Good for them, but we all know cancer research is one of the biggest money pits out there. Years upon years and billions of dollars spent, and still no cure. If you want to look at the bigger picture, take a look at how much the cancer rate has increase the past 25 yrs, hand in hand with the big food companies, who hold farmers hostage, selling us their processed garbage. Follow the money trail and you’ll eventually get to the pharmaceuticals and our wonderful politicians in Washington. It’s all interconnected and we have the responsibility to as citizens to stop supporting all this garbage.

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GassyMan2010 commenting on University Hospitals receives $35 million gift for cancer research and treatment

While I agree that a lot of money (maybe too much?) gets spent on cancer research (although honestly I can’t complain since it, you know, pays my salary) it seems awfully disingenuous to imply that no progress has been made. Cancer isn’t really one homogenous disease that will have one cure, and it seems kind of misleading/unproductive to lump all neoplastic processes into one category. Like, we don’t just look for one cure-all for viruses.

One of the things I don’t want people to take from the story is the idea that tissue culture is bad. So much of medicine today depends on tissue culture. HIV tests, many basic drugs, all of our vaccines—we would have none of that if it wasn’t for scientists collecting cells from people and growing them. And the need for these cells is going to get greater, not less. Instead of saying we don’t want that to happen, we just need to look at how it can happen in a way that everyone is OK with.

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Henrietta Lacks’ ‘Immortal’ Cells

My job revolves pretty significantly on collecting tissue specimens JUST LIKE THIS from people (except we do have a written consent form, we don’t just do it on the DL). Prior to starting this job I had no idea how prolific this is. We have 20+ years of tissue specimens at our facility (not necessary living like these, although we do have cell lines and do collect specimens for researchers that are creating tumor cell lines) and institutions have tissue banks/archives that go back decades. Pretty interestnig.

Oh and about that consent I mentioned.. our institution has only been obtaining consent for these activities for like 5 years. Its pretty amazing to me how entitled biomedical institutions can feel to parts of patients bodies. This article is a great example of that. As tremendous as the advances are that have been made at the expense of marginalized and unconsented/unconsulted bodies are, I feel fairly confident saying that they aren’t worth it. Its not that hard to take the extra step of informing and obtaining consent.

An ethical commitment to the other should mean that if one is committed to one’s ethics, one should be prepared to forego one’s research project entirely. If you are against the war, you are against research support for the war. Some anthropologists are quick to assuage critics that “we have been decolonizing anthropology for decades” (taking credit for the work of a marginal minority, with virtually no courses on the subject anywhere, and publications primarily dedicated to this concern would not fill up half of a library shelf). Yet, the question is this: taking an expansive view of ethics, if anthropology were truly to be decolonized, would it be anthropology as we know it? Would it even exist as a university discipline? Should it exist?

— Blind Spots: Ethical Research in the Midst of Counterinsurgency

However, on another level, Slaikeu’s apparent selective vision is quite common in social science research with human subjects, where the notion of ethical research is minimalist at best. “Ethics” is frequently reduced to a formality, an exercise designed to get clearance from a university board that wishes to simply limit the legal liability of the university, otherwise its insurance costs would be too high if it shouldered the blame for a researcher’s malpractice. “Ethics” is often a short statement appearing in a section of a research proposal, normally separated from theory and methodology. “Ethics” in most cases reduces to simple acts designed to address questions such as: How long will you store confidential data? Will you store that data in a secure location? How will you obtain informed consent? Will participants in your research be allowed to withdraw from the research? Ethics is this reduced and restricted to short discussions of basic research procedures. It is an obstacle, a hurdle to jump over, so as to dive into the research. It is then outstanding if a researcher becomes preoccupied, more than once, with questions of ethical research practices.

— Blind Spots: Ethical Research in the Midst of Counterinsurgency

The basic model of “human subjects research” that it assumes is one of clinical research, but the intricate and intimate relationships that develop during ethnographic research raise dilemmas that are nearly unthinkable in a clinical encounter – dilemmas like: What if you’re doing research on sexuality and you start sleeping with your informants?

— Protected: Open access materials for teaching research ethics

The researchers then ask how costly it is to insure that women be represented equally… in other words, what is the cost of affirmative action? In particular, how much lower will the performance threshold be for women? How many better-performing men will have to be passed by to hire a woman? To what extent will reverse discrimination arise?
The authors find that introducing affirmative action causes a substantial increase in the number of female competitors, and this supply effect reduces the cost of requiring equal representation of women …Thus, it becomes much less costly to achieve equal representation, and the resulting minimum performance threshold changes very little if at all under affirmative action.

— How Costly is Diversity? [via]