Seems to be yet another variation of this synthetic outrage being forwarded all over the internet. Sometimes it's zombie stories from years ago being recirculated, because people have seen the story but not the debunking. Sometimes it's a very slight variation on the theme: the amazing discovery that's being suppressed seems to have mutated from a cheap wonder drug to a cancer-killing virus recently. But otherwise the elements of the OMG this is so terrible!!!! screed are suspiciously similar. And it's just as much bullshit as every other iteration of this.
I'm sticking my neck out and saying this, even though I only seen the rumours and outraged Twitter and FB posts, I haven't traced the detail of the story back to its source and verified how little is factual. There's a pattern to these stories, and it's based on several misconceptions about how the world actually works.
( several reasons I don't buy it )
The other big reason to be extremely skeptical about these kinds of scare stories is that very often they originate from quacks who are peddling some kind of miracle cure. They want desperate cancer patients to believe that the whole medical, scientific, political and commercial establishment is conspiring against them, so that they'll be good little marks for whatever someone's selling. That could be magic, it could be something that is completely untested and unvalidated, it could be a genuine drug (perhaps even the very one that's supposedly being suppressed by evil corporations) being manufactured without the appropriate quality control and safety checks.
This is pretty much a potted version of a rant I subjected![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
jack to when he innocently asked me about the cancer-killing virus story. So I thought I should put it on the internet for posterity! I should note that I know quite a lot about cancer research, as it's been my profession for ten years, but my knowledge of IP law comes from the fact that my childhood was pretty much as portrayed in this Calvin and Hobbes strip.
For a more detailed takedown of the story, with actual citations rather than just ranting, see this excellent piece by David Gorski on DCA. As far as I can tell the DCA story from 2007 is the memetic ancestor to all the related scandals that keep doing the rounds, though even DCA itself hasn't died out, it shows up on social networks every so often.
I'm sticking my neck out and saying this, even though I only seen the rumours and outraged Twitter and FB posts, I haven't traced the detail of the story back to its source and verified how little is factual. There's a pattern to these stories, and it's based on several misconceptions about how the world actually works.
( several reasons I don't buy it )
The other big reason to be extremely skeptical about these kinds of scare stories is that very often they originate from quacks who are peddling some kind of miracle cure. They want desperate cancer patients to believe that the whole medical, scientific, political and commercial establishment is conspiring against them, so that they'll be good little marks for whatever someone's selling. That could be magic, it could be something that is completely untested and unvalidated, it could be a genuine drug (perhaps even the very one that's supposedly being suppressed by evil corporations) being manufactured without the appropriate quality control and safety checks.
This is pretty much a potted version of a rant I subjected
jack to when he innocently asked me about the cancer-killing virus story. So I thought I should put it on the internet for posterity! I should note that I know quite a lot about cancer research, as it's been my profession for ten years, but my knowledge of IP law comes from the fact that my childhood was pretty much as portrayed in this Calvin and Hobbes strip. For a more detailed takedown of the story, with actual citations rather than just ranting, see this excellent piece by David Gorski on DCA. As far as I can tell the DCA story from 2007 is the memetic ancestor to all the related scandals that keep doing the rounds, though even DCA itself hasn't died out, it shows up on social networks every so often.
