All posts by Paul Raven

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Biopharming: transgenic animals as medicine-factories

That sound you can hear is sound of bioconservatives gnashing their teeth in horror: COSMOS Magazine has a decent long piece on transgenic animals and the role they may play in tomorrow’s pharmacology:

The greatest impact biopharming will have on the world’s medicine cabinet is one of supply – it will dramatically boost the availability of biopharmaceuticals, also known as ‘biologics’. Biologics are defined as medicinal products extracted from or produced by biological systems – many are made by genetically manipulating cells of bacterial, animal or human origin.

The majority of biologics are proteins such as hormones, enzymes, growth factors and antibodies, which can be collectively called therapeutic proteins, as well as viral proteins for use in vaccines.

This method of drug manufacture will make things cheaper… but not to the degree that you might expect:

A review of the scientific literature shows that a slew of antibody-based drugs manufactured in transgenic animals are poised to enter the market as soon as their branded competitors’ patents expire.

Traditionally, this would result in the transgenic animal-manufactured drugs being labelled as generic drugs – a non-patented, cheaper alternative to brand-name medications with the same active ingredient.

But because the antibodies that the transgenic animals produce are extremely complex monoclonal antibodies – large protein-based structures that specifically recognise one part of a target molecule – no two are alike. This means that, unlike the less complex ‘small molecule’ (non protein) structure of most drugs, they cannot technically be called generics.

“When GTC Biotherapeutics start marketing Herceptin from transgenic cows, it will be classed as a biosimilar, not a biogeneric. We may even end up having a better Herceptin, what we’d call a ‘biobetter’,” notes Heiden.

The ‘better’ refers to aspects of a drug’s profile that may be more desirable than those of its competitor, such as better efficacy or fewer side effects. These traits will affect pricing, but biosimilars will still be cheaper.

“The cost savings will be in the order of 30% – not the 80% price drops we see when a generic small molecule drug goes to market,” says Heiden. That’s because of where in the manufacturing process the savings impact. “Where we save money is at the front end. But the downstream cost of goods, which is about half of the total, is the same regardless of whether you are using cell culture or animals on a farm. You still have to extract and purify your product.”

Well, you do if you’re playing by the rules… I’ll bet there’s plenty of corners that can be cut if you’re not too bothered about meeting safety standards. Hmmm, the ideas for my genetic police procedural are all falling rapidly into place…

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Path dependency: why we still use rockets

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Very interesting piece by ubergeek Neal Stephenson over at Slate, where he wonders why it is that we’re still stuck in the rocket paradigm of space launch tech. In two words: path dependency.

To recap, the existence of rockets big enough to hurl significant payloads into orbit was contingent on the following radically improbable series of events:

1. World’s most technically advanced nation under absolute control of superweapon-obsessed madman

2. Astonishing advent of atomic bombs at exactly the same time

3. A second great power dominated by secretive, superweapon-obsessed dictator

4. Nuclear/strategic calculus militating in favor of ICBMs as delivery system

5. Geographic situation of adversaries necessitating that ICBMs must have near-orbital capability

6. Manned space exploration as propaganda competition, unmoored from realistic cost/benefit discipline

The above circumstances provide a remarkable example of path dependency. Had these contingencies not obtained, rockets with orbital capability would not have been developed so soon, and when modern societies became interested in launching things into space they might have looked for completely different ways of doing so.

Before dismissing the above story as an aberration, consider that the modern petroleum industry is a direct outgrowth of the practice of going out in wooden, wind-driven ships to hunt sperm whales with hand-hurled spears and then boiling their heads to make lamp fuel.

It’s this sort of thinking that makes Stephenson’s novels so fascinating to me… and, I fully expect, what makes other people bounce right off them. To Stephenson, everything is a system, and a system is a sort of story. Or maybe it’s the other way around? Anyway, the point is that for all our talk – and worship – of innovation, we’re mired in a whole interconnected set of path dependencies, a kind of civilisational stasis where we don’t do amazing new things so much as we find new ways to do the same things we’ve always done, only bigger, faster and with greater consequences of failure.

… the endless BP oil spill of 2010 highlighted any number of ways in which the phenomena of path dependency and lock-in have trapped our energy industry on a hilltop from which we can gaze longingly across not-so-deep valleys to much higher and sunnier peaks in the not-so-great distance. Those are places we need to go if we are not to end up as the Ottoman Empire of the 21st century, and yet in spite of all of the lip service that is paid to innovation in such areas, it frequently seems as though we are trapped in a collective stasis. As described above, regulation is only one culprit; at least equal blame may be placed on engineering and management culture, insurance, Congress, and even accounting practices. But those who do concern themselves with the formal regulation of “technology” might wish to worry less about possible negative effects of innovation and more about the damage being done to our environment and our prosperity by the mid-20th-century technologies that no sane and responsible person would propose today, but in which we remain trapped by mysterious and ineffable forces.

