LOVE EXIT
Colin James may be reached at colinrichardjames@yahoo.com
Monthly Archives: July 2013
‘The Rose Shipwreck,’ poetry from Christopher Bernard
The Rose Shipwreck
By Christopher Bernard
Such a shipwreck of flowers – a petaled wreck
on an azure sea, of blood-red salmon
stained with peach, with a steady clear
tolling of deep bells under a sheer blue sky
half-deafened in the gale – flowers staining
the sea in disintegrating color, like the heads of children
drowning – and the magnificent ship slowly dissolves
in the whirlwind of its wreckage,
a dream of itself, a littering of its losses
to wind and tide, a fatal cry of roses
brimming its mouth – the thunder heaves a shout,
and the sea rumbles like a vast
train in a tunnel – a flare of lightning
disappears, silent as the shipwreck sinks,
spilling its wreckage across the white floor
of a seasick ballroom, bales of flowers
splitting till the petals cover the wastes,
like the Roman’s feasters, drowning them in roses.
The ghost of a sea swallows the ghost of a ship
under the ghost of a sky: listen, you can hear them,
the ancient sailors singing like the sirens,
calling you to sea – to sea – to sea –
steel gray, enamel blue, and white with foam,
to join the ships that blossom like so many roses
and scatter their petals as they perish, and drown, and sing,
like them, calling the next generation
to sea – to sea – like us – well? will you brave it?
will you build your ships of roses and brave the sea?
or is its storm a terror worse than childhood’s,
not to be escaped, the waves and wind
the white of a cage, the ice and snow cold bars
in a burning sky that seals the world and twists
down on our heads even as we heave
out into the open sea, our white sails out
like butterfly wings, our hopes so many hooks
the wild sea can catch and hold us with,
like love itself, a bark, a cage, a brand?
Shall we build our ships of roses and brave the sea,
that rose of fire, garden where winds take root
and grow into forests?
Though night is coming, shall we aim our bow toward the dark,
though the storm is coming, shall we spot the thunderhead
and steel our sheets till they thrum in the underwind
and the water flails and hisses over the bulkheads
and churns and cries and crashes in our wakes
like an arrow thrusting us ahead, to sea,
to sea, far out, pushing us till we fly
into the storm? Shall we build our ships
of roses? Shall we flower over the whirlwind sea?
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org). “The Rose Shipwreck” was originally published in Caveat Lector.
Poetry from Claire Blotter
CUTTING THROUGH SNOW
Whose son is this? I think I know
the one who lost his mind in snow
Why did we freeze him out again?
Why didn’t we listen in blizzard
after blizzard?
What drug is this? I think
I know: purple hash or heaven
knows, ecstasy- Wandering deeper
into the web he popped pills drank
the chill of lacy flakes of roaring winds
of frozen lakes- Can we heal
his shimmering soul strain the stones
from melting snow? What blazing sun
what glacier gone
can keep the ice from
moving on
WHAT WILL WE GIVE?
In memory of Sandy Hook
What will we give to the Queen?
the dreams of her own sweet
children
What will we give to the King?
our taxes and castles
What will we give to the Dark
Knight? The souls of children
mowed down one by one
in their horrified rows
What will we take from the story?
two hand guns a rifle stashed
in the back seat
What do we bleed as a nation?
