Search This Blog

Thursday 6 September 2012

You can't dance to atheism


Any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and its myths
A Tea Party event in Nevada in 2010
'In America the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.' Photograph: Ethan Miller/Getty Images
I finished the series of articles I wrote on Robert Bellah's Religion in Human Evolutionwith a definition – a religion is a philosophy that makes you dance. It pleased me because the book itself can be read as a history of how philosophy grew from dance. But is it any use?
The great difficulty of definitions like mine is that they leave the content of religions entirely to one side. We are still enough of the heirs of Christendom to feel that religions must involve doctrines, heresies, and a commitment to supernatural realism. The trouble is that a definition with doctrines, heresies, and supernaturalism fits many varieties of atheism just as well. You will object that atheism bans, by definition, any belief in the supernatural. Yet almost all sophisticated religions ban at an intellectual level all kinds of belief which sustain them in practice. Buddhists worship; Muslims have idols. "Theological incorrectness" is found wherever you look for it.
And atheism can be just as theologically incorrect: today's paper told me that: "our bodies are built and controlled by far fewer genes than scientists had expected". The metaphors of "building" and "controlling" have here taken a concrete form that makes them palpably untrue. Genes don't do either thing. It seems to me that a belief in tiny invisible all-controlling entities is precisely a belief in the supernatural, yet that is the form in which entirely naturalistic genetics is widely understood in our culture. Religion can't really be about doctrine and heresy either, because these concepts don't make sense in pre-literate cultures. You can even ask whether the concept of "supernaturalism" makes any sense in most of the world without a developed idea of scientific naturalism, and scientific laws, that would stand for its opposite.
The serious weakness of my definition is that philosophy itself is a very late development and not one that has really caught on. As Bertrand Russell observed, many people would rather die than think, and most do. So maybe it would be better to say that religion is a myth that you can dance to. This is useful because it suggests that atheism is not a religion as you can't dance to it. There's no shortage of atheist myths – in the sense of historically incorrect statements which are believed for their moral value and because it's thought that society will fall apart if they're abandoned. The comments here are full of them. But they are no longer danceable.
There aren't any overwhelming and inspiring collective atheist rituals. I don't mean that these can't exist. Olof Palme's funeral procession was one unforgettable example. But they don't exist today. Possibly, the London demonstration against Pope Benedict would qualify but in terms of numbers it was wholly insignificant compared with the crowds that he drew, or that flock to church every Sunday.
Against this point the committed atheist replies exactly as a liberal protestant would have done 20 years ago: bums on pews don't matter; he or she is in the business of truth, not numbers, and the truth must in the course of time prevail. I don't believe this. I don't believe it in either case. Individualism without some myth of the collective is quite powerless. This is clearly illustrated by the Tea Party in America where the myth of a particular sort of extreme individualism is inseparable from the myths of a particular sort of America whose history has been invented in almost every detail.
If I'm right, then liberal, individualistic atheism is impossible as an organising principle of society because any doctrine that actually works to hold society together is indistinguishable from a religion. It needs its rituals and it needs its myths. A philosophy will grow around it in due course. Now perhaps you can have, at least on a small scale, a society committed to the principles of rational and tolerant disagreement and the sovereignty of reason. But what you end up with then isn't some rational Athens of the mind. It's Glastonbury.

Wednesday 5 September 2012

Family Matters Should Be Argued Only By Married People, Not Spinsters says Judge



A petition to Chief Justice of India asks him to remove Justice Bhaktavatsala of Karnataka High Court for his retrograde views against women against the tenets of the Constitution

From the petition:
On August 31, he went out of his way to counsel a young woman whose stated reason for not living with her husband was that he used to beat her. Justice Bhaktavatsala said, “Women suffer in all marriages. You are married with two children, and know what it means to suffer as a woman. Yesterday, there was a techie couple who reconciled for the sake of their child. Your husband is doing good business, he will take care of you. Why are you still talking about his beatings? I know you have undergone pain. But that is nothing in front of what you undergo as a woman. I have not undergone such pain. But madam (Justice BS Indrakala) has.”

The court asked the woman if her parents were present, at which her father walked up to the bench. The judge remarked, “Ask your father if he has never beaten your mother!” When the woman said her husband would beat her in the open, in front of everyone, Justice Bhaktavatsala remarked that it was she who was bringing it out in the open. The court was told that the husband would beat her in the middle of the night and had thrown her out of the house.

