TEDTalk: Medicine for the 99%... He's about 99% Wrong

A TEDTalk was uploaded in December 2011 titled Medicine for the 99 Percent - It's still on the front page of the most recently uploaded TEDTalks as of this publication.  Thomas Pogge is Director of the Global Justice Program and a philosophy professor at Yale.

He argues in this TEDTalk for the development and support of the Health Impact Fund, a global fund available to any innovator of a new drug.  The ostensible goal of the fund is to bring access to high impact drugs to all of the world's population at an affordable cost.  It's not subsidizing drug costs or aiding in the distribution of drugs, just incentivizing innovators to make a global commitment to cheap and accessible drugs.

Let me explain a bit more about how he introduces his argument and how it works, then I'll go into why this guy's presenting a straw-man at best.  He opens by saying medicines are cheap to produce and much cheaper than the alternatives ("hospitalization... operations... emergency rooms... the morgue"), and we need to be thankful to "pharmacologists" who research "these things and develop them" and to the pharmaceutical industry for "supporting these activities."
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IYC2011: My 3 Things List

The goals of IYC2011 are to increase the public appreciation of chemistry in meeting world needs, to encourage interest in chemistry among young people, and to generate enthusiasm for the creative future of chemistry.

This quote from the chemistry2011.org About IYC page gives us chemists a charge: Embrace the concept that 'Science is for Everyone' and help make science in general (and chemistry in particular) more accessible to a wider audience.

This is an awesome charge.  The message of the chemist can sometimes be misinterpreted or abused for a number of reasons.  One one end of the spectrum, chemistry can be derided as witchcraft of magic by those without a general understanding of the basics of chemistry.  On the other hand, chemistry can be proclaimed as an Absolute Truth for political purposes by those without a general understanding of the nuances of chemistry.  In the middle are misinterpretations and misunderstandings of the vagueness and imprecision of our esteemed field.

So as IYC2011 draws to a rapid close, what are the 3 things you would hope the general public would see as the take-home message about chemistry?  Here's my 3 Things list:

1. "Chemical" is not a pejorative.
2. Chemicals are everywhere.  In everything.  At all times.  There is no such thing as "chemical free."
3. For the most part, chemists are not vindictive, manipulative, political, or nefarious.  They're trying to make other people's lives better everyday.  Better Living through Chemistry is not just a slogan.

So what makes your 3 Things list?  Post your list in the comments, or on your own blog.  If you blog about it yourself, let me know and I'll compile a list of everyone's 3 Things lists as updates to this post.

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Neat-o Curved Arrows in Chemdraw

UPDATE: New Catalytic Cycle video below!

James (of Master Organic Chemistry and the Reagents App/Guide fame) and I had some off-line conversations about curved arrows in ChemDraw. I don't particularly like the suite of arrows ChemDraw gives us in the Arrow Tools menu. Yeah, they give you 4 arc angles, but you have to guess if you need the clockwise or counterclockwise arrow... and I just don't like them. They look, i dunno, amateur or less professional or something.  Nothing against people who use the standard arrows, I just don't like them.

So over the years I've become quite adept at using the Edit Curve function in ChemDraw.  It allows me to make my arrows look however I want them to.  I have a couple of arrow shapes I particularly enjoy, and I use them a lot.

James (@jamesashchem) gave me a hat tip on Twitter for showing him the new arrows, at which point Mark Peczuh (@mwpeczuh) requested a public YouTube video.

So I made one.  Here it is.  If you already know how to use the Edit Curve function then cool.  If not, hope it helps

12/12/11:

Thanks to everyone who left kind comments about the curved arrow video.  Stephen Davey (@stephengdavey) asked if the Edit Curve function could make curly q arrows.  I'd never tried to make one like that before, so I took a crack at it.  Turns out, this arrow doesn't work so well with the Edit Curve function (unless some actual graphic designer knows more about making paths than I do.  If so, please let me know!!).  I ended up combining an arc, an arrow, and a circle and the effect looked ok.  Here are my failed attempts, plus the final output (click for larger):

Later, Bal (@gnak_lab) asked about an easy way to draw catalytic cycles.  I think the question was referring to the "circle of arrows" like in this mechanism for the Heck reaction.  I've done catalytic cycles before, but was never really pleased with the result either.  Then I had an idea.  You can add curvature to straight arrows... so I though if I started with a circle as a template, added the arrows, then deleted the circle, that might just work.  So without practicing first, I shot a video on me making the catalytic cycle for the Sonogashira reaction (I just recreated the mechanism from that site).  The video for that is below.  It's not a polished mechanism, I'd go back and tweak a few things, but for a first try, I think it turned out pretty well

(video at 2x speed for brevity)

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The HigherEd Bubble Part 5 What Can We Do about It?

