BioBeers November ’09

What a great turn-out last week for BioBeers!  TalentWrx Professional Staffing, Tyler-Donegan and ImQuest (the Official Chicken wing sponsor of BioBeers).  It was a record for attendance with 123 people (and probably more since everyone wasn’t drinking beer).

I only took a few pictures.  Click on the picture below to open the Web Album on Picasa:

I am also glad to announce that I know the next sponsor is going to be the Battelle National Biodefense Institute (BNBI), the group running the National Biodefense Analysis and Countermeasures Center (NBACC).  And don’t listen to the the trolls (instead subscribe to the BPSDB blog), there are jobs and plenty of them coming soon at NBACC and most don’t require wearing a bunny suit every day! They have a number up already on their Careers site and they want to use BioBeers as a recruiting tool. So stay tuned, as I am working with them now to set a date in mid-January.

 

“You do what? Sorry, we don’t want Your business…..”

Couple weeks ago I went to a Frederick County Chamber of Commerce lunch networking event at the Red Horse.  It’s like a speed dating networking event:  you sit with 4 other people, give them your elevator talk, pass out cards, move to next table every 5 minutes.  As a small business owner with no real “retail” or consumer services to offer (although I have toyed around with the idea of handing out “coupons” for free placental perfusion or “Recycle your placenta” bumper stickers), the sales people at these events like to pitch their wares:  Web design, Accounting services, graphic arts, office supplies, computer stuff, etc.

So I had a couple follow-up calls and made appointments to chat with a few people since I really need to start “branding” the Hemacell Perfusion (and man, does the web site need some work).  Here’s where it gets bizarre.

I get an email back from one of my appointments stating “we really think the work you are doing is great, but we’re not going to be able to business with you because of potential conflict of interest with existing clients.”  That’s a first for me.

And on another rant, there was a great little opt ed piece in the Baltimore Sun last week written by Dr’s Curt Civin (best known as the person who discovered CD34) and E. Albert Reece.  In the piece he make allusion to the belief that Obama will overturn the Bush “Stem Cell Legislation”.  As I have said before (HERE and HERE), this piece of legislation is really not the problem and as the Opt-ed piece states:

Lifting the ban is an important first step – but it is mostly symbolic. Unless it leads to a significant increase in funding for rebuilding the infrastructure this field needs to mature, it is likely to have little tangible effect. This would be very unfortunate, because the field of regenerative medicine – which utilizes stem cells, among other tools, to understand disease processes and to repair damaged organs – is ripe for development.

I also have been meaning to ask you all to oppose HR 801 “Fair Copyright in Research Works Act” which seeks to overturn the order that all NIH funded research be made available to the public at no charge.  Most critically, H.R. 801 would reverse the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Public Access Policy, prohibit American taxpayers from accessing the results of the crucial biomedical research funded by their taxpayer dollars, and stifle critical advancements in life-saving research and scientific discovery.  Please write your Senator, House member, and local officials and state your opposition to HR 801.  I’ve already sent an e-mail to Roscoe Bartlett and a few others.  You can go to the web site for more information.

Scientific Fraud and Layoffs

A couple of interesting news articles going around this weekend.

I look forward to Jason Balog’s Biotech “blog” in the FNP every month.  He has an interesting take this week talking about the recent layoffs at Pfizer.  The layoffs announced are all in R&D and are attributed to a lack of productivity.  No new drugs in the pipeline and some memorable failures.  As Jason puts it:

At $7.5 billion, Pfizer has one of the largest research and development budgets. But in the last couple of years Pfizer has terminated several high-profile projects and has produced no new blockbusters. Consequently, Pfizer is facing the impending loss of patent protection for its best-selling drug with no product(s) ready to replace the loss.

As internal research and development departments continue to produce disappointing results, management has started to look for external means to fill the pipeline. The result has been a rapidly increasing number of acquisitions of promising molecules or entire operations from smaller companies. However, even with the uptick in acquisitions, internal research and development departments have largely stayed intact.

Pfizer’s recent announcement is therefore more significant than it might first appear. With the recently announced layoffs, Pfizer seems to be tacitly admitting its research and development activity has failed and that a change in how big pharma does business may be required in the future.

So these actions are lock step with the belief that Big Pharma will be looking to acquire a number of small biotechs to grow their product pipeline. For example, AZ acquiring MedImmune right here in our back yard. We also know Pfizer has talked a lot about Stem Cells and Regenerative Medicine. If anyone’s listening, I can be bought, cheap. Under 9 figures. Give me a call.