our children
our children
our children
once more
once more
our children
our children
our children
Each one stands and falls
for them all
ON DEPARTING JOHN WAYNE AIRPORT
High in the friendly United skies
a video screen explodes on the upright back
of the seat a foot and a half in front of me
As soldiers charge a hill bombs explode
with no clear way to stop them-
The guy across the aisle has
tacked a black cloth over the screen
to spare himself the devastation-
He tells me: If you press long enough
on the faintly marked arm of your chair
the war eventually disappears-
But you have to press hard and
keep holding-
REGRET
We vacillate in the luminous night under white blue stars
like steering wheels like flies over
pudding
It’s a true translation except for the vowels
guttural with unpronounceable sounds we keep
trying to prove
We insist grapple search out corners empty
pockets of coins of tissue unsure who paid us
who loved us
Even the tumultuous river contracts with
autumn’s caution: crackling leaves bodies, stiff
with sudden indescribable sorrow
We vacillate pull paper from the windows then regret
the light
MIRROR
Mirror to yourself,
mild mercy You look
only when called when
your mother calls you back
to her- Gray sheep
apple blossom and
you come as you did
as you must bringing
the bread or broom
helping helping till
all is clean all is wiped
dry till you look up though
she does not smile back
already planning the next
meal purging dirt that rises
at her door Mirror to yourself,
mild mercy Search again
and again but only
her face stares
back
OUTPOSTS IN THE DARK
The moon is a lemon floating in a vat of
tar glowing really impossible to
peel my heart is a car window stuck
in its groove that won’t slide down my
emissary shut in its safe embassy when
I look up stars shoot down like fiery bees or bullets I
think no where is safe where there is no mother I try but
maybe never ever recover from not enough inside the lemon is healing
juice that’s sour the heart pounds from the strength of its fibery mass
tough woven walls never drop down completely like tired stars Are
they torches in night these tiny guide lights that keep falling or anonymous
weapons from an omnipotent sky I can’t know for sure but sometimes
sense the shining the steady beats of my heart as stepping stones
to jump from then precariously balance one two three before I’m swept
back into treacherous motherless
seas.
From Claire Blotter:
My poetry has been recently published in Barnwood, Gargoyle Magazine, the California Quarterly, Canary, the We’Moon 2012 & 2013 Datebooks and the anthology, KINDEGARDE: AVANT-GARDE POETRY FOR CHILDREN, among other anthologies and journals. As a performance poet who competed in the early National Poetry Slams in Chicago and Boston, I’ve concentrated on spoken word performance and collaborative theatrical work in the past. For the last 2 years I’ve focused on revising and refining my poetry for the page. My third chapbook, MOMENT IN THE MOMENT HOUSE, was published this year by Finishing Line Press.
Claire may be reached at savesongbirds@yahoo.com and lives in Sausalito.
Christopher Bernard reviews Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete
Josette Day as “Belle” and Jean Marais as “the Beast” in Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bête.
GIVE ME BACK MY BEAST!
La Belle et la Bête
An Opera by Philip Glass
(based on the film by Jean Cocteau)
The Philip Glass Ensemble, with vocal soloists
Conducted by Michael Riesman
To celebrate Philip Glass’s 75th birthday, the Philip Glass Ensemble came to San Francisco to perform the magisterial minimalist’s opera, La Belle et la Bête (“Beauty and the Beast,” based on Gabrielle-Suzanne de Villeneuve’s celebrated fairy tale).
What makes this work unique is not that Glass based his work on a film; he had already done so with the first of a trilogy of works based on work by the unforgivably talented, unapologetically gay, and compulsive appropriator of surrealist gestes, Jean Cocteau: the chamber opera Orphée.
Here he went a good deal further. He stripped out the entire original soundtrack (which took some gall, as it’s a very fine one, composed by Georges Auric, an original member of the bad boys of French modern music, “Les Six”) and replaced it with an original score, with singing parts for the original spoken ones, the entirety performed live as the film is screened overhead.
And he chose a nearly perfect source, as Cocteau’s 1946 film – with actors Jean Marais, Josette Day, and Raoul Marco, and handsome camera work by Henri Alaken – considered by many critics to be Cocteau’s masterpiece, is a work itself of near-operatic fantasy.
What might have turned out to be one more lamentable exercise in postmodern kitsch is a near-masterpiece, a posthumous collaboration that would probably have tickled the ever-experimenting Cocteau.