When the woman’s advocate produced photographs showing her swollen face, the court said, “You have to adjust. Are you just behind money? There is nothing in your case to argue on merits. You have to give him a divorce or go with him. Have you read about actor Darshan. He spent 30 days in jail after beating his wife. But they are living together now. What is on your mind and what is on your agenda?”
...
This is just not an isolated case in another case reported , a young advocate had not imagined she would be receiving a lesson on married life when she took up a case on behalf of an estranged wife. She was summarily told by Justice K Bhaktavatsala that she was unfit to argue a matrimonial case as she was unmarried. While the lady advocate was citing the allegations against the husband, Justice Bhaktavatsala stopped her midway and asked, “Are you married?” When she replied in the negative, the judge said, “You are unfit to argue this case. You do not know real life. Why are you arguing like this? He is your (client’s) partner,not a stranger. Family matters should be argued only by married people, not spinsters. You should only watch. Bachelors and spinsters watching family court proceedings will start thinking if there is any need to marry at all. Marriage is not like a public transport system. You better get married and you will get very good experince to argue such cases.”

Some cruelest foods


Menaka Gandhi in Mathrubhumi

In the last 5 years meat eating has risen to the highest levels it has ever been. The reason for this is that India is, thanks to TV, turning non-vegetarian. Soon we will lose the magic and mystery of India, the soul and the gurus who have kept it alive, and become just another struggling, boring nation full of viciousness. According to the Mahabharata, the Kalyug started on the day that man discovered he could eat his fellow creatures. From there it was a short step to wars, slavery and wickedness to all humans.

All animals that are grown for meat are raised, trucked and killed with extreme cruelty. But man has taken unkindness to an art form. Let me give you a list of the cruelest foods. I am sure I can give you at least 100, but let me start with ten.

1. A Japanese dish , Ikizukuri means 'prepared alive'. It is the preparation of fresh raw meat, usually of fish, cut into thin slices made from live seafood and served as sashimi. The victims are fish, octopus, shrimp, and lobster. You choose the animal. The chef uses his skills to partially gut and cut the animals up and serve it. He must cut the fish without killing it. With its heart exposed and beating, gills still working, trying to gasp for air and painfully conscious while its body is being cut up. Often the chef will take the pieces he cut from the fish and 'reassemble' them like some nightmarish jigsaw puzzle. The Chinese have Yin Yang Fish, which involves dipping the living fish into oil and frying it alive, but again just enough that it is still living right up until you plunge your fork into it and put it wriggling into your mouth.
2. Ortolan is a tiny songbird native to most European countries and west Asia. It is about six inches long and weighs just four ounces. The French capture these birds alive, blind them using a pair of pincers and then squeeze them into tiny cages where they cannot move. The bird is fed millets, grapes and figs till it reaches 4 times its size. Then it is drowned in a liquor called Armagnac, roasted whole and eaten, bones and all, while the diner drapes his head with a linen napkin to preserve the aroma of the brandy – and probably to hide from God.
3. 'Foie Gras' means 'fatty liver,' and it comes from ducks or geese. Adult ducks and geese are taken to a dark room and put in fowl coffins. A long metal pipe is shoved down the bird's oesophagus and a machine pumps pounds of fat greased corn mix directly into their digestive systems, which then gets deposited in their livers. This goes on till their livers reach six times their normal size. The birds writhe in pain for three weeks but they are stuck in boxes where they cannot even spread their wings. Then their throats are cut and the cancerous liver taken out and sold as a delicacy for rich people.
4. This is a dish invented by people who are known for their culinary cruelty – the Japanese. The victims are baby Dojo loaches (Mudfishes). The recipe calls for boiling water. When the water is heating up, a block of soyabean tofu is placed in the vessel. The baby loaches are added and they try to escape being boiled alive by plunging straight into the still cold tofu. The tofu starts cooking and the little fish are cooked alive inside it. The final product resembles Swiss cheese, the holes created by panicked baby loaches trying to escape boiling water.
5. A product of that other compassionate civilization, the Chinese who brought it to Tibet – or vice versa - Feng Gan Ji means 'wind dried chicken.' The chicken is not killed. Its stomach is sliced open and its intestines are cut out and replaced with spices and herbs as stuffing. The stomach is sewn up again in the still living bird and it is then strung upside down to die and dry in the wind.
6. Another dish known in China as Huo Jia Lu meaning 'Live Donkey'. The animal has its legs tied and its body held down, while the cook cuts its body and serves it immediately to the diners who quietly eat it among the ear splitting cries of the animal. The flesh is actually eaten raw without cooking. The diner uses a special fork and spoon to scoop out some of the flesh from the donkey. The meat is dipped into the fresh red blood before it is eaten. A variation of this dish is called Jiao Lu Rou ('Water Donkey Meat'), where the donkey's skin is pulled off and boiling water poured on its raw flesh until it is cooked.
7. Nagaland has its dog variation. A dog is tied to a tree and kept hungry for a week. It is then given a bucket of rice, lentils and vegetables to eat. It stuffs itself. It is then turned upside down and its stomach split open while alive and the food scooped out and eaten.
8. Nothing like eating your own relatives. A monkey is forcibly pulled to the dining table, tightly bound with hoops over its hands and legs. One of the diners uses a hammer to create a hole in the live monkey's head. Its cracked skull opens from its head and the diners use a stick to extract the brain. The monkey usually screams terribly before dying. Diners use their spoons to scrape through the bloody monkey's brain. Others dip the raw brain into a herb soup in order to add to the aroma while eating.
9. We in the Northeast have another amazing way to eat the most intelligent and emotional animal on the planet – the pig. A sharp iron rod is poked through the pig's anus and pushed in till it comes out through the mouth , tearing up all the organs on the way. The still living pig is then roasted over a fire.
10. Another popular Far Eastern dish - a newly born rodent and a selection of vegetables are brought to the table. The diner uses a special skewer to stab the live rodent. The rodent, who cannot bear the pain of being pierced, squeals as it is impaled on the skewer. The diner dips the still-live rodent into the boiling oil and then eats it.

