Lung cancer vaccine and cigars: hot export from Cuba

Have you ever been upset by Amazon product suggestions like "Customers who bought this bicycle padlock also bought E.L.James' erotic thriller Fifty Shades of Grey" ? For sure, they usually make little if any sense.

But here comes something really meaningful: From Cuba, the land that always produced the best quality cigars (Montechristo, Rey del Mundo or the most famous and Hemingways all-time favorit: the mighty Cohibar) can offer its customers now in a bundle with a 10% discount: the first efficient vaccine against advanced lung cancer. The tiny socialist island, suffering for more than 50 years under US political and trade sanctions, is not only a great exporter of cane suggar, excellent rum, amazing music, but without much attention from the international scientific community always did excellent research in immunology. Apart from a better understanding of the role of the immune systems signaling molecules such as interferons and interleukins, the Cuban biologists and medical doctors also contribute to the development of innovative, targetted immunological weapons to fight cancer. Now they were successful of introducing the first recombinant vacine to treat advanced lung cancer, a tumor type that is approximately 8 times more frequent in smokers.

 A cool offer would be: custers who have bought 100 boxes of Cuban cigars within 10 years will get a gratis course of lung cancer vaccine treatment.

De Rerum Natura

When Lukretius (his full name was Titus Lucretius Carus) wrote his book "On the nature of things" (in the first half of the last century B.C.), he already blamed religion for obstructing human rationality with superstition, believing dogma rather than believing observations and misguiding our entire life towards fear of death rather than joyful anticipation of the real world. Making religion responsible for so much evil in the world (Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum), he was mainly referring to the ancient roman faith, which was notorious for not only prefering superstition against rationality, but also promoted sacrificing animals and even human to please their gods.

Lukretius: On the Nature of Things (translated by H.A.J.Munro), London 1886, H.Routledge & Sons Ltd

Would Lukretius have ever forseen, that centuries later masses of mentally blind-folded people followed the papal "call of duty" to raid the non-christians during three crusades. Would he believe, that again and again warmongers could rely on the churches to praise the million-fold killings on the battle-fields. Would he believe that at the beginning of the 21st century, despite free education and an era of enlightment, young people from civilized societies follow islamic preachers who order them to kill and destroy everything that is not in accordance to some anachronistic holy writings.

Blocked Wordpress.com in Turkey: Shooting the messenger

One of the first examples for a messenger who is made responsible and punished for the bad news he transmits can be found in the old testament. In the 2nd Book of Samuel the reaction of David (who later shall become King David) is reported after a courier brings him bad news about King Sauls death. This message makes him so furious that he orders the messenger to be killed straight away. This narrative from the bible, however should not blame to be blue-print of a historically more widespread seen habit of trying to deal with one owns frustration by punishing the bearer for the bad tidings. It can been found in historic records of non-Christian cultures as well, such as the killing of a news reporter who told Montezuma about the arrival of Cortez. During the Battle of Tigranocerta (Third Mithridatic War) the Roman consul Lucius Licinius Lucullus also made it into the history books by ordering the decapitation of a messenger who reported the approaching army of the Armenian King Tigranes.

Since these times, of course, the ways we express our frustrations have changed, but they are still driven by the very same feelings of suffering from temporal or repeated defeats. At least on a global political scale, a person transmitting bad news is not killed anymore. But the advent of the information age has opened completely new possibilities for the political rulers worldwide. Information or ideas cannot be suppressed by law, but the electronic messengers can be switched of. This is what the Turkish government has repeatedly done, in the case of Twitter, Facebook or Google. In pseudo-legal suitcases that accused single Facebook- or blog articles for insulting national identity to religious feelings, the law enforcement authorities ordered to shut down the entire news platforms. This was done because of the widespread use of SSL certificates for secure HTTPS internet protocol makes it hard for any national government authority to block a single content page only. Since the national authorities can only  put pressure on the local internet service providers (i.e. on internet relay nodes), but not on the domain hosts directly, they have little power to insist on blocking a single web-page, be it on Facebook, Google-Blogspot, WordPress or Wikipedia. In their helpless attempt to suppress the viral spread of unpleasant news, instead, they pressed the local internet service providers in their countries to block entire domains. This has happened to Google and Facebook in the past, and recently to the entire WordPress.com domain. As the Turkish blogger efe kerem sozeri described it in his recent study, “.. it’s a move that shows the scope of Turkey's Internet law, the power of judges who may not fully understand online media, and the technical capacities of Turkish ISPs, which, under the heavy pressure of President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan's rule, have turned into instruments of censorship.” He had discovered that the legal order of a Turkish court to removed or block a single WordPress page (that contained unproven claims of scientific plagiarism of one professor against another one) lead to ban of the entire WordPress.com domain (with several hundred thousand individual blogs and websites). 

