Peeking into someone’s private email seems uncool (although I must admit that I have eavesdropped on Bertram Russell's private love letters, all handsomely bound in the university library). Still, I wouldn’t exactly want my private emails to all be on the internet. There was some real skulduggery going on with that Wikileaks Podesta email thing. Then again it is a fascinating look at the real lifestyles of the rich and famous.
I compromised by reading an article that distilled the leaked documents into just those of specific interest to San Diego where I live. There’s a lot of weird stuff in there. Perhaps most strange was the collaboration between Podesta and Blink-182’s Tom Delonge in researching UFOs. To be fair, there are a lot of military flying objects in San Diego skies and the military usually likes its hardware to be unidentifiable. Whatever. Moving on…
If only all of San Diego’s questionable science could be so harmless. What really shocked me was a sentence having nothing to do with Clinton or Podesta or the election or politics. It has to do with the San Diego specialty that I work in — drugs.
Apparently some rich, powerful, and important person was not rich, powerful, or important enough to evade the banality of a terminal illness. His people sent this email trying to implore other elites to help with an impasse in acquiring a certain experimental drug. Obviously the fact that rich people can even grasp at straws like these raises philosophical questions. Ignoring those, take a look at this detail which caught my eye.
…[the patient’s doctors] at Mayo think this drug is his only chance, but Biogen won’t approve for [the patient] because he is too sick and if it fails him, it could skew the outcome of the trials…
Let me get this straight. If I increase the sample size, the outcome will be skewed? Seriously? The only way that increasing the sample size would skew the outcome is if the sample was chosen in a biased way. If Biogen really believed in the efficacy of their product, they should welcome the opportunity to cure another person with it. Perhaps they thought he was too far gone for the drug to even be a plausible remedy but would that mean you have to count him in your trials alongside patients for whom the drug is ab initio more encouraging? Either way something is wrong here. I just thought this was an interestingly candid peek into a drug company not really doing science properly. They may have had good reasons, but if you believe medicines are created in a scientific, evidence based way, this should disturb you.