Category Archives: Medicine

Readercon 23 schedule, July 13-15, 2012

Readercon is coming up in a couple of weeks, once more at Burlington Marriott, in Burlington MA, just north of Boston. This year, I’ll be there for Friday as well, although the epic journey from downtown Boston to Burlington after the Express bus has stopped running means that I’ll miss most of the Thursday evening programming. The menu is once more full of meat and potatoes as well as spicy crunchy bits not served elsewhere. The full schedule is here, and my part of it is . . .

Friday July 13

11:00 AM    G    Subversion Through Friendliness Glenn Grant, Victoria Janssen (leader), Toni L.P. Kelner, Alison Sinclair, Ruth Sternglantz

In a 2011 review of Vonda N. McIntyre’s classic Dreamsnake, Ursula K. Le Guin quotes Moe Bowstern’s slogan “Subversion Through Friendliness” and adds, “Subversion through terror, shock, pain is easy—instant gratification, as it were. Subversion through friendliness is paradoxical, slow-acting, and durable. And sneaky.” Is subversion through friendliness a viable strategy for writers who desire to challenge norms? What are its defining characteristics? When do readers love it, and when does it backfire?

6:00 PM    ME    Podcasting for the Speculative Fiction Author; Or, Will the Revolution Be Recorded? Mike Allen, C.S.E. Cooney, Jim Freund, Alexander Jablokov, Alison Sinclair, Gregory Wilson (leader)

Building on last year’s talk at Readercon about promotion for the speculative fiction author and drawing from an upcoming SFWA Bulletin article, Gregory A. Wilson and discussants will focus on the pros and pitfalls of podcasting for fantasy and science fiction authors, looking at some examples of successful podcasts in the field, different types for different purposes, and the basics of getting started with podcasting.

Saturday July 14

7:00 PM    ME    Kurzweil and Chopra, Ghosts in the Same Shell Athena Andreadis (leader), John Edward Lawson, Anil Menon, Luc Reid, Alison Sinclair

Transhumanism (TH) has been a prominent strain in contemporary SF; cyberpunk is in many ways the fiction arm of the movement. Athena Andreadis and discussants will explore core concepts of TH (longevity, uploading, reproductive alternatives, optimization projects from genome to organism), investigate which are strictly in science fiction versus science territory, and examine the larger outcomes of these tropes within the genre as well as in First Life, aka the real world.

Sunday July 15

10:00 AM    G    Making Science Sound Like Science Jeff Hecht, Katherine MacLean, Eric Schaller, Alison Sinclair, Allen Steele, Eric M. Van (leader)

The science fantasy of the 20th century tried to make the magical and impossible sound scientific and plausible. Thanks in part to that legacy and in part to the increasing complexity of scientific discoveries and developments, when we write about 21st-century science in ways that are meant to sound scientific and plausible, it often comes across as magical and impossible. How can we make quantum entanglement feel at least as real as the ansible? What can we learn from science fantasy about imbuing writing with not just truth but truthiness?

12:00 PM    G    Paranormal Plagues John Benson, Richard Bowes, Alaya Dawn Johnson, James D. Macdonald (leader), Alison Sinclair

Some paranormal novels portray vampirism, lycanthropy, and even zombification as infectious diseases that work in ways directly opposite to real-world diseases, such as making the infected person physically stronger and longer-lived. The idea of a disease we can choose to have and choose to share is also compelling. Yet these paranormal diseases are rarely explored in comparison to real-world ones (other than in the innumerable vampires-and-AIDS stories of the 1990s). Is disease just a narrative convenience, or does it relate to real-world medical issues such as the (overhyped) evolution of multiple-drug-resistant bacteria and the persistent incurability of illnesses like HIV, cancer, and influenza that we were supposed to have beaten by now?

1:00 PM    G    Mapping the Parallels Greer Gilman, Walter Hunt (leader), Alison Sinclair, Howard Waldrop, Jo Walton

Stories of parallel worlds are often actually stories of divergent worlds. As such, they contain implicit ideas about how and why divergences can happen: questions of free will and personal choice, theories of history, and speculation about the core constants of the universe. The range of divergences, and the reasons behind them, also serve as at least a partial map of the kinds of possibilities considered worth telling stories about. With this in mind, let’s talk about what has been done, or could be, with the idea of parallel worlds in fiction—both classic and contemporary examples in SF&F, women’s fiction, MG/YA, and more. How do the differences in usage of the trope—such as the scope of divergence (personal vs. societal vs. scientific, human-centric vs. extra-human), the degree to which the causes of divergence are explained, and the ability to travel between divergent worlds—play out across parallel and divergent world stories? How do they express ideas about what is possible?

. . . And I am resolved to know my customs allowance to the nearest cent, this trip! Unlike last.

Anticipation schedule

When: Thu 12:30
Title:  Bio-Ethics
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Judy T. Lazar, Laura Anne Gilman,
Russell Blackford, Tomoko Masuda
Moderator:  Laura Anne Gilman
Description:  Medical experiments, drug companies, cloning, insurance,
bookies and you.

When: Fri 12:30
Title:  Alison Sinclair Signing
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair
Duration:  0:30 hrs:min
Language:  English

When: Fri 20:00
Title:  Mad Social Scientists
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Sparks, Shariann Lewitt
Moderator:  Sparks
Description:  Why do the chemists get all the fun? Why do you have to
be a physicist to destroy the world? The panellists discuss the
possibility of using social science to destroy the universe.