This is not the first time that the global blog-hoster WordPress.com was affected by Turkish legal actions. The notorious Turkish creationist, Holocaust denier and islamic scholar Adnan Oktar has been criticized by scientists from all over the world for his superficial collection of wannabe evidence against the Darwinian theory of evolution. Oktar’s two-volume convolute “Yaratılış Atlası (The Atlas of Creation)” has been judge by the UCB biologist Kevin Padian as “just astounded at its size and production values and equally astonished at what a load of crap it is."  The European Councils Committee on Culture, Science and Education wrote about Oktars book “None of the arguments in this work are based on any scientific evidence, and the book appears more like a primitive theological treatise than the scientific refutation of the theory of evolution."

Adnan Oktar, feeling that his islamic position on defending biological creationism and rejecting the evolution theory could find supporters within the ruling Turkish AKP party, filed a law suit demanding to block several internet pages. And once again, due to their inability to restrict access to single page with a particular content, the Turkish telecom authorities instead blocked the entire WordPress.com domain.

Obviously, it seems to be easier for frustrated governments worldwide (China, Iran or Pakistan are using the same practice) to quickly block an entire web-domain (such as Google or Wordpress or Facebook), i.e. killing the modern equivalents of the messengers, rather than trying to deal with a single unpleasant message or opinion.

But as little power the kings or consuls of the past had to make the bad news unheard, as helpless are the attempts of undemocratic governments to prevent the spreading of unpleasant opinions or comments. Their attempt, however to brutally suppress entire information platforms and social websites should not be tolerated. Despite their univocal demand of social welfare and rights of basic human needs (food, water, housing, health care), those governments are fast acting when it comes to refuse peoples right of freely accessing any information source.

Jeff Jarvis, a writer and blogger focusing on the value of free information exchange, has recently published his view on the value of information content and the value of information distribution. He shows that “...online, content with no links has no value because it has no audience. Content gains value as it gains links.”

So when the Turkish authorities attempt to block access to the entire WordPress site, and suppress any links to it, it is as if they want to kill the messenger already on his way, before he is able to deliver the bad news. In the context of Jeff Jarvis interrelation between content value and distribution value, however, I predict that any attempt to block the distribution makes the value of the content even higher. Two of the most prominent cases were the attempt of the catholic Vatican to ban the movie “Da Vinci Code” and the recent attack of the North Korean government against Sony Pictures to stop them from showing the satirical movie “The Interview”.  In both cases, trying to turn down distribution resulted in a huge increase in publicity for both films.

The communist mutations

In one of Monthy Python's series there was this animated cartoon (by Terry Gillian) about the eminent yellow danger, world wide communist conspiracy that finally causes dental canker and severe tooth loss in people of the free, western countries. To combat this threat, all people in the free western world should therefor use the new toothpaste "Crelm", making the teeth resistant against the communist conspiracy. This was really a fine irony about the hypocrisies of the commercial advertisement business.

Today I was reminded to this crazy Monthy Python sketch, while a colleague of mine from the Cambridge Sanger Center gave a talk about stem cell's involvement in cancer progression. Inhis talk I heard for the first time about a new kind of mutation in the p53 gene, called the communist mutation. What this should be ?  Is this a mutation that causes a disorganization of tissue architecture ?  Or will people who carry the communist p53 mutation develop persistent revolutionary ambitions ? Or maybe cells which acquire this communist mutation turn red, like those transfected with a red-fluorescence protein ?  So I asked the scientist during the next coffee break what characterizes a communist p53 mutation and if there are also capitalist ones.

First he did not understood my point, but than he started laughing and excused for his northern accent. He said that he meant that this mutation is the "commonest" of all the mutations in this gene. But shouldn't this correctly be called "the most common mutation" ?

I had never expected that I will propose the correct English grammar to an Englishman from one of the famous red-brick (hic!) Cambridge / Oxford colleges.