The story is almost too well known to recount, yet is told with a few fresh twists: Belle, a Cinderella-like figure, is scorned and exploited by her two wolfish sisters and ne’er-do-well brother, though doted on by a father oblivious to his daughter’s misery – Belle is an unwittingly willing victim, in which those who love her, and even she herself (through an ideology of self-denial that reinforces the victim’s weakness and the power of the dominant – sound familiar?), comply in her servitude. She has a lover, a companion of her irresponsible brother, whom she refuses to marry because she feels bound to take care of her oblivious father, who allows Belle to be bullied and exploited by her two older sisters, who intend to get married and out of the household as soon as they find victims – er, husbands.
The father goes off to the city after promising Belle he will bring her back the only thing she asks for: a rose. After a business venture goes badly awry, he rides back home through a forest at night, where he discovers a magic castle, magically alive, which he enters and is served a feast by magical servants. Later he visits the castle’s garden, where a rosebush blossoms. Remembering his promise, the old man plucks the loveliest rose for his daughter. Upon which the prince of the castle, a hideously deformed monster (in the film, he looks like a giant cat, with sensitive ears that telegraph his feelings, perking him up when he says a prey for his next meal in one of the film’s deftly humorous touches), appears and tells the old man he has committed the one crime that is unforgivable in that castle, and now must die. The old man pleads for his life, and the monster relents, telling him he can go home to give the rose to his daughter, but only if he promises to return.
Once the old man is home again and tells his children of his plight, Belle refuses to let him go back, and goes in his stead, to face death as punishment for her father’s crime. But the monster, upon seeing her, falls instantly in love and instead of killing her, imprisons her in his castle and begins to woo her, even though he is aware that his hideous ugliness makes it impossible for anyone to genuinely love him.
Some men feel a curious self-contempt when they become aware of the strong physical feelings they have for women they admire and love; this story works well as an allegory for this, in an age that likes to pretend it is beyond such callowness.
The film, while never losing its fairy-tale quality, never falls into camp or archness, satire or over-sweetness, even at the dangerous happy-ever-after ending: it has a darkness, a fadedness and grittiness, that gives it, for all its fantasticality, a hardness, an actuality – like any poem worth its salt. This helps make the film’s final transcendence peculiarly credible and moving. Never has wishful thinking had a kinder, more eloquent advocate. (Though the final transformation of the Beast into a prince has disappointed some; is fabled to have made even Marlene Dietrich cry out, “Give me back my Beast!”)
Cocteau, who had made only one film before this one, in 1930, the surrealist classic Blood of a Poet, had refined his cinematic technique so that he knew just how much magic he needed to create in his world: disembodied arms holding candelabra in darkened hallways, disembodied hands pouring wine into the old father’s goblet, the masklike heads carved into the fireplace mantel shifting their eyes in curious glances at the innocent human partaking of his magic fare without so much as a question, Belle moving down a long corridor wafted by curtains blowing from floor-length windows, on invisible wings, without stirring her dress or seeming to move a shoe.
Joining Cocteau’s magie, douceur et poésie is Philip Glass’s. The signature style of the master musical stylist of our time is much in evidence. The essentials are all there: a steady rain of eighth-note ostinati, with the occasional long arpeggio, broken unpredictably by stately static chords; a steady house-music like pace that rarely varies over the 90 minutes of the work; continuous harmonic variation; and a keen sense of orchestration, which his ensemble, which includes several keyboards that can produce a theoretically infinite number of different sounds, makes possible.
Glass does not always avoid the danger of monotony, though what is remarkable is that he fails so rarely. He does this by constantly varying the melodic shape of the rhythmic ostinati and rarely allowing the music to sink into a groove of exact repetition except where such figures work to create a feeling of oppression or suspense. The singing lines are not arias but quickly paced, almost conversational lyrical recitatives, which cut through the ostinati like shards of roughness through what is sometimes an excessive smoothness of musical texture.