Next week I will tell you 10 more. Put yourself in the animal's place.

I cannot imagine the people who enjoy this – and then believe that praying to the gods will result in something good for themselves.

A virus that kills cancer: the cure that's waiting in the cold


On the snow-clotted plains of central Sweden where Wotan and Thor, the clamorous gods of magic and death, once held sway, a young, self-deprecating gene therapist has invented a virus that eliminates the type of cancer that killed Steve Jobs.
'Not "eliminates"! Not "invented", no!' interrupts Professor Magnus Essand, panicked, when I Skype him to ask about this explosive achievement.
'Our results are only in the lab so far, not in humans, and many treatments that work in the lab can turn out to be not so effective in humans. However, adenovirus serotype 5 is a common virus in which we have achieved transcriptional targeting by replacing an endogenous viral promoter sequence by…'
It sounds too kindly of the gods to be true: a virus that eats cancer.
'I sometimes use the phrase "an assassin who kills all the bad guys",' Prof Essand agrees contentedly. 
Cheap to produce, the virus is exquisitely precise, with only mild, flu-like side-effects in humans. Photographs in research reports show tumours in test mice melting away.
'It is amazing,' Prof Essand gleams in wonder. 'It's better than anything else. Tumour cell lines that are resistant to every other drug, it kills them in these animals.'
Yet as things stand, Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD – to give it the full gush of its most up-to-date scientific name – is never going to be tested to see if it might also save humans. Since 2010 it has been kept in a bedsit-sized mini freezer in a busy lobby outside Prof Essand's office, gathering frost. ('Would you like to see?' He raises his laptop computer and turns, so its camera picks out a table-top Electrolux next to the lab's main corridor.)
Two hundred metres away is the Uppsala University Hospital, a European Centre of Excellence in Neuroendocrine Tumours. Patients fly in from all over the world to be seen here, especially from America, where treatment for certain types of cancer lags five years behind Europe. Yet even when these sufferers have nothing else to hope for, have only months left to live, wave platinum credit cards and are prepared to sign papers agreeing to try anything, to hell with the side-effects, the oncologists are not permitted – would find themselves behind bars if they tried – to race down the corridors and snatch the solution out of Prof Essand's freezer.
I found out about Prof Magnus Essand by stalking him. Two and a half years ago the friend who edits all my work – the biographer and genius transformer of rotten sentences and misdirected ideas, Dido Davies – was diagnosed with neuroendocrine tumours, the exact type of cancer that Steve Jobs had. Every three weeks she would emerge from the hospital after eight hours of chemotherapy infusion, as pale as ice but nevertheless chortling and optimistic, whereas I (having spent the day battling Dido's brutal edits to my work, among drip tubes) would stumble back home, crack open whisky and cigarettes, and slump by the computer. Although chemotherapy shrank the tumour, it did not cure it. There had to be something better.
It was on one of those evenings that I came across a blog about a quack in Mexico who had an idea about using sub-molecular particles – nanotechnology. Quacks provide a very useful service to medical tyros such as myself, because they read all the best journals the day they appear and by the end of the week have turned the results into potions and tinctures. It's like Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black reading the National Enquirer to find out what aliens are up to, because that's the only paper trashy enough to print the truth. Keep an eye on what the quacks are saying, and you have an idea of what might be promising at the Wild West frontier of medicine. This particular quack was in prison awaiting trial for the manslaughter (by quackery) of one of his patients, but his nanotechnology website led, via a chain of links, to a YouTube lecture about an astounding new therapy for neuroendocrine cancer based on pig microbes, which is currently being put through a variety of clinical trials in America.
I stopped the video and took a snapshot of the poster behind the lecturer's podium listing useful research company addresses; on the website of one of these organisations was a reference to a scholarly article that, when I checked through the footnotes, led, via a doctoral thesis, to a Skype address – which I dialled.
'Hey! Hey!' Prof Magnus Essand answered.
To geneticists, the science makes perfect sense. It is a fact of human biology that healthy cells are programmed to die when they become infected by a virus, because this prevents the virus spreading to other parts of the body. But a cancerous cell is immortal; through its mutations it has somehow managed to turn off the bits of its genetic programme that enforce cell suicide. This means that, if a suitable virus infects a cancer cell, it could continue to replicate inside it uncontrollably, and causes the cell to 'lyse' – or, in non-technical language, tear apart. The progeny viruses then spread to cancer cells nearby and repeat the process. A virus becomes, in effect, a cancer of cancer. In Prof Essand's laboratory studies his virus surges through the bloodstreams of test animals, rupturing cancerous cells with Viking rapacity.