When: Sun 10:00
Title:  Science for SF Writers
All Participants:  Julie E. Czerneda, Alison Sinclair, David Clements,
David D. Levine
Moderator:  David Clements
Description:  Where can you get crash courses on science for science
fiction writers? Is it actually useful?

When: Sun 11:00
Title:  Food for Writers
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Jon Singer, Sharon Lee, Debra
Doyle
Moderator:  Jon Singer
Description:  So you have 90000 words to write, tthree months to do it
in, and the fridge is bare. What foods keep you going?

When: Mon 10:00
Title:  Author Reading
All Participants:  Alison Sinclair, Edward Willett, Heidi Lampietti

Yellow fever, buccaneering doctors, surgical instruments from the Napoleonic War

A comment on the MARHST-L list, on which I quietly lurk, about yellow fever being a possible cause of ships found abandoned or with all crew deceased, sent me in search of confirmation via PubMed. Found a lead, via an article on illness aboard cruise ships, on a chapter in a history of naval medicine that looked promising according to the available snippets on Google Books. Further investigation will need to wait on a foray into a city with a good medical library. Along the way, I discovered an assortment of gems archived in PubMedCentral – the free archive of medical journals.

  • David Geggus considers how yellow fever, generally not a high fatality disease, caused devastating mortality in the British army in occupied Saint Domingue (Yellow Fever in the 1790s).
  • The Buccaneering Doctors (GM Longfield-Jones, 1992) who served aboard the seventeenth century privateers were valued members of the crew who could subsequently enjoy a respectable retirement or practice on land. Contemporary accounts, such as that of the wonderfully named Alexandre Oliver Esquemeling/Oexmelin (alias Henrik Barentzoon Smeeks) and William Dampier describe the hazards, hardships and medical practices of the times.
  • The successors of the buccaneers were physician-explorers such as Joseph Hooker. Botanical science was at the time an essential part of the practice of medicine, and Hooker traveled on expeditions to Antarctica and India, befriended to Charles Darwin, contributed his expertise in botany to Darwin’s developing theories, and presided at the first presentation of Darwin’s and Wallace’s work. (WE Swinton, Physicians as Explorers: Joseph Hooker, 1977, one of a series of articles).
  • JC Goddard unpacks The navy surgeon’s chest, from the time of the Napoleonic War. His conclusion: “the surgical armamentarium has changed remarkably little …”

Open Source Drug Development?

The idea of open source drug development gained some attention with an article in The Economist back last June. My ISP’s server and backup crash, coupled with my access and backup issues, made that original entry vanish into the ether. However PLOS Medicine (the open source, open access medical journal) has an ongoing series on initiatives in drug discovery for neglected diseases (in this instance, tropical and third world diseases); in its December issue, Stephen Maurer, Arti Rai, and Andrej Sali elaborate on their proposal to use an open source model for the development of drugs that are potentially of great benefit but are not of significant commercial interest for pharmaceutical companies operating on the standard commercial model. They propose using bioinformatics methods to identify possible drug targets, given our knowledge of various pathogenic genomes, and then tap academic and pharmaceutical companies for in-pipeline drugs or volunteer scientific expertise to help develop drugs against those targets.

The original discussion over on Slashdot, on which I first commented, veered off into discussion of intellectual property rights, not surprising given the demographics of the community, their area of expertise (not drug development), and their politics. Setting aside matters of intellectual property, the first part of Maurer et al’s proposal, to use bioinformatics methods to identify drug targets, is plausible: publically accessible bioinformatics resources are extensive and accessible by anyone with a computer, a project, and enough knowledge to be getting on with, and bioinformatics is already being heavily used in the identification of drug targets. The discipline, like most computing disciplines, is evolving so swiftly that the ability to decode indifferent documentation and understand the principles is almost more valuable than knowledge of any particular tool, beyond the core tools. But I do wonder whether life sciences has the demographic to make a meaningful go of this approach: bioinformatics is a young discipline, certainly younger that software engineering, and therefore the pool of practitioners is not as extensive; life sciences are less amenable to being practiced as a hobby and early, and I suspect life scientists would tend to be older and more settled into institutions before they gained sufficient knowledge to make an effective contribution, especially at the highly regulated later stages of drug development. In addition, successive long-term contractions in the life sciences job market have meant that many people who might have made a contribution have left the field over the years. Those are, however, merely impressions; in the time honoured phrase of the discipline, more research is required.

There is no getting away from the fact that the non-clinical and clinical testing phases for drugs are lengthy, expensive and highly regulated, although regulators and others take a special interest in neglected diseases and orphan drugs. Money, expertise and coordination will be required at this stage. Maurer et al mention the idea of “virtual pharma”, such as the Drugs for Neglected Diseases Initiative, whose mandate is to push promising drugs on through the pipeline; the work of the DNDi was described in the first issue of PLOS Medicine. Should the drug developers wish to take the drugs all the way through a regulatory application (which will be necessary if this is a new drug never marketed before), then the writing of a regulatory submission could be done in an open source manner, on-line, using open-source collaborative writing software, wiki, blog, database, or possibly even custom-built for the purpose.

In a letter in this month’s (February’s) issue, Richard Stallman of the free software foundation writes in support of the concept, reminding the reader that the open source software movement has 20 years’ experience in resisting commercial and proprietary interests. Moreover, he points out the possible effect of the open access movement in scholarly and biomedical publishing in advancing such work.