A fascinating and provocative read: go see the whole thing.

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In defence of libraries

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US-based readers: please forgive the nakedly UK-centric nature of this post, though I imagine the sentiment is just applicable over on your side of the pond.

Futurismic veterans may remember that, prior to going freelance full time, yours truly used to work in libraries. But I loved libraries long before I worked in them – in fact, I loved libraries pretty much as soon as I knew of their existence. If you love books, how can you not love libraries?

I’m not going to open a debate here about whether or not there’s a genuine need for the austerity measures being introduced by the UK government at the moment; I’m not versed enough in the ways of economics to make an argument based on anything other than my own instinctive reactions and political leanings. Times are hard; I only have to look out of my window at the long line of “To Let” signs on the shops in the street where I live to see that. The country’s accounts need balancing, without a doubt.

But gutting public library provision, while seductively easy for media-wary local governments under pressure from Downing Street, is a choice that hits the most needy at their time of greatest need.

Here’s Philip Pullman taking the podium at FalseEconomy.org.uk:

You don’t need me to give you the facts. Everyone here is aware of the situation. The government, in the Dickensian person of Mr Eric Pickles, has cut the money it gives to local government, and passed on the responsibility for making the savings to local authorities. Some of them have responded enthusiastically, some less so; some have decided to protect their library service, others have hacked into theirs like the fanatical Bishop Theophilus in the year 391 laying waste to the Library of Alexandria and its hundreds of thousands of books of learning and scholarship.

[ He’s not kidding; someone linked me to the 2011/2012 budget plans for Portsmouth, my long-term hometown to which I’m returning in a few months, and they’ve gone through the library service like a scythe through a cornfield. It’s harder for me to watch than for others, of course, because I know the names and faces behind those post titles and salaries; I know the years spent studying for a qualification that opens the door to a job you’d never take if chasing money was your prime career motivation; I know the years spent fighting similar attempts at reducing provision, and the determination to provide despite the steady erosion of funds. I know the gallows humour of an industry where the writing has been on the wall for years; I know the genuine grief of people who’ve spent their lives working for an ideal that shaped their own childhoods seeing that ideal written off as a red column on a balance sheet by accountants who earn far more than the jobs they’re suggesting be axed. And sure, yeah, someone somewhere can say that about pretty much every threatened service on the list. So maybe they should. We seem to have forgotten that They are supposed to work for us; They, of course, forgot that long ago, if they ever believed it at all. ]

I still remember the first library ticket I ever had. It must have been about 1957. My mother took me to the public library just off Battersea Park Road and enrolled me. I was thrilled. All those books, and I was allowed to borrow whichever I wanted! And I remember some of the first books I borrowed and fell in love with: the Moomin books by Tove Jansson; a French novel for children called A Hundred Million Francs; why did I like that? Why did I read it over and over again, and borrow it many times? I don’t know. But what a gift to give a child, this chance to discover that you can love a book and the characters in it, you can become their friend and share their adventures in your own imagination.

And the secrecy of it! The blessed privacy! No-one else can get in the way, no-one else can invade it, no-one else even knows what’s going on in that wonderful space that opens up between the reader and the book. That open democratic space full of thrills, full of excitement and fear, full of astonishment, where your own emotions and ideas are given back to you clarified, magnified, purified, valued. You’re a citizen of that great democratic space that opens up between you and the book. And the body that gave it to you is the public library. Can I possibly convey the magnitude of that gift?

Somewhere in Blackbird Leys, somewhere in Berinsfield, somewhere in Botley, somewhere in Benson or in Bampton, to name only the communities beginning with B whose libraries are going to be abolished, somewhere in each of them there is a child right now, there are children, just like me at that age in Battersea, children who only need to make that discovery to learn that they too are citizens of the republic of reading. Only the public library can give them that gift.