The Uppsala virus isn't unique. Since the 1880s, doctors have known that viral infections can cause dramatic reductions in tumours. In 1890 an Italian clinician discovered that prostitutes with cervical cancer went into remission when they were vaccinated against rabies, and for several years he wandered the Tuscan countryside injecting women with dog saliva. In another, 20th-century, case, a 14-year-old boy with lymphatic leukaemia caught chickenpox: within a few days his grotesquely enlarged liver and spleen had returned to ordinary size; his explosive white blood cell count had shrunk nearly 50-fold, back to normal.
But it wasn't until the 1990s, and the boom in understanding of genetics, that scientists finally learnt how to harness and enhance this effect. Two decades later, the first results are starting to be discussed in cancer journals.
So why is Magnus – did he mind if I called him 'Magnus'? – about to stop his work?
A reticent, gently doleful-looking man, he has a Swedish chirrup that makes him sound jolly whatever his actual mood. On the web, the first links to him proclaim the Essand Band, his rock group. 'Money,' he said. 'Lack of.'
'Lack of how much money? Give me a figure,' I pressed. 'What sort of price are we talking about to get this virus out of your freezer and give these people a chance of life?'
Magnus has light brown hair that, like his voice, refuses to cooperate. No matter how much he ruffles it, it looks politely combed. He wriggled his fingers through it now, raised his eyes and squinted in calculation, then looked back into his laptop camera. 'About a million pounds?'
More people have full-blown neuroendocrine tumours (known as NETs or carcinoids) than stomach, pancreas, oesophagus or liver cancer. And the incidence is growing: there has been a five-fold increase in the number of people diagnosed in the last 30 years.
In medical school, students are taught 'when you hear hoof beats, think horses not zebras' – don't diagnose a rare disease when there's a more prob-able explanation. It leads to frequent misdiagnoses: until the death of Steve Jobs, NETs were considered the zebras of cancer, and dismissed as irritable bowel syndrome, flu or the patient getting in a tizz. But doctors are now realising that NETs are much more prevalent than previously thought. In a recent set of post-mortem investigations, scientists cut open more than 30,000 bodies, and ran their hands down the intestines of the dead as if they were squeezing out sausage skins. One in every 100 of them had the distinctive gritty bumps of NETs. That's two people in every rush-hour tube carriage on your way home from work, or scaled up, 700,000 people in Britain, or roughly twice the population of the city of Manchester. The majority of these tumours are benign; but a small percentage of them, for reasons that no one understands, burst into malignancy.
Many other cancers, if they spread, acquire certain features of neuroendocrine tumours. The first person to own a successful anti-neuroendocrine cancer drug – it doesn't even have to cure the disease, just slow its progress as anti-retrovirals have done with Aids – will be not only healthy but also Steve Jobs-rich. Last year the pharmaceuticals giant Amgen bought a cancer-assassinating version of the herpes virus for $1 billion. That Magnus's virus could be held up by a minuscule £1 million dumbfounded me.
'That's a banker's bonus,' I said. 'Less than a rock star's gold toilet seat. It's the best bargain going. If I found someone to give you this money, would you start the clinical trials?'
'Of course,' replied Magnus. 'Shall I ask the Swedish Cancer Board how soon we can begin?'
I do not have a million pounds. But for £68 I flew to Uppsala. I wanted to pester Prof Essand about his work, face to face, and see this virus, face to petri dish. I wanted to slip some into my mittens, smuggle it back to England in an ice pack and jab it into Dido.
Magnus's work is already funded by the Swedish Cancer Society and the Swedish Children Cancer Society (neuroblastoma, the most common cancer in infants, is a type of neuroendocrine tumour). A virus that he previously developed (against prostate cancer) is about to enter human trials in Rotterdam, supported by a European Union grant.
The difficulty with Magnus's virus is not that it is outré, but that it is not outré enough. It is a modified version of an adenovirus, which is known to be safe in humans. It originates from humans, occurring naturally in the adenoids. The disadvantage is that it is too safe: the immune system has had thousands of years to learn how to dispatch such viruses the moment they stray out of the adenoids. It is not the fact that Magnus is using a virus to deal with cancer that makes his investigation potentially so valuable, but the novel way he has devised to get round this problem of instant elimination by the immune system, and enable the virus to spread through tumours in other parts of the body.
The closer you get to manipulating the cellular forces of human existence, the more you sound like a schoolboy babbling about his model aeroplane. Everything in the modern genetics lab is done with kits. There are no fizzing computer lights or fractionating columns dribbling out coagulations of genetic soup in Magnus's lab; not a single Bunsen burner. Each narrow laboratory room has pale, uncluttered melamine worktops running down both sides, wall units above and small blue cardboard cartons dotted everywhere. Even in their genetics labs, Swedes enjoy an air of flatpack-ness. The most advanced medical lab in the world, and it looks like a half-fitted kitchen.