One peculiarity (noted by Romancha Pralapa) is that the original film is 94 minutes long, but the opera is only 90 minutes, as Glass, when composing the score, seems to have used a version of the film projected at too fast a speed. The result is that the performers in the film act and speak at just slightly too brisk a tempo, which has the effect of making the film seem a little like old-fashioned screenings of silent films before modern projectors were able to project them at the originally intended speeds.
The Ensemble has this music in their blood and clearly love the score. The admirable singers were Gregory Purnhagen, Hai-Ting Chinn, Marie Mascari, and Peter Stewart.
The opera was performed, as part of San Francisco Performances, at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts’ Lam Research Theater.
Christopher Bernard is a poet, novelist and critic living in San Francisco. His novel A Spy in the Ruins was published by Regent Press (http://www.regentpress.net/spyintheruins). He is also a co-editor of the literary and arts webzine Caveat Lector (www.caveat-lector.org).
Book Periscope: What’s New in Indie and Small Press Books, from Elizabeth Hughes
Christopher Bernard’s A Spy in the Ruins
“A Spy In The Ruins” by Christopher Bernard, is a very complex book. It is not a book that can be read quickly and just scanned through. The book is written well and you will want to sit down, put your feet up and drink a cup of tea or a cup of coffee and read it all the way through. I loved this book and highly recommend it. This book is definitely my cup of tea. Thank you Mr. Bernard for a wonderfully complex and great read!!
A Spy in the Ruins is available from Berkeley’s Regent Press and may be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/A-Spy-Ruins-Christopher-Bernard/dp/1587901110/
J.K. Bowden’s Bioweapon
‘Bioweapon’ by J.K. Bowden is a brilliant work of science fiction. I loved the book. ‘Bioweapon captured my interest from the start. It kind of makes you wonder how close human kind is to having microchips implanted in the brain and being controlled. The suspense and story flows from page to page, chapter to chapter. The writer captures and holds the interest of the reader to such an extent you don’t want to put the book down. I highly recommend this book. It is definitely’my cup of tea’. Thank you Mr. Bowden for an excellent work of science fiction. I am looking forward to reading the next installment of the ‘Bioweapon’ series.
Jeremy Bowden’s Bioweapon may be purchased here: http://www.amazon.com/Bioweapon-New-Beginnings-J-K-Bowden/dp/1477159800/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1371147495&sr=8-1&keywords=bioweapon
Cristina Deptula on San Francisco State University’s Personalized Medicine Conference 6.0
Personalized Medicine 6.0: Emerging Frontiers in Diagnostics and Treatment
Tailoring treatments for different patients based on their genetics represents an emerging technology that could streamline medicine and reduce costs while maintaining quality of care. San Francisco State University’s Department of Biological Sciences’ sixth annual personalized medicine conference, organized by department head Dr. Michael Goldman, and held at the South San Francisco Conference Center on Thursday, May 30th, explored various successes and ramifications of this approach to biomedical science.
Dr. Kimberly Popovitz, CEO of Genomic Health, served as a keynote speaker. Her talk emphasized potential cost savings and health benefits for many cancer patients who will now be able to confirm that their diseases are slow-growing and less dangerous, and thus skip painful, invasive treatments. Some people will also discover sooner that they require urgent interventions, and in these cases, personalized medicine could save their lives.
‘Cancer’s becoming a chronic disease in this country,’ Popovitz said. While this is good for patients whose lives can be prolonged, the lengthy treatments are expensive. Also, currently, many people are over-treated for prostate, colon and some forms of breast cancer, receiving chemotherapy and radiation even when they are likely to experience normal lives without these measures. Yet, no physician or patient wishes to skip out on a treatment that could prove life-saving, even in rare cases, especially when they could be accused of letting someone die for financial reasons.
The more detailed understanding of a person’s cancer subtype and individual genetic makeup made possible through genomic sequencing and analysis can increase the likelihood that he or she will receive appropriate and timely care. Popovitz and others hope this will make a difference in the lives of the 1.6 million people diagnosed with cancer every year in the USA.
