George Rebane

Google has announced the launch of its Baseline Study – a “moonshot” research effort to obtain the quantitative description of a healthy human body along with early precursors to the likelihood of eventual dreaded diseases.  They’ll do this by assembling initially hundreds then thousands of volunteers who will donate their bodily data placed into an anonymous data bank.  Researchers from Google Research, interested universities, and even private enterprises will ‘mine’ this data to create information that will be useful for administering personal and aggregate healthcare programs.  (more here)

There’s a disquieting aspect to this report.  Google’s efforts will be monitored by institutional review boards, primarily at Stanford and Duke.  It is they who will determine “who are allowed” to analyze the data.  And one of their prime efforts is to see that the data doesn’t get into the hands of insurance companies, and employers, and people planning to marry each other, and … .  At this point most people are at a loss as how to evaluate this kind of oversight, and the cited WSJ article doesn’t provide much help.  As RR readers know, there is a huge difference between data and information, the latter being made from the former.  (more here)

To me it is clear that the assembled and maintained raw (and anonymous) database should be made very public, available for anyone to download or send away for a DVD that costs a nominal fee (determined by Google) to duplicate and mail.  The information made from the data by various researchers may be confidential and/or proprietary, depending how it was developed and who paid for the effort.  The information sets themselves become assets which may be incorporated into other software and decision support systems that should be able to be marketed like any other kind of information so derived.

But here we read that this may no longer be possible in our society.  The medical industry – governmental and academic – may already have erected a wall around such valuable possibilities, keeping themselves as gatekeepers to determine who gets to do what with Google’s risky and expensive contribution.  To me this is utter bureaucratic lunacy, especially in an important area such as healthcare.  The obviously enlightened policy would be to invite as many researchers into the fray as possible.  Let ten thousand flowers bloom and allow the market to sort out the value of the various resulting information sets (processes, tests, procedures, analytical techniques, key measurables, data processing algorithmics, …).  Each of these could still earn the imprimatur of established bodies of expertise, or suffer from not having such endorsements.  But why start having a bunch of self-serving bureaucrats set themselves up from the gitgo as the ‘allowers’ for how this important data will be mined and analyzed?

A little segue to another application of current progressive sensibilities.  The pharmaceutical Gilead developed the drug Sovaldi for the treatment of Hepatitis C which kills over 80,000 people annually (about ten times the number that die from AIDS).  After testing and treating a lot of Hep C patients, it turned out that not only did Sovaldi treat the disease, it cures possibly has high as 98% of those receiving the medicine.  But our socialists are up in arms because Sovaldi costs about $84K for a complete onetime treatment.  This compares with a previously developed and more poorly performing drug that costs $97K for a treatment, one that then has to be repeated later.  (more here)

For Hep C patients Sovaldi is literally a life-saver since it doesn’t have any expensive side effects, and avoids the requirement for a $580K liver transplant for the more seriously ill.  But our anti-capitalist chorus is singing the corporate greed anthem for any dummy who will listen.  Gilead, like all pharmas, has to recover its research and ‘batting average’ costs which the FDA and other government agencies have made sky high.

So what should be done?  Should the drug be taken off the market because the bureaucrats have decided it’s too expensive for Hep C patients?  Should Gilead take a haircut with a drug that appears to have been an infrequent home run?  Should Obamacare’s ‘Death Panel’ ration Sovaldi to a favored class of patients?  Or should Obamacare start paying the going rate for successfully treating people afflicted with this dreaded disease?

[26jul14 update]  This is actually an addendum to the examples of how progressives view the effectiveness of politically correct control of society.  For many years one of our most crime-ridden cities suffered an increasing murder rate in its poorest neighborhoods.  Leftwing logic sought to achieve two concurrent goals – ratchet back 2nd Amendment rights and reduce the murder rate – by passing draconian laws against possession and concealed carrying of firearms by law abiding citizens.  Not surprisingly, they achieved only one of their goals as the killings grew unabated.  Then suddenly a surprising thing happened, the murder rate started dropping – how come?

Well, as one of our readers pointed out in a previous comment, the good people of Chicago took matters (read ‘guns’) into their own hands.  They started carrying handguns and keeping them at home with which to greet the murderous scumbags when they were accosted.  Word on the street got out – ‘What the f#&k!  Now them mofos got guns and they be shootin’ back.’  The predictable and recordable happened very quickly as citizens availed themselves to their inalienable right to be secure in their persons.

A more fortuitous example of the social utility of concealed carry happened at a psychiatric clinic in Pennsylvania.  The clinic was one of these progressive peace palaces that sought to assure a non-violent environment by posting signs declaring that none but on-duty security officers were to carry guns in the facility.  Well, that is exactly the environment that nut jobs like patient Richard Plotts are happy to exploit.  He arrived with a semi-automatic and about 50 rounds of ammo ready to perpetrate a scene of murder and mayhem, knowing that he’d be the only wolf in a corral of lambs.  He started shooting, killing a case worker as his first victim, then turning his gun on his psychiatrist Dr Lee Silverman.  But his shots went awry, only one of them grazing the temple of the good doctor.

Fortunately for the uncounted employees of that clinic who are still alive today, Dr Silverman ignored the posted policy and was carrying – he drew his own gun and shot Plotts multiple times, thereby ending what would have been the planned murder of tens of people.  (details here)

What continues to astound me is the liberal mentality that develops, abets, and enforces such policies as ‘gun free zones’.  If we believe them to be cynical, then depriving law abiding citizens of the means to protect themselves is evil, pure and simple.  The stats of guns in legal hands preventing crimes are there for all to see.  The rate of concealed carry gun accidents is negligible and further reducible through gun safety and shooting programs decried by progressives.  But were it really cynicism, then it most impacts the poorer neighborhoods where gun crimes keep families and their children in a constant state of fear instead of being able to pursue their career, health, and educational goals.  To repeat, such policies are evil, pure and simple.

But what of those progressives who really believe the pap that is fed to them about ‘gun violence’?  About those folks we can only surmise that the clinical evidence first discovered at University College London (here and here) about the workings of liberal and conservative brains explains away the muddle that such people find themselves in when developing misguided public policies.  Giving them the benefit of the moral highground, these good-hearted and well-intentioned liberals really do have bad luck when they try to think about such things.