To make and test their virus, Magnus buys cell lines pre-fab (including 'human foreskin fibro-blast') for $50-100 from a company in California; DNA and 'enzyme mix' arrive in $179 packets from Indiana; protein concentrations are tested 'according to the manufacturer's instructions' with a DIY kit ($117) from Illinois; and for $79, a parcel from Santa Cruz contains (I haven't made this up) 'horseradish peroxidase conjugated donkey anti-goat antibody'.
In a room next to Magnus's office, a chatty woman with a ponytail is putting DNA inside bacteria. This God-like operation of primal delicacy involves taking a test tube with a yellow top from a $146 Qiagen kit, squirting in a bit of liquid with a pipette and putting the result in a box similar to a microwave: 'turn the dial to 25 kilovolts and oophlah! The bacteria, they get scared, they let the DNA in. All done,' the woman says. As the bacteria divide, the desirable viral fragments increase.
What costs the £1 million (less than two per cent of the price of Francis Bacon's Triptych 1976) that Magnus needs to bring this medicine to patients is not the production, but the health-and-safety paperwork to get the trials started. Trials come in three phases. What Magnus was suggesting for his trifling £1 million (two Mont Blanc diamond-encrusted pens) was not just a phase I trial, but also a phase II, which, all being well, would bring the virus right to the point where a big pharmaceuticals company would pay 10 or 100 times as much to take it over and organise the phase III trial required by law to presage full-scale drug development.
'So, if Calvin Klein or Elton John or… Paris Hilton stumped up a million, could they have the virus named after them?'
'Why not?' Magnus nodded, showing me the bacteria incubator, which looks like an industrial clothes washer, only less complicated. 'We can make an even better one for two million.'
There are reasons to be cautious. A recent investigation by Amgen found that 47 of 53 papers (on all medical subjects, not just viruses) by academics in top peer-reviewed science journals contained results that couldn't be reproduced, even though company scientists repeated the experiments up to 50 times. 'That's why we have to have such a careful peer-review process,' Dr Tim Meyer, Dido's energetic, soft-spoken oncologist, warns. 'Everybody thinks that their new treatment for cancer is worth funding, but everybody is also keen that only good-quality research is funded.' Similar to Prof Essand in youth but less polite of hair, Dr Meyer is the co-director of the Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre at University College London. Beside his office, banks of white-coated researchers are bent over desks, busy with pipettes and microscopes. His team pursues an exciting brew of new anti-cancer ideas: antibody-targeted therapy, vascular therapy, DNA binding agents and photodynamic therapy. Each of these shows remarkable promise. But even for such a brilliant and innovative team as this, money is not flowing.
Everyone in cancer science is fighting for ever-decreasing small pools of cash, especially now the government has started tiptoeing into charities at night and rifling the collection boxes. It is big news that Dr Meyer and the UCL team won a grant of £2.5 million, spread out over the next five years, to continue his institute's cutting-edge investigations into cancers that kill off thousands of us every week: leukaemia; melanoma; gynaecological, gastrointestinal and prostate cancers. Without this money, he would have had to sack 13 members of staff. The sum of £2.5 million is roughly what Madonna earns in 10 days.
He peers at Magnus's pairs of photographs of splayed rodents with glowing tumours in one shot that have vanished in the next. He knows the Uppsala neuroendocrine team well and has great respect for them. 'It may be good,' he agrees. But until Magnus's findings are tested in a clinical trial, nobody knows how good the work is. Astonishing results in animals are often disappointing in humans. 'We all need to be subject to the same rules of competitive grant funding and peer review in order to use scarce resources in the most effective manner.'
Back at home with whisky and fags, I nursed my entrepreneurialism. There are currently about half a dozen cancer research institutes in Europe developing adenoviruses to treat cancer – all of them pathetically short of cash. Enter the Vanity Virus Initiative. Pop a couple of million over to Uppsala University, and you will go down in medical books as the kind heart who relieved Ad5[CgA-E1A-miR122]PTD of its hideous hump of a moniker, and gave it the glamour of your own name. What's the worst that can happen? Even if Magnus's innovations don't work in clinical trials the negative results will be invaluable for the next generation of viruses. For the rest of time, your name will pop up in the reference sections of medical papers as the (insert your name here) virus that enabled researchers to find the cure for cancer by avoiding Magnus's error.
On my third glass of whisky, I wrote an email to Dr Meyer suggesting that he issue a shopping list each year at the time that bankers receive their bonuses, which could be circulated in the City. The list would itemise the therapies that his Experimental Cancer Medicine Centre have selected for support, and quantify how much would be needed in each case to cover all outstanding funds and ensure that the work is branded with your name.