Currently researchers seek to understand which genes are associated with better or worse health outcomes, so they can provide this information to oncologists and patients to help them make better informed treatment decisions. Scientists are also studying RNA, a form of DNA that functions within cells to build proteins, and identifying genes whose action contributes to disease processes and which could be targets for new drug therapies.
The human genome provides so much information that, according to the conference speakers, physicians, including oncologists, might get confused and need guidance about how to interpret the data.
For this technology to move forward, we will need more research and more detailed predictive models. Popovitz and others emphasized that the complexity of the science is a major factor holding back progress on cancer cures. ‘People wonder why we spend so much time and money on this, and we still don’t have a cure yet. Well, we’re working on it, and it takes awhile because it’s just that hard!’
Dr. Popovitz ended her segment on a note of cautious optimism. Although it has taken a long time for the field to move forward, both technically and in the eyes of decision-makers who choose whether to approve studies and pay for treatments, Genomic Health’s technologies are now in use in countries around the world.
Next, Dr. Jorge A. Leon, of Leomics Associates, discussed the future of the field of molecular diagnostics, as related to other conditions as well as cancer.
Dr. Leon pointed out that it’s cheaper and easier in the long run to sequence a patient’s entire genome than to test for the presence of particular alleles, or forms of certain genes. Whole genome sequencing has become much more accurate, faster, cheaper, and simpler.
Cancerous cells within a patient’s tumors can mutate and develop resistance over time to chemotherapy drugs. Molecular diagnostics could also allow oncologists to identify which drugs would be effective in each patient before starting treatment.
‘It’s no longer impossible to think about sequencing the whole genome of an individual cancer,’ Dr. Leon asserted.
Data storage and information processing power requirements could be addressed through cloud computing. And, also by harnessing some of the region’s information technology expertise, drawing upon the software knowledge of Silicon Valley.
Dr. Leon, and several other presenters, discussed other factors which influence our DNA. These include epigenetic changes in gene regulation and expression due to our environment, substances in the environment which can affect DNA, spontaneous somatic mutations, and the genetic makeup of the bacterial species living symbiotically within our bodies. Personalized medicine hopes to account for all of these factors eventually within its models.
Applied Medical Genomics: Breakthroughs and Next Steps
A panel presentation followed these talks. Dr. Christos Petropoulos of Monogram Biosciences spoke first, outlining his firm’s research into identifying strains of HIV and hepatitis virus resistant to common treatments.
Sequencing the viral genomes seems a faster and cheaper strategy than the current technology of cell-based infectivity assays, where researchers observe directly whether a patient’s viral strains infect cells. However, genomic sequencing will take more knowledge and proficiency with tools than we now have. His company’s using emulsion PCR, a faster way to replicate DNA for observation, and sequencing by synthesis, a more effective way to identify variant viral strains.
However, many questions remain, including how to determine a threshold for how much resistant virus within a patient’s body should indicate a change in treatment.
Dr. Jonas Korlach of Pacific Biosciences talked next, again pointing to the need to consider factors beyond just DNA in these types of analyses. Integrating genetic, epigenetic (environmentally triggered changes in gene expression), protein, metabolite, and clinical databases would prove an enormous, but potentially greatly useful, project.
Someday in the future, this type of data might be accessible through iPhone applications, making our phones critical diagnostic tools. But today, researchers seek ways to improve the accuracy of laboratory results. Dr. Korlach pointed to an example of the limitations of our technology from UC Davis researcher Dr. Paul Hagerman, who works on fragile X syndrome. This condition leads to severe and permanent mental and physical issues for children, and results from inheriting excessive repeats of a certain DNA sequence, CGG.
To determine a person’s risk of passing on Fragile X syndrome to their children, researchers count the numbers of CGG repeats in the relevant DNA region. However, some people’s set of CGG repeats is interspersed with AGG codons (groups of three bases signifying a particular amino acid). These AGG codons significantly reduce the risk of transmitting the condition, yet often go undetected when geneticists count the number of repeats.