In other, more local news I was reading about Kai Hagen’s rants in the Gazette.  Apparently, he’s the only county commissioner opposed to the Waste to Electricity project.  Even more better, he accuses the other commissioners as relying on “scientific fraud” as a basis of their choice ot support the “Incinerator”.

According to the article:

“The frequent assertion that WTE [waste-to-energy] as we have proposed … helps with our national energy crisis, is more environmentally friendly than practical and economically competitive alternatives or is in any way responsible from a climate change perspective is misguided at best,” Hagen wrote in the e-mail.

“It is a myth that one could reasonably describe as scientific fraud. And to date, too many decision-makers in the county have been complicit in perpetrating that fraud. We can do better than that. And, fortunately, we still have the opportunity to do so.”

Those who read FredCoBio regularly may know I am not a subscriber to the global warming conspiracy theory. Having reviewed the data and the proposed theories and models, none present any compelling evidence that humans are responsible for “climate change”. Certainly climate change is happening. It happens every day. I believe the overwhelming evidence is that the current, and historical, changes are “purely natural” and our ability to predict future “catastrophes” (which are certain to occur whether or not humans inhabit the planet as they have before human inhabited the planet) based upon measurements only possible for the past 25 years (100 years would be stretching it) is not appreciating the scientific method and falsely leading people (i.e. the media) to sensationalize their self fulfilling prophecy in hopes of getting themselves funded. Humans are a part of nature and matter in the universe and matter can be neither created nor destroyed.

My main point in disagreeing with Kai is that this is not a precident setting proposal.  Fort Detrick and Frederick Memorial Hospital (I think) already have WTE incinerators.  It’s common at hospitals and other places that generate a lot of biomedical waste.  Why?  Because sending it to a landfill isn’t an option and handing it over to a waste hauler gets damn expensive real fast.  Oh, and why wait for the waste to decompose and generate Methane, which we’ll gladly harvest and convert to electricity?  Same stuff, different day.  In terms of geological time, not relevant.

And neither are humans.  So y’all might as well come out to BioBeers East ’09 on Thursday 2/12 to celebrate the demise of humanity, extinction of non-beer drinking psychopaths and generally embrace your inner science geek.

PS:  I did not intend to imply that either Jason or Kai are dinosaurs by throwing my rant into this post

9 PM UPDATE:  Pfizer looking to acquire Wyeth for $60 billion.  Yeah, that’s the ticket I was looking to punch…

Holy Cow!

Yes, I know this is supposed to be a blog about Frederick County Biotech. This story is neither about Fred Co nor biotech, but it’s my blog and I can rant when I want to.

I am at a loss for words. Hold on, they’re coming back to me. In waves, kinda like diarrhea. Maybe this can be my inaugural BPSDB post?

The Global Warming conspiracy, in Nature no less, reports that the ozone-hole recovery is threatening the Antarctic Ice cap. Yes brothers and sisters, the Ozone hole, so widely attributed to be the demise of the planet in the 80′s, a tell-tale, doomsday prophecy of humans ruining the universe due to gluttony and lust of chlorofluorocarbons and exhaust from burning of fossil fuels, the ozone hole shrinketh.

From the article ( a drum roll please):

Antarctic ice threatened by ozone-hole recovery

Global winds could accelerate melting.

Amanda Leigh Haag

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The ozone hole may have delayed Antarctic warming

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Recovery of the ozone hole above Antarctica could warm the Antarctic and cause more ice to melt in coming decades, researchers say. As the ozone hole heals, wind patterns that shield the interior of the polar region from warm air may break down, causing warming in the Antarctica as well as warmer and drier conditions in Australia.

Despite global temperatures rising, the interior of Antarctica has experienced a unique cooling trend during its summer and autumn over the last few decades. Scientists attribute this cooling to the hole in the ozone layer, which alters atmospheric circulation patterns and strengthens the westerly winds that swirl around the continent. These winds have isolated the Antarctic interior from the warming patterns seen on the continent’s peninsula and throughout the rest of the world.

“The warming of the Antarctic may have been delayed because of the ozone hole,” says atmospheric scientist Judith Perlwitz, a climate scientist at the of the University of Colorado at Boulder and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Let it be said, as real climatologists have been telling us for decades, there is no consensus that we are in a period of global warming. As this article supports, the Antarctic (the Southern Hemisphere in general) has been experiencing a “unique cooling trend”.

Sounds like we’re heading for an Ice Age, to me.

Ok. Rant accomplished. I hope my invite to SciFoo ’08 isn’t retracted. I’ll overblog this with something good I just read about FredCoBio…