The corridors connecting the different research departments of the Uppsala medical campus are built underground, in order to protect the staff from death during the Swedish winters. Professors and lab technicians zip back and forth along these enormous rectangular tunnels on scooters, occasionally scratching their heads at the tangled intersections where three or four passageways meet at once, then pushing off again, gowns flying, one leg pounding the concrete floor like a piston, until they find the right door, drop the scooter and rise back upstairs by lift. Suspended from the ceiling of these corridors is a vacuum tube that schluuuuups up tissue samples at top speed, and delivers them to the appropriate investigative team. Magnus led me along these tunnels to the Uppsala University Hospital, to visit the chief oncologist, Kjell (pronounced 'Shell') Oberg – the man who will run the trial once the money is in place.
'The trouble with Magnus's virus is Magnus is Swedish,' he says, wincing and clutching the air with frustration.
'It is so,' Magnus agrees sorrowfully. Swedishly uninterested in profiteering, devoted only to the purity of science, Magnus and his co-workers on this virus have already published the details of their experiments in leading journals around the world, which means that the modified virus as it stands can no longer be patented. And without a patent to make the virus commercial, no one will invest. Even if I could raise the £2 million (I want only the best version) to get the therapy to the end of phase II trials, no organisation is going to step forward to run the phase III trial that is necessary to make the therapy public.
'Is that because pharmaceuticals companies are run by ruthless plutocrats who tuck into roast baby with cranberry sauce for lunch and laugh at the sick?' I ask sneerily.
'It is because,' Kjell corrects me, 'only if there's a big profit can such companies ensure that everyone involved earns enough to pay their mortgage.'
There is no ready source of public funds, either. For reasons understood only by Wotan and Thor, the Swedish government refuses to finance clinical trials in humans, even when the results could potentially slash the country's health bill by billions of kronor.
All is not lost, however. Kjell does not have to wait until the end of the trials – which could take as much as 10 years – for the full, three-phase process before being able to inject Magnus's virus into his patients, because as soon as the test samples are approved and ready for use, he can by European law start offering the medicine, on an individual basis, to patients who sign a waiver confirming that they're prepared to risk experimental treatments. Within 18 months he could be starting his human case-studies.
At several moments during my research into this cancer-delaying virus from the forests of Scandinavia I have felt as though there were someone schlocky from Hollywood operating behind the scenes. The serendipitous discovery of it on the internet; the appalling frustration of being able to see the new therapy, to stand with my hand against the freezer door knowing that it is three inches away, not well-guarded, and that it might work even in its crude current state, but that I may not use it; the thrill of Kjell Oberg's powerful
support; the despair over the lack of such a silly, artificial thing as a patent. Now, Dr Leja steps into the narrative: she is the virologist whose brilliant doctoral thesis first put me on to the cancer-eating-virus-left-in-a-freezer, and whose name heads all the subsequent breakthrough research papers about this therapy. She turns out to be 29, to look like Scarlett Johansson and to wear voluptuous red lipstick.
Justyna Leja slinks up from her chair, shakes my hand and immediately sets off into a baffling technical discussion with Magnus about a good way to get the patent back for the virus, by a subtle manipulation that involves something called a 'new backbone'. She also has in mind a small extra tweak to the new-backboned microbe's outer coat, which will mean that the virus not only bursts the cancer cells it infects, but also provokes the immune system to attack tumours directly. It will be easy to see if it works in animals – but is it worth lumbering the current virus with it for use in humans, who tend to be less responsive? The extra preparatory work could delay the phase I and II trials for a further year.
Back at his lab, Magnus opened up the infamous freezer. I took a step towards the plastic flasks of virus: he nipped the door shut with an appreciative smile.
'What would you do,' I asked bitterly, returning my hand to my pocket, 'if it were your wife who had the disease, or one of your sons whose photograph I saw on your desk?'
He glanced back at the freezer. Although his lab samples are not made to pharmaceutical grade, they would be only marginally less trustworthy than a fully-sanctioned, health-and-safety certified product that is between 1,000 and 10,000 times more expensive.
'I don't know,' he groaned, tugging his hair in despair at the thought. 'I don't know.'
To donate money to Professor Magnus Essand's research on viral treatments for neuroendocrine cancer, send contributions to Uppsala University, The Oncolytic Virus Fund, Box 256, SE-751 05 Uppsala, Sweden, or visit www.uu.se/en/support/oncolytic. Contributions will be acknowledged in scientific publications and in association with the clinical trial. A donation of £1 million will ensure the virus is named in your honour