The views expressed this week are those of this author only.  They are not necessarily the views of the author's employer nor any other author at Chemistry-Blog.com.

Is there anything we can do to avoid having the higher education bubble collapse? Well, if the collapse is going to cause us all to shift our paradigms, we could just have the paradigm shift ahead of the bubble burst… Many of the suggestions I’ve read on how to prevent the bubble collapsing are a lot of the consequences I read about the post-bubble world. Many suggest that student should simply make smarter college choices, even if that means not attending a 4-year school or not attending college at all.

Several suggestions centered on increasing online learning opportunities. An explosion of valid, credible online course offerings could completely readjust the pricing model for higher education. Many schools, traditional or for-profit, are already starting to do this. Brigham Young University, Idaho campus, plans to offer 20% of its courses online. Students will be able to choose from 120 online courses.

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The HigherEd Bubble Part 4: What If the Bubble Pops?

The views expressed this week are those of this author only.  They are not necessarily the views of the author's employer nor any other author at Chemistry-Blog.com.

When the dot-com and the housing bubbles burst, the values of those assets (stock shares and homes) plummeted. Some lost their entire investment portfolio – and if that portfolio comprised the entirety of their net worth, they lost everything. The education bubble won’t look like this, in my opinion. The asset you buy is your education, and the value of that asset is what an employer will pay you in wages. Employers are still going to need employees, so the value of the educational asset won’t plummet the way the value of a housing asset did.

What might happen may look like what some are noticing in various law schools around the country. Applications for fall 2011 were down 11.5% from 2010, a ten year low in number of applicants.  If people perceive that value of the education is no longer worth the cost of obtaining that education, people may stop applying. At least they may stop applying for schools outside a reasonable price range.

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The HigherEd Bubble Part 3: Student Loans

The views expressed this week are those of this author only.  They are not necessarily the views of the author's employer nor any other author at Chemistry-Blog.com.

Update: Here's a great Student Loan infographic.

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My personal views on student loans have changed dramatically since I graduated high school in 2001. I’ll tell you my $100,000 story later in today’s installment.

If the assumption is that you need to go to college, and if costs are rising faster than inflation, then you’ll have to get there through any means necessary. If it can't be cash-flowed, it will have to be borrowed. Parents could take out a home equity line on their home, there were several private student loan lenders, or you could borrow from the taxpayers with federal student loans.

Your federal student loans could be subsidized (meaning the taxpayers paid your interest while you were still a full time student) or unsubsidized (meaning you were responsible for your interest payments while you were in school. If you didn’t pay your interest payments – which you didn’t have to – then all that interest would be capitalized and become part of the principle once you graduated).

I’ve already mentioned Obama’s push for America to lead the world in college graduates by 2020. And to help do so, he has called for some $150 billion in increases in federal subsidies for student aid. In the last 10 years or so, the government’s spending on student aid has roughly doubled. Most student loans are federally insured. If the borrower defaults, the taxpayers are on the hook for the balance.

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The HigherEd Bubble Part 2: Is It a Bubble?

The views expressed this week are those of this author only.  They are not necessarily the views of the author's employer nor any other author at Chemistry-Blog.com.

An economic bubble is a market with inflated value. Something is overvalued and conventional wisdom says the value of that good will continue to rise. Remember the dot-com boom and crash around 2000? In the late 90s, all you needed was a start-up internet company and you were guaranteed to make it, right? Tech stocks soared. But then the economy began to turn, Microsoft was declared a monopoly, and people realized the guaranteed rate of return wasn’t so great.

Buyers bought an asset they thought would appreciate and make them rich in the future when they sold that asset. The increased demand caused the price to rise, which proved to people the value would indeed rise. What could go wrong? It’s only an asset irrationally and artificially overvalued.

More recently, the US housing market was a bubble which dramatically burst. For an entire generation, it was assumed you could purchase a house as a sound investment in your future. The house would always be worth more when you were ready to sell it than when you purchased it. While this does have a modicum of truth, the ‘truth’ got stretched to unhealthy levels.

Conventional wisdom said you have to take out a mortgage to purchase the house, and that it’s ok to leverage yourself into a larger home than you can really afford. It’ll appreciate and you’ll make your money back. In fact… since you know the house will increase in value, go ahead and take a cash-out re-fi. In fact… make it a balloon payment, adjustable, interest-only loan! You’ll sell or cash-out re-fi again before the mortgage adjusts! As homes did rise in value, all homes become more expensive. And cheap and available credit only encouraged more consumption. Then the bubble burst, home values plummeted, and the market crashed, as we are all only too painfully aware.