Pullman and myself are probably preaching to the choir here, but nonetheless: the problem council beancounters have with libraries is that the social capital they produce doesn’t appear on spreadsheets. All they see is expenditure, a hole into which money is poured. They don’t see the benefits flooding outward: the gifts that Pullman is talking about, as well as the simpler (and yes, not so book-related) gift of a quiet space to retreat from the world outside that libraries provide for many of the most vulnerable and impoverished members of society. The ability to provide those gifts has withered over the years as acquisition budgets have been whittled away, buildings undermaintained until there’s “no other valid cure” but to sell them off… and with less books available in less locations, borrowing rates inevitably drop, and are then held up as proof positive that money spent on libraries is wasted. “Look, less people use them every year!” Well, of course; you’ve made them less usable. Bravo, you.

Pullman again:

I’m not praising the public library service for money. I love the public library service for what it did for me as a child and as a student and as an adult. I love it because its presence in a town or a city reminds us that there are things above profit, things that profit knows nothing about, things that have the power to baffle the greedy ghost of market fundamentalism, things that stand for civic decency and public respect for imagination and knowledge and the value of simple delight.

[…]

Leave the libraries alone. You don’t know the value of what you’re looking after. It is too precious to destroy.

An anarchist aguing in favour of a fundamentally socialist institution like public libraries may seem inconsistent, and perhaps it is, if one assumes that anarchism (or any other political philosophy) is monolithic and unchanging across all of its adherents. I’m an anarchist because I believe in the power and ability of ordnary people to build a functioning society without the need for the guiding hand of career politicians whose first love is the party line. Until such a day as control has been wrested peacefully from the weasels in expensive suits, the best thing we can do is remind them – constantly, loudly – that their job is to enact the will of the people.

In this particular situation, then, I’d ask you – if you’ve ever had a moment of wonder or enlightnement or just plain old peace and contentment in a library, even so much as just once in your life – to tell them in no uncertain terms to take their hands off your libraries, the ones your taxes have paid for. If money’s short, there are plenty of places it could be found without punishing those already suffering the most, simply by making sure that the rates already set were paid by all who owe them: the Square Mile leaps immediately to mind, as do a number of notorious tax havens.

As a nation – and as a planet, to be honest – we’ve become very accustomed to shrugging off the caprice and arrogance of our political classes as one of life’s inevitabilities. Remember, though, that we pay their wages; as such, we can – and should – hold them to account for their work, and sack them for misconduct. Remember this, and remind them.

The libraries are yours. If you don’t fight for them, they’ll be sold off by those who have always been well enough off not to need them. And if you shrug, smile sadly, say that the cuts are terrible but inevitable, then you have fulfilled your own prophecy.

To attempt something is to invite failure;to not attempt something is to ensure failure.

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Halo and post-franchise worldbuilding

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Here’s a link-heavy post at MetaFilter rounding up a whole bunch of bits and bobs about the fictional universe of the Halo game franchise. Over a decade old, Halo has propped up seven best-selling novels (one of which was penned by long-term friend-o’-Futurismic Tobias Buckell), a radio drama, a handful of Hollywood-grade short films… and then there’s all the fan-created content, too.

I mention this not because it’s impressive (though it is, really), nor because it represents a potential future ecosystem for creatives (which it does, be they writers, artists, film-makers, whatever). No: what interests me is that they’ve reached a point where someone has written a lengthy treatise on the nature of canon in the halo universe, and what will happen to it when Bungie, Halo’s creators, decide to move on to something else. I just tried reading it, and I bounced right off after the first few pages – if you think sf academia produces tracts couched in impenetrable language, you’ll find the SVMMA CANONICA as welcoming as a concrete wall, though I suspect the obfuscatory language is a deliberate and ironic affectation – so I’m not going to pass comment on its content; what interests me is the amplified persistence of fictional universes in the internet age. Fan-created content isn’t new, of course, but the ability to share it easily with a post-geographical community means that a certain momentum or mass can accrete around the original source material, and – in quite a few cases – eclipse it.

Who owns a world when its original creators decide to stop creating within it? How far into the future will fans still be working within the Halo canon? What are the odds of a schism in said fandom? If you have two competing fictional histories of an orphaned fictional universe, which one is more valid – the one with the most followers? The one with the greatest logical consistency within the parameters of the pre-schism history? Might the two factions war over their interpretations of the canon? Could said war be restricted to the fictional universe itself, or might it spill out into the parent reality… or even leak across into other fictional universes? When immersive virtual worlds are cheap and commonplace, how many will there be? So many questions… and enough ideas for a dozen novels*, were I skilled enough to write ’em.

[ * I’m put in mind of Walter Jon Williams’ Implied Spaces, which goes somewhat in that direction; I’m sure there are others I’ve missed, so do pipe up with suggestions in the comments, won’t you? ]