Tuesday 4 September 2012

Fake book reviews are rife on internet, authors warn


 

Fake book reviews are rife on the internet and readers should be aware of the "fraudulent" practices of some writers, a group of leading British authors warn tonight.

Authors Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Val McDermid: RJ Ellory: fake book reviews are rife on internet, authors warn
Image 1 of 2
Authors Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Val McDermid were among the 49 writers to condemn the "underhand tactics" of colleagues such as RJ Ellory. Photo: CHRIS WATT/GEOFF PUGH/GETTY IMAGES
In a letter sent to The Daily Telegraph, the authors, who have collectively sold millions of novels, “unreservedly” condemned the “abuse” on websites such as Amazon.
RJ Ellory admitted to using false names on Amazon to attack rivals (Picture: REX FEATURES)
The group, including bestselling writers Ian RankinLee Child, Susan Hill,Val McDermid and Helen FitzGerald, said the widespread use of “fake identities” was causing untold damage to the publishing world.
In an outspoken attack on the so-called “sock puppeting” practice, they urged readers and the literary world to help expose colleagues who used the “underhand tactics”.
Their condemnation came after RJ Ellory, the bestselling British crime writer,was exposed for using pseudonyms to pen fake glowing reviews about his “magnificent genius” online while simultaneously criticising his rivals.
The author of A Quiet Belief in Angels and a Simple Act of Violence, whose real name is Roger Jon Ellory, apologised for his "lapse of judgment".
The 47 year-old, based in Birmingham, West Midlands, admitted he had used fake identities to write about his own work on the Amazon book site, giving himself five star ratings.
Ellory, who went to ground today as he faced a deluge of criticism from fans worldwide – many of whom took to the internet to voice their anger – also gave his rivals bad reviews and low ratings using the same pseudonyms.
The father-of-one, who has won a variety of awards including Crime Novel of the Year 2010, was compelled to apologise after Jeremy Duns, a British spy author now based in Sweden, aired the accusations on Twitter last week.
Another thriller writer, Stephen Leather, has also admitted using different online identities to publicise his work.
Authors Ian Rankin, Lee Child and Val McDermid (Pictures: CHRIS WATT/GEOFF PUGH/GETTY IMAGES)
In their public letter, the group of 49 British writers, including Mark Billinghamand Stuart MacBride – who were targeted by Ellory – said that with the advent of the internet, honest comment had never been more important.
“These days more and more books are bought, sold, and recommended online, and the health of this exciting new ecosystem depends entirely on free and honest conversation among readers,” they wrote.
“But some writers are misusing these new channels in ways that are fraudulent and damaging to publishing at large.
“Few in publishing believe they are unique. It is likely that other authors are pursuing these underhand tactics as well.”
They added: “We … unreservedly condemn this behaviour, and commit never to use such tactics.
“But the only lasting solution is for readers to take possession of the process. The internet belongs to us all.
“Your honest and heartfelt reviews, good or bad, enthusiastic or disapproving, can drown out the phoney voices, and the underhanded tactics will be marginalised to the point of irrelevance.”
Mark Billingham was among those authors targeted by Ellory (Picture: GERAINT LEWIS)
The Crime Writers' Association, whose almost 600 members include Ellory, a former board member, have also condemned the “unfair” practice and confirmed they had launched a review.
Mr Duns, 38, also a signatory, exposed Ellory, whose 10 novels have sold more than a million copies, after being contacted by a fellow concerned author.
“It is very encouraging to see the support from so many people in the literary community at large who have come together to stand up against this sort of thing,” he said tonight.
MacBride said he had received dozens of messages of support from both fans and fellow writers.
He added: " It is hard to know what to pity more – the need to create 'sock-puppets to big up your own work or to use those same 'sock-puppets' to attack other writers."
In 2010 Prof Orlando Figes, a leading academic and award-winning historian, confessed to posting similar reviews on Amazon that praised his own work as "fascinating" and "uplifting" while rubbishing that of his rivals.
Ellory was “unavailable” for comment tonight while his literary agent Euan Thorneycroft declined to answer a series of questions from The Daily Telegraph.
An Amazon spokesman did not respond to requests for comment.
Ellory was "unavailable" for further comment (Picture: GETTY IMAGES)