So what does this have to do with higher education?

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The HigherEd Bubble Part 1: The State of Higher Education

Bubble. The dot-com bubble. The housing bubble. The gold bubble. We’ve probably heard various markets called ‘bubbles’ by TV newscasters over the past few years. If you watch 24-hour cable news, you’ve probably heard someone talking about one bubble or another every half hour. Do we really know what that means? And is higher education the next bubble about to burst?

via Flickr user Mysserli

I’ll be tackling that question this week in a series of posts. I by no means consider myself an economics expert. I’m just an un-tenured college professor in my sophomore season looking at the wall to see if there’s any writing…  This may seem like an odd series for a chemistry blog, and you're probably right.  But not only am I a chemist, I'm also a college educator.  And many of you are, too.  Or you went to grad school with someone who's in higher education now.  Or you're still in school.  Or your kids will be going to college soon, or are already there.  So even though it's not a chemistry topic, it's relevant to all of us by one or two degrees of separation.

The views expressed this week are those of this author only.  They are not necessarily the views of the author's employer nor any other author at Chemistry-Blog.com.

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In one article I read while researching this topic, one commenter made a germane point. “I think most people view a university education as a kind of Pascal’s wager. It is better to have at any cost than not have…” I think this pretty well describes the current state of higher education: universal higher education. It’s almost reached a point where it’s just assumed you’ll go to college. The statistics tell us that in the US 68.1% of 2010 high school graduates were enrolled in college in October 2010 (3% of high school graduates enlist in the military).

On its face, encouraging more participation in higher education is a fine goal. Obama has challenged the county to lead the world in college graduates by 2020. How can there be a problem being more educated? But that’s not the whole picture of the current state of higher education. Tuition costs are rising, debt loads are rising, and some argue the return on investment isn’t what’s advertised. And some politicians are actively encouraging more and more students to buy into this system.

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Sigma-Aldrich: "All-U-Can-Eat" styrofoam with every purchase!*

*Substitute for weird grey flaky stuff at no extra charge!

Hi, everyone. Apologies for my absurdly long absence from the blog--I've been extremely busy hammering out an enormous project and writing grant applications to the Canadian government for the past few months.

Today's post is going to be a short one, but it's a problem that's been vexing me for the entire time I've been at grad school. As the person at my lab who is charge of ordering reagents, and partially responsible for the inventory and cataloging of them, I get to see first-hand how much packaging goes into a Sigma order. I think I can speak for everyone when I say that the policies they use for determining "adequate packaging" are absurd to the point of being humourless (figures 1 & 2).

Figures 1 & 2. This is a 25g bottle of 1-decyne that we received today from Sigma, shown for scale with the size of the box and the amount of styrofoam used to ship it. This is far from the worst case of overpackaging I have seen.

Now, I understand several things:

1. These are indeed hazardous chemicals (sometimes)
2. A breakage or leak in transit would be a "non-trivial" (cf. dangerous and embarrassing) problem
3. The company is responsible for making sure that I receive the items intact and in perfect condition
4. There are numerous regulations regarding the transport and handling of these materials, both domestically and across international borders

HOWEVER. When receiving items from Strem or Alfa, the packaging isn't nearly as excessive (that is, they usually ship multiple items individually wrapped in a single box, unlike Sigma, who generally place a single item in a single box for an entire order, unless there are a series of similar items, such as various 500 mg bottles of pybox ligands). Both Alfa and Strem ship from the U.S., so I know that it isn't simply a border issue, and indeed, when things get shipped to us by Sigma from Oakville, Ontario, the reagents are still swaddled in enough layers of plastic pillows, styrofoam, grey fabric, or that weird flaky stuff to survive getting thrown out of an airplane. I've received orders where individual 1g bottles of reagents are packed in their own boxes, resulting in an entire garbage can full of packing junk after ordering only 5-10 g total of actual materials.

It may be a funny coincidence that I work in a "green chemistry" oriented laboratory, but all comedic weepiness aside, this packaging offends me every time I make an order. The amount of styrofoam alone that goes into the garbage here every week could probably fill a hot tub, and that stuff never goes away. I've found an aftermarket use for the grey fabric, and the boxes can be recycled easily, but the rest of it just goes straight to a dump.

So, I pose these questions to fellow chemists and other scientists in the States:

Does Sigma-Aldrich use the same asinine packaging policies when shipping domestically?

Does it enrage you, having to swim through a sea of styrofoam just to find your starting material?

Do you fantasize about sending back the box-o-styrofoam with a note encouraging them to re-use it?

Do you fantasize about collecting a year's worth of Sigma-foam and filling your swimming pool with it?

What is that weird greyish flaky stuff?

Nick

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