Enceladus, a moon of Saturn, probably has a saltwater ocean under it’s surface, at least per an analysis of data from the Cassini probe. Take it away NASA and JPL:

For the first time, scientists working on NASA’s Cassini mission have detected sodium salts in ice grains of Saturn’s outermost ring. Detecting salty ice indicates that Saturn’s moon Enceladus, which primarily replenishes the ring with material from discharging jets, could harbor a reservoir of liquid water — perhaps an ocean — beneath its surface.

Such an ocean would vastly increase the chance of life elsewhere in our solar system, beyond our own planet.

… isn’t about the uninsured. Paul Begala put it concisely on Real Time with Bill Maher last week:

(Most relevant part starts at 3:35.)

My transcript:

What we’ve really spent our money on, in this system, is trying to figure out to not cover people who have paid for their premiums.

There was a hearing last week, with no network covered, including mine (CNN). And they had witnesses, people who had paid their health insurance premium for months or years and then committed the sin of getting sick. And then insurance companies kicked them off.

And then they had insurance company executives and they were asked, under oath, ‘Will you stop doing this? Will you stop kicking people off unless they’ve committed fraud?’ Ok. Short of fraud, will you cover the people who pay their premiums?

And they all, under oath, said ‘no.’

That’s why we need a public plan. Because they’ll keep kicking you off.

A recent column of mine responded to a question/rant about naturopathic medicine:

A dear friend of mine is about to enter a prestigious program of naturopathic medicine. There—in exchange for hundreds of thousands of dollars and five years of his life—he will study homeopathy, osteopathy, water therapy, etc. Apparently, after gaining his ND credential, he will not only be allowed to practice medicine in Washington, but also to prescribe drugs. Why does state law allow these practitioners to dole out the pills? Can this possibly be safe?

Incredulous Friend

P.S. Is there a polite way to tell someone that everything he passionately believes in is bunk and that he’s throwing his life away?

I disagreed with the questioner; a lot of alternative medicine is worthwhile, and increasingly demonstrated to be so by the scientific method.

Fortunately, not all of naturopathic medicine is bunk….The less a branch of naturopathic medicine defines itself as being in opposition to “allopathic medicine” (i.e., scientific medicine), the more useful it seems to be for patients. Most massage therapists or acupuncturists will gladly admit the limits of their techniques, and the benefits from receiving treatment from either can be scientifically demonstrated. For things like chronic back pain, arguably these practitioners will be of more use to a patient than a doctor armed with pills and surgery. Training in osteopathy is becoming ever closer to the curriculum one would find in a medical school; Science would trust an osteopath as a primary caregiver as much as an MD.

Only when the naturopathic fields refuse to have their claims tested by experimentation does Science find them to be silly or even fraudulent.

This position–that an ND curriculum based upon science is as valid as one taught at a traditional medical school–is a bit out there, a more generous stance in favor than typical for naturopathic medicine.

The response from the local ND community? Emails like these:

First problem: it is an opinion dressed in an article called ‘Science.’ That is shitty science. It is also crappy journalism to advance opinion as fact. Some simple searches on PubMed would have improved the entire article, or maybe call a few people with credentials like Dan Savage does.

Bigger problem: Bastyr University pays the Stranger for ad space. Obviously, you print what you think is important and everybody is better off because censorship creates fear and drones. However, I think taking money from a University for ad space and bashing them in an opinion-laden article passed as Science is low. It is one thing to take ads for cigarettes and then criticize, but Naturopathy is not cigarettes, it leads to health not health problems.

You paper shapes peoples opinions. Do you really want to suggest that current medical practices are ideal? Do you want to discredit the ND’s who heal while not partaking in the fraud that is our current healthcare system and medical practice? I would like you to publish articles on ‘iatrogenic’ disease. There is a story.

Ugh.

Modern medicine works because of a long legacy of scientific inquiry to human health–from peer-reviewed, double-blind, randomized and controlled trials to simple correlations of observations to disease states. After pulling out the horrors of our employer-based private insurance system, for-profit hospitals and other aggravations, this body of knowledge– continually expanded, pruned and refined–is the basis for the dramatic successes of a deeply flawed health care system.

