who composed kyogen.
The performers wore these masks and they looked like cute little goblins on stage. They kept uttering this phrase throughout the whole play “ya ya ko shi ya”, which in Japanese means “It’s all very complicated”. The performers were all men, and two of men who were supposed to be imitating women wore the most beautiful kimonos. I saw this play at Shakespeare in Golden Gate Park a few years ago, and they used boy/girl twins in the role.
It was amazing how the performers were able to translate a Shakespeare play into a very old form of Japanese theater, and that as an audience member I could still recognize the play as what I remembered.
Here’s the Chronicle’s review - "Errors" does Shakespeare right.
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