We're one crucial step closer to seeing Tony Blair at The Hague



Desmond Tutu has helped us see the true nature of what the former prime minister did to Iraq and increased pressure for a prosecution
Blair at Leveson May 2012
Tony Blair arrives at the Royal Courts of Justice in London to give evidence on media ethics to the Leveson inquiry in May 2012. Photograph: Dan Kitwood/Getty Images
For years it seems impregnable, then suddenly the citadel collapses. An ideology, a fact, a regime appears fixed, unshakeable, almost geological. Then an inch of mortar falls, and the stonework begins to slide. Something of this kind happened over the weekend.
When Desmond Tutu wrote that Tony Blair should be treading the path to The Hague, he de-normalised what Blair has done. Tutu broke the protocol of power – the implicit accord between those who flit from one grand meeting to another – and named his crime. I expect that Blair will never recover from it.
The offence is known by two names in international law: the crime of aggression and acrime against peace. It is defined by the Nuremberg principles as the "planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression". This means a war fought for a purpose other than self-defence: in other words outwith articles 33 and 51 of the UN Charter.
That the invasion of Iraq falls into this category looks indisputable. Blair's cabinet ministers knew it, and told him so. His attorney general warned that there were just three ways in which it could be legally justified: "self-defence, humanitarian intervention, or UN security council authorisation. The first and second could not be the base in this case." Blair tried and failed to obtain the third.
His foreign secretary, Jack Straw, told Blair that for the war to be legal, "i) there must be an armed attack upon a state or such an attack must be imminent; ii) the use of force must be necessary and other means to reverse/avert the attack must be unavailable; iii) the acts in self-defence must be proportionate and strictly confined to the object of stopping the attack." None of these conditions were met. The Cabinet Office told him: "A legal justification for invasion would be needed. Subject to law officers' advice, none currently exists."
Without legal justification, the attack on Iraq was an act of mass murder. It caused the deaths of between 100,000 and a million people, and ranks among the greatest crimes the world has ever seen. That Blair and his ministers still saunter among us, gathering money wherever they go, is a withering indictment of a one-sided system of international justice: a system whose hypocrisies Tutu has exposed.
Blair's diminishing band of apologists cling to two desperate justifications. The first is that the war was automatically authorised by a prior UN resolution, 1441. But when it was discussed in the security council, both the American and British ambassadors insisted that 1441 did not authorise the use of force. The UK representative stated that "there is no 'automaticity' in this resolution. If there is a further Iraqi breach of its disarmament obligations, the matter will return to the council for discussion as required in paragraph 12." Two months later, in January 2003, the attorney general reminded Blair that "resolution 1441 does not authorise the use of military force without a further determination by the security council".
Yet when Blair ran out of options, he and his lieutenants began arguing that 1441 authorised their war. They are still at it: on Sunday, Lord Falconer tried it out on Radio4. Perhaps he had forgotten that it has been thoroughly discredited.
The second justification, attempted again by Blair this weekend, is that there was a moral case for invading Iraq. Yes, there was one. There was also a moral case for not invading Iraq, and this case was stronger.
But a moral case (and who has launched an aggressive war in modern times without claiming to possess one?) does not provide a legal basis. Nor was it the motivation for the attack. In September 2000, before they took office, a project run by future members of the Bush administration – including Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz – produced a report which said the following: "While the unresolved conflict with Iraq provides the immediate justification, the need for a substantial American force presence in the Gulf transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein." Their purpose, they revealed, was "maintaining American military pre-eminence". The motivation for deposing Saddam Hussein was no more moral than the motivation for arming and funding him, two decades before.
But while the case against Blair is strong, the means are weak. Twenty-nine people have been indicted in the international criminal court, and all of them are African. (Suspects in the Balkans have been indicted by a different tribunal). There's a reason for this. Until 2018 at the earliest, the court can prosecute crimes committed during the course of an illegal war, but not the crime of launching that war.
Should we be surprised? Though the Nuremberg tribunal described aggression as "the supreme international crime", several powerful states guiltily resisted its adoption. At length, in 2010, they agreed that the court would have jurisdiction over aggression, but not until 2018 or thereafter. Though the offence has been recognised in international law for 67 years, the international criminal court (unlike the Rwanda and Yugoslavia tribunals, which hear cases from before they were established) will be able to try only crimes of aggression committed beyond that date.
The other possibility is a prosecution in one of the states (there are at least 25) which have incorporated the crime of aggression into their own laws. Perhaps Blair's lawyers are now working through the list and cancelling a few speaking gigs.
That the prospect of prosecution currently looks remote makes it all the more important that the crime is not forgotten. To this end, in 2010 I set up a bounty fund –www.arrestblair.org – to promote peaceful citizens' arrests of the former prime minister. People contribute to the fund, a quarter of which is paid out to anyone who makes an attempt which meets the rules. With our fourth payment last week, we've now disbursed more than £10,000. Our aim is the same as Tutu's: to de-normalise an act of mass murder, to keep it in the public mind and to maintain the pressure for a prosecution.
That looked, until this weekend, like an almost impossible prospect. But when the masonry begins to crack, impossible hopes can become first plausible, then inexorable. Blair will now find himself shut out of places where he was once welcome. One day he may find himself shut in.