Take Evidenced-Based Physical Diagnosis, written by a Seattle VA doctor Steven McGee, as an exemplar example. Any caregiver (MD, ND, DO, whatever) with this book, or similar, in their mind is skittering on top of a vast and precise body of knowledge that has taken centuries to accumulate. This collection of carefully curated information, that some of my ND readers are ready to call fraudulent, is beautiful and scientific in the deepest sense of the word. To the extent that alternative caregivers are contributing to it–using differing philosophies and point of view to open whole new areas to observation–they deserve a warm embrace. To the extent they are furiously, blindly and stupidly lashing out at it, they are the enemies of health.

As a pathogen, influenza is the cat’s pajamas; influenza puts the ortho in orthomyxovirus, the segments in its RNA genome and the misery in sneeze droplets everywhere.

Let’s unpack H1N1 and H5N1. The ‘N’ in both stands for neuraminidase, a fancy way for saying “snot eating enzyme.” The virus needs to get to the juicy cells at the back of the throat. Our bodies pour out copious amounts of snot in defense, forming a sticky wall of doom for all manner of pathogens. Stuck on the outside of every flu virus is a sea of this neuraminidase enzyme. The enzyme gobbles up the snot, allowing the virus to reach the cells lining our throat. In comes the ‘H’ or hemagglutinin protein, also located on the outside of the virus. Hemagglutinin binds the salicylate receptors located on the outside of almost all cells (salicylate is a special way of saying aspirin), dragging the virus into the cells. Once inside, you’re infected. Huzzah for our little virus. Go team!

Influenza has been around for a while–co-evolving with many other species beyond man. As a result, different versions of the H and N enzymes have split off over time. The numbers after H and N in a flu virus name indicate the rough genetic heritage of a given flu’s enzymes. H1 and H5 are like Montagues and Capulets–alike in kind if not kin. A given H (or N) is accomplishing the same task, but in slightly different ways.

In comes the home team. If the B-cells in our immune system can make antibodies against the neuraminidase and hemagglutinin, blocking their function, we can stop the virus. Making antibodies takes time. While we’re waiting, CD8 T-cells (cytotoxic T-cells) come in and kill any of our own cells that are infected with virus, a sort of controlled Kamikaze mission in defense of the Home Islands. (Dead cells can’t make more copies of the virus; once you’re infected, brother cell, it’s too late to save you.) With each kill, the CD8 cells release a little bit of activating cytokine and become a bit more bold. This self-death is a large part of the misery of the flu. You are sore because your body is literally killing itself in battle. It takes a week or two for the B-cells to start pumping out antibodies to a new(-ish) virus, at which point the CD8 cells are told to lay off, and take a break.

What we have here is the co-evolution of a host and parasite. My favorite! This sort of host-pathogen interaction is an evolutionary saddle-point, with two possible resolutions:
1. All out battle to the death! Host and pathogen strike fast and hard, in an all-out effort against the other. This is true misery for both, with the eventual true end to this situation the extinction of the pathogen, or host and pathogen together.

2. A detente. The pathogen tries to go out its business in the least offensive way possible, with the host ignoring the pathogen (due to the lack of mayhem perhaps making the pathogen invisible to the host). The eventual end of this evolutionary path is the pathogen becoming commensal, completely harmless. Tons of viruses end up this way, including Kaposi Sarcoma virus. Eventually, a once-pathogen can actually become symbiotic, helping its host out in life, and benefiting as a result. Consider this the environmentalist bug gameplan.

Which path a host and pathogen take is dependent upon a bit of other environmental factors, and also pure random chance. A typical year’s influenza tends towards plan #2, thanks to antigenic drift. Even within a given family of the viral enzymes, thanks to mutation, the surface proteins of the virus are constantly drifting. For example, the 2007-2008 and 2006-2007 flu seaons both had H1N1 influenzas in circulation. In a year’s time, the viral proteins had mutated enough to ensure that people infected with the 2006-7 version of H1N1 could be reinfected with the 2007-8 version. The antibodies we developed in the 2006-7 were good enough to slow down the 2007-08 virus, but not stop it entirely. The CD8 cells still needed to be activated, but not as much as they would for a totally new virus. This is the start of a detente, with the full-scale war held back by the similarity between the 2006-7 virus to the 2007-8 H1N1 virus allowing the older antibodies to work a little and hold the infection in check. So long as a given influenza virus has been around humans for a while, it’ll trend to a detente-style interaction with the human host, holding back the carnage.