Dr. Korlach pointed out that there are 10,000 regions of possible nucleotide sequence repeats in the human genome. Many of these could well be medically important, including those within introns (regions of DNA on the genome not coding for particular proteins).
That, in addition to possible genomic effects from the DNA from the three pounds of bacteria co-existing inside our bodies, and from the bacteria we encounter every day, highlights the need for further data collection and research.
‘Personalized medicine needs comprehensive biology,’ said Dr. Korlach, advocating for epidemiological tools such as population statistics to be applied to this intensive genomics research project.
Next, Dr. Frank Ong, of Illumina Inc. talked about his company’s form of noninvasive prenatal testing for trisomies, extra chromosomes leading to conditions such as Down’s syndrome. Some fetal DNA makes its way into a mother’s blood during pregnancy, from apoptosis (programmed and natural cell death) within the placenta. This can be examined as a preliminary way to rule out certain conditions or refer mothers for further tests.
He, also, closed with a call for computer science, engineering, and business professionals to consider lending their skills to this emerging field.
‘Biology does not have all the answers,’ he said.
Dr. Ong and others then mentioned a project to sequence the DNA of foodborne pathogens, such as salmonella, to determine how and why some strains are more virulent and figure out how to avoid them.
Also, while molecular genomics remains quite expensive, some technologies developed through this technology can translate into forms affordable for developing countries. Bacterial DNA observation is one area where this has been possible.
What Personalized Medicine Can Mean for Patients: Therapy In Action
After lunch, Stanford’s Dr. Atul Butte, physician, scientist and entrepreneur, spoke. He discussed the case study of Steve Quade, a forty year old healthy white man with a family history of aortic aneurysm and sudden, unexpected death, as an example of the power of personalized medicine.
Mr. Quade discovered that he did indeed have a genetic predisposition to coronary artery disease, and his doctor suggested he take statins. However, he did not.
Here Dr. Butte joked that there was no genetic method yet to find the best way to encourage patient compliance with treatment.
Dr. Butte described the process of identifying potential health risks from a patient’s genome, which was surprising. High school students scanned and searched through academic literature to curate the data, and identify alleles linked to specific diseases. Placing this data into the common medical statistics format of a likelihood chart made it easier for physicians to comprehend and refer to when discussing these matters with patients.
He also reminded conference attendees not to ignore the effects of environmental toxins on the body and human genetics. As he mentioned, the set of all the toxins we’re exposed to over our lifetime could be considered the human ‘toxome,’ perhaps as influential as the genome.
A current research project known as the National Health and Nutrition Examination Study (NHANES) surveys environmental factors for disease. Scientists are also using the approaches of molecular genetics to look at the effects of the environment on human health.
‘Do you want to change the genome?’ Dr. Butte asked. ‘Change behavior and the environment.’
Near the end of his talk, he mentioned that with our decentralized heath care system in the USA, researchers often do not know how many people have a particular disease, unless it is contagious. Except for Kaiser, our hospital systems do not coordinate record-keeping, and this has hampered population genetics and epidemiological research.
Next, Dr. Mark Sliwkowski, distinguished staff scientist with Genentech’s department of research oncology, explained the molecular mechanisms behind new breast cancer drugs, such as herceptin.
Nearly three million women within the United States have been treated for breast cancer, and nearly forty thousand die per year. Younger women are more likely to have a particular form of cancer known as HER positive, where a gene known as HER codes for a protein that works together with another substance to signal for the continued growth of tumors.
New-ish drug Herceptin prevents tumor growth by binding to the substances within the cell, known as ligands, to stop them from coming together to produce their signal. Although Herceptin has proved fairly successful in slowing cancer, 5,000 women still die per year from HER positive breast cancer.
