Journal Entries
Burn In Hell Award for this week
Posted Mar 16, 2007
Before you dismiss this as a hang-em-and-flog-em diatribe, just let me give you some background to the issue I am about to discuss. there has been a minor kerfuffle in the field of cancer therapy recently, concerning some research work done at the Univerity of Alberta in Canada. I work in drug discovery and this sort of thing is of interest to me, mainly because of an article published as http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn10971-cheap-safe-drug-kills-most-cancers.html .
I'll explain why this development is so exciting. Cancer cells differ from normal cells in many ways, but one of the most interesting is in their metabolism. In normal cells, respiration takes place in little structures called mitochondria. These extract every ounce of energy from a sugar molecule possible, but they need oxygen to function. They also perform another function, which is to activate apoptosis - programmed cell death. If the mitochondria get switched off for some reason, energy has to be made in the body of the cell using an anaerobic process called glycolysis. Glycolysis does not need oxygen but is hideously inefficient. However, it is just the sort of process that cancer cells in the centre of an oxygen-starved lump would need to use to proliferate.
It used to be thought that mitochondria in cancer cells had shrivelled up and died, but someone has just tried treating cells in cultures and implanted tumours in immunocompromised rats with an old drug, DCA, that helps damaged mitochondria to function properly. The result was that all the cultured cancer cells died and the tumours shrank drastically as a result of the mitochondria being re-awakened from a state of dormancy and in turn triggering apoptosis.
I have been following the progress of these studies: there are no clinical trials yet because drugs companies cannot make money from unpatented medicines. However, I am not pointing the finger at them. I am pointing the finger at the people who set up the first link you come across when you do a search for 'DCA cancer' on Google. The drug is potentially dangerous, has serious side effects and has not been tested in a clinical trial but already somebody is trying to make money out of the desperation of very sick people. This isn't somebody with a slightly smaller willy, or a couch potato who wants a quick fix for their obesity, that we are talking about.
I have recently lost a number of people who are important to me through this disease and the last thing I would want to see is them having any hope of life cruelly dashed in their remaining days because some scum was selling an untried, untested and unproven medicine. There should be a new Infernal plane created for people like this. And search engines should be ashamed of themselves for accepting advertising revenue from such a despicable enterprise.
Discuss this Journal entry [7]
Latest reply: Mar 16, 2007
The Warning, forty years on.
Posted Mar 7, 2007
It was after watching Pan's Labyrinth at the cinema that I remembered this dream. It was the first nightmare I can ever remember having, and the worst. I must have been about three at the time. I'm standing with a lot of other children on a flat muddy plain. There is no vegetation, just a hill in the distance. Then a miner appears: his face is dirty, but he turns to us and points up at the sky before, suddenly, a huge tidal wave of mud appears and engulfs us all.
At this point I woke up, apparently screaming and took ages to be consoled. I still remember the feeling of encroaching and bottomless dread as the dream developed. It wasn't until I got into double figures that I deduced the meaning. It was about the Aberfan disaster. The dream would have occurred at about the same time as the disaster. Was I, a three year old, able to process the media information that was available at that time to the extent that it planted the seed of a nightmare in my mind? Unlikely, seeing as how I was only three and remembered the dream vividly and not the news. We didn't have a television then, anyway, and my parents wouldn't have said anything about it to me.
The more I re-examine it, and the more I read accounts by people who had almost identical dreams (even down to the miner) around that time I'm pretty sure that I had a premonition of some kind. I had a second such premonition when I was 14, of a woman being burned to death in a laboratory fire at the local University. I've had other weird and conventionally-inexplicable things happen to me since. And this is why I don't believe in rubbish like crystal therapy: the explanation should come *after* the mysical phenomenon. You don't come up with some cod spiritual theory and then claim spurious powers that arise from it.
I just hope to God it never happens again.
Discuss this Journal entry [6]
Latest reply: Mar 7, 2007
First screenshots of the new improved GuideDog!
Posted Feb 16, 2007
You can see these on the project home page:
http://www.codeplex.com/guidedog
It's still very rough and ready. Copy and paste, search and replace doesn't work, there is no way to upload a finished enttry or even cut it to the clipboard, right-clinking has yet to be sorted out as it pops up the default IE menu, it doesn't write out entities properly...
However, it is to all intents and purposes *working* and this is because I have junked the old technologies and learned how to program properly in C++. I still need your help to get this finished. The screenshots should act as an incentive for you to get involved!
Discuss this Journal entry [4]
Latest reply: Feb 16, 2007
Hell's Bells, what a day...
Posted Jan 19, 2007
Some of you may know I'm a senior IT manager for a very large pharmaceutical firm. I drove to our principle research site in the UK yesterday in Cheshire for a meeting. Instead of my rather powerful 4WD Octavia estate I had to take the works car, a horrible underpowered Honda hybrid. I left the meeting at 2.00, to find that every single major route of the site was blocked by trees. I eventually managed to get to Leek in Staffordshire about 3 hours later, but nearly all the roads out of that were blocked by trees as well. I found the alternative truck route across the Dark peak, and on the way drove past FIVE (yes, five) lorries that had been blown off the road onto their sides. Then a tree branch bounced off my windscreen and I drove into the mther of all hailstorms.
It took me six hours to drive the hundred odd miles back home. Today, I get to go to Bristol 
Discuss this Journal entry [9]
Latest reply: Jan 19, 2007
New Year's Rissolutions
Posted Jan 2, 2007
* Stop drinking (easy, cos I've done that already to all intents and purposes)
* Lose weight and take more exercise (not so easy)
* Start writing again: PR is still full of shite, wallowing in the drearily mundane, but unless I do something about it I really can't complain
* Finish GuideDog
* Play with my daughter more often: I don't enter into her own little world anywhere near often enough
* Get and remain in touch with old friends I haven't seen for ages
* Sort out the back garden
* Attend the beekeeping course so two of us know what we're doing
That should do for now.
Discuss this Journal entry [17]
Latest reply: Jan 2, 2007
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