What makes this new swine H1N1 virus so concerning is that it’s never been seen by humans before. As a result, none of our existing memory B-cells have an antibody that even wings these H1N1 proteins. We cannot hold back the initial infection at all. The initial defense against the virus is completely reliant upon those destructive CD8 T-cells. This can select for viruses employing strategy #1 (all-out battle) this Spring, Summer and Fall until the next flu season starts; this H1N1 might have a detente with swine, but has no such arrangement with the human immune system.

If the CD8 cells get excited enough by the unusually aggressive virus (a cytokine storm), the lungs of the young and healthy get trashed during these early stages of meeting. People in their twenties and thirties will die in numbers not seen during the more typical detente-style human-flu interaction.

We honestly have no clue how this virus will re-emerge in the Fall. It could be just like a regular-old flu, or it could be a monster that has undergone extensive selection for virulence. The furious-paced efforts to develop and manufacture a vaccine are our safety net.

Dendreon, a Seattle-based biotech startup, just completed a successful phase III trial on an entirely new kind of cancer treatment. The idea: If cancer is difficult to treat because the mutated cells divide and crawl all over the place, and thus cannot be cut out in one chunk, why not send the immune system after ‘em? The immune system loves crawling all over the body in a hunt for the unwelcome. If we could figure out a way of telling the immune system “cancer, bad” all would be well.

It’s a pretty clever idea. Nobody has been able to make it work. Tumor cells seem to know the trick, and have potent means of telling the immune cells “back off, guys. We’re cool.”

Dendreon, focusing on prostate cancer (very common in older men), figured it out. In this most recent trial, they demonstrated efficacy of this new treatment to the satisfaction of the FDA. Since this therapeutic method is so new, the trial and standards were more stringent than for a more typical chemotherapy drug.

Not only is this really good news for prostate cancer patients, it’s also good news for the local economy. The intellectual property generated by the company should be applicable to other forms of cancer. Prepare for billions of dollars to start flowing into the state, as we are now the global leaders in a new way of tackling cancer.

Let’s look at the bios of the CEO and scientific leadership team:
Dr. Mitchell Gold: President and CEO.
“Dr. Gold is a former urologist at the University of Washington and currently serves on the boards of the University of Washington/Fred Hutchinson Cancer Research Center Prostate Cancer Institute and the Washington Biotechnology and Biomedical Association.”

Dr. Urdal: Chief Scientific Officer.
“Dr. Urdal received a B.S. and an M.S. in public health and a Ph.D. in biochemical oncology from the University of Washington.”

Huh. UW. You know, the highly productive public research University that brings in a billion dollars a year (or so) of out-of-state funding and is the largest employer in the city of Seattle. Also, the same University facing a 25-35% budget cut from the State and is planning to lay off 1000 people in a couple weeks, while jacking up tuition and cutting student rolls. After these cuts, Washington State will be 42nd out of 50 in State funding for higher education.

Who needs higher education? Taxes are baaad for the economy. The Republican superminority in State government tells us so. We already have a raging state economy. Raging! Sure, Boeing needed billions of dollars of state-funded life support during the boom years, has a commercial aviation division that can’t build aircraft and is facing cuts in orders to its most profitable aircraft, and a military division still reeling from the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union twenty years ago. It’s not like China is going to figure out how to build aircraft! Never! And Microsoft’s monopoly is firmly entrenched, with no serious competitors on the horizon. Businesses are snapping up Vista and cannot wait for Windows 7. XP is long forgotten. Nobody wants that stuff. Nor is piracy of Microsoft products a serious problem, certainly not in the future markets of Brazil, Russia, India or China.

And our high tech economy has no need for well-trained employees. None at all. Sure, public universities are incredibly efficient at generating superbly trained and prepared staff for companies. But, why would Boing, Microsoft or other tech companies want to hire Washingtonians? If UW is gutted, all it’ll take is more H1B visas. With all the tax dollars we’ve saved, we can make our kids happy in the burger-flipping and car washing jobs that are the future.

Yes, our governor and democratic supermajority in the state legislature are faced with an impossible set of circumstances: a gaping budget hole caused by ill-advised earlier tax cuts and subsidies for failing industries, one of the world’s largest collections of idle wealth residing in the state, and an antiquated and ultra-regressive sales tax based revenue structure. What possible solution could be crafted from this raw material? Mysterious clues have been found in a yet-indecipherable code: aiseray axestay onay ichray. To help them in their quest of balancing the books, the governor has crafted a website where you can cut funding, and pick exactly which seed corn we should feast on now.

Should be a smashing success. Thanks, UW spinoff Dendreon, for showing us what we won’t miss at all.