Researchers now have developed another drug for breast cancer, Kadcyla, which inhibits microtubule formation within cells. Cytotoxic, Kadcyla kills tumor cells and seems more potent than Herceptin, although it has only undergone a small clinical trial. It also leads to more months without progression of the disease in patients, and creates fewer side effects than Herceptin.
Legal and Financial Ramifications of Personalized Genomics: Industry Perspectives
Next up was a panel on legal issues involved with personalized medicine. Dr. Hank Greely, of Stanford’s Center for Law and the Biosciences, spoke first.
Dr. Greely advocated for policies encouraging and facilitating corporate investment in research and development, including stronger patent protections.
‘In order to meet today’s stringent regulatory requirements concerning evidence for the safety and efficacy of these therapies’, he said, ‘we must spend a lot of money developing them.’ And the biotech companies seek return on their research investments.
Dr. Greely then went on to highlight the unexpected drama of coding, where new therapies receive classifications determining the level of government health and safety regulation they will be subject to, and whether public or private insurers will cover them. Companies must pay to test their therapies and prepare for them to undergo the complex coding process.
Next, Dr. Michael Shuster, partner at Fenwick and Est LLP, discussed patent law in relation to personalized medicine. He brought up some basic categories of things which cannot be patented under American law: the laws of nature (i.e. no one can own gravity), products of nature (animals, plants, fungi) and abstract ideas and mental processes.
Dr. Shuster brought up a few examples from case law relevant to the science at hand. Isolated DNA molecules were once ruled unpatentable as a product of nature, and methods of screening cancer therapeutics were seen as a law of nature. Techniques for comparing and analyzing DNA sequences can also be seen as an abstract idea, although the courts reversed themselves on that decision.
Finally, he reminded us that genes were not currently under discussion for potential patenting, just molecules.
Finally, Paul Sheives, JD, of the Biotechnology Industry Organization, spoke enthusiastically about what was needed to advance the field.
He pointed out, once more, the need for improved accuracy and validity of the genomic screening procedures, and warned that this would not be easy to accomplish.
“Have you read War and Peace? How about the whole Bible? Or the Lord of the Rings?” he asked. “Imagine reading each of these a thousand times. That’s how many characters we’re going to have to analyze if we look at all of our DNA base pairs.”
Also, he sees a need for scientists to educate doctors and patients about the meaning of the genomic findings. People need to understand the concept of absolute and relative risks, so they will not panic with slight risk increases or avoid needed tests and health measures because of a small decrease.
Communication will serve as a major part of this education. “Personalized Medicine?” Sheives said, echoing the theme of the conference. “That’s usually thought of as talking to people, seeing them as human. Genomics is only part of that.”
International Genomics and Biotechnology Investment
Next, a final panel celebrated regional investment in biotechnology, within the Skane region of southern Sweden which a small delegation at the conference hailed from, and locally within South San Francisco.
Moderator Andrew Copestake, CEO of Swedish Biomimetics 3000, illustrated the cost savings potential of personalized medicine through a French study through their National Cancer Institute. By not over-treating slow-growing, non-lethal cancers, the nation recently saved $69 million euros.
However, this type of success will require an unprecedented level of cooperation among the chain of healthcare institutions. Researchers within the United States hope to facilitate a similar type of collaboration.
Later, Stefan Johansson, CEO of Sweden’s Invest in Skane association, encouraged those present to visit and work within the country’s Oresund region, near Denmark. This former shipyard, now a working and living area, has now become a hub for biotech investment. The locale offers a proton and electron accelerator, a ‘science village’ full of biomedical companies, vodka, food, arts and media.
Research in progress at Sweden’s firms includes work on drug delivery, healthier aging, using the Internet to enhance patients’ access to health information, and enhancing the immune system. They seek to translate systems biology into clinical care, and enjoy beaches, sun, and golf, as the region’s supposedly unusually warm for Scandinavia.
Sweden also offers affordable hydropower, which benefits biotech firms, and England and other European countries offer tax credits for research and development.
Next, Michael Lappen, economic development coordinator for the City of South San Francisco, reminded us that they were the epicenter for product development, education, and surfing (down the Peninsula). South San Francisco is actively developing infrastructure and science and math education to encourage corporate and startup biotech investment.
Lappen said that companies will go wherever there are skilled workers with backgrounds in relevant particular fields, so we maintain our economic edge by supporting education. He said that outside of Sweden and the San Francisco Bay Area, Munich, Boston, San Diego, Singapore and parts of Shanghai were developing into biotechnology centers.
Genomics, Patient Care and Cancer: Concluding Keynote
Lastly, Dr. Carl Borrebaeck of Lund University’s CREATE Health program discussed new methods for personalized, and earlier, detection of pancreatic cancer in a final keynote.
One hundred people in the USA die per day of pancreatic cancer, and only three to four percent of people diagnosed with it live more than five years after diagnosis. Diabetics, those with a family history of pancreatic cancer, and others are at greater risk, but many people come down with the cancer for no apparent reason.
Dr. Borrebaeck pointed to the emerging development of a blood-based test for pancreatic adenocarcinoma. Through improved planar well microarrays for analyzing multiple blood samples, scientists in Lund, Sweden are closer to being able to distinguish whether a patient has cancer or just pancreatitis. Early treatment can go a long way to save lives for those who do have cancer.
Currently scientists investigating pancreatic cancer receive an overwhelming amount of information from the tests we have, and seek to identify peptide motifs, the signs of the presence of a few major protein groups.
He also discussed protein profiling for breast cancer. Researchers examined tumors from 52 patients, identifying 49 proteins associated with certain grades of breast tumors. These techniques enabled higher-resolution classifications.
Researchers hope to continue by uncovering the biology behind cancer’s progression from one grade to another.
‘This assay technology is not a replacement for a pathologist, it’s a tool for them.” Borrebaeck said.
Sweden possesses a repository of genetic cancer data from their relatively homogeneous population, and his group takes part in a worldwide collaboration with researchers in Tianjin, China, Oxford, Madrid, and elsewhere. They’ve also made inroads and connected with the Pancreatic Cancer Action Network, and are trying to stay on top of resistance by developing several antibodies for the same antigen.
Overall, the conference reflected the promise, and challenges, of new technology, and left us in an upbeat mood. Near the end, over wine, cheese, and various sweet and savory snacks, undergraduate students presented quite professional research work on a host of posters. And, gauging from the conversations among the departing attendees, this sixth annual event will inspire continuing work in a variety of science and technology fields.
For more information, please contact San Francisco State University’s Dr. Michael Goldman, dnamed@sfsu.edu
Poetry from Dave Douglas
Coal Cars Going Over Trestle
Railway
On the railway inside
With a heavy payload,
I continue as this thought
And ignore the switch tracks
The engineer is my passenger
And I pull a freight of gold
With electronic waste
Never reaching the climax
I push the eighth notch
Highball to the next yard
But the cargo betrays you
I am full of double-stacks
Sparks take wing
The stress of steam
The strain of steel
The engine screams!
~
The derailment was close
Nothing was lost, except
The lives at the crossbuck
And the tears you wept
~
You decouple the old cars
And spot my new direction
I pick up broken passengers
Stopping at the next station
Over white-diamond mountains
Through obsidian-filled tunnels
Sunflower fields that glisten
And muscle-flexed trestles
Content in the journey of today
Not the destination of tomorrow
With treasures beyond the railway
Leading others as I follow …
Eighth notch: The final notch in the throttle; the most powerful position
Highball: A signal to operate a train at full speed.
Double-stack: Stacking one container on top of another
Crossbuck: The X shaped sign where the tracks cross a road
[“I” is the personification of a thought; and “you”
is the mind, or the human containing the mind.]
Dave Douglas is a writer from Pleasanton, California and an avid cyclist. He may be reached at carpevelo@gmail.com