[tokenadult]

Well of course everyone wishes well to anyone pursuing a promising avenue of research in treating cancer, but what I see here is an online news site with a tiny reporting staff[1] recycling what is plainly a press release with an included video as part of the press release. A press release is how people go about raising crowdfunding, of course, but the role of press releases in the science news cycle[2] is more to hype a speculative idea that may not work than to report on what is known for sure.

The researcher who is profiled (through his own press release) in the article kindly submitted here appears to have written in 2010 a caution about speculative research. "Ultimately, every cross-disciplinary research niche must achieve a level of maturity. We would characterize maturity as having two defining aspects: First, a respectable level of reproducibility is required, and clear operating procedures using methods accepted by the research community. Secondly, enough repeated experiments have been conducted that broader meta-analyses can be conducted to glean additional or unexpected information about the system. These two aspects, combined, suggest ability and need to begin a process of standardization so that comparisons may be made to assess quality of research, and to bolster the strength of peer review. Ultimately, standardization opens up the avenue for practical engineering."[3] That sounds about right. If we can find replicable results with this approach, then we have something to talk about.

[1] http://timesofsandiego.com/staff/

http://timesofsandiego.com/about/

[2] http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=1174

[3] Yonemoto, I. T. and Tippmann, E. M. (2010), The juggernauts of biology. Bioessays, 32: 314–321. doi: 10.1002/bies.200900142

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/bies.200900142/ab...

[dnautics]

Hi! I'm running the crowdfunding and I'm the first person to say that there are a ton of ways that this might not work. It's still early-stage preclinicals (although the results obtained so far are in range of common drugs like taxol). Arguably more risky is the idea of trying to develop a drug without patents.

I guess personally I would consider this to be less of a 'science news cycle' than a 'desperate plea for funding', considering that there are no new results reported in the article.

[tokenadult]

A pleasure to make your acquaintance. I gather from the Hacker News profile you have that you are indeed the same person as the person profiled in the article kindly submitted here. (You would have replied just before I posted a second paragraph to my comment, quoting an earlier paper that I think must be your co-authored paper.) How did the earlier phases of research go?

[dnautics]

Ah, yes, the Juggernauts of Biology. That was a fun article to write. Indeed, the professor we're critiquing (and also praising) was on my committee, and I had a copy of an early draft of the Juggernauts paper literally in my back pocket during my thesis defense [0].

That research is somewhat unrelated to what I'm doing - the more relevant paper is this (happily open access thanks to the NIH) http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3376188/: The molecule demonstrates great results - single digit nanomolar IC50s (somewhere between taxol and paclitaxel-level strength). And also mitigated cardiotoxicity, which was the major concern preventing continuation of preclinical experiments in the parent compound.

Briefly back to the topic of (the typical scientific) press releases, they have always been a strange animal, authored by nonscientist PR agents hired by the institution, bragging about some achievement, without directly asking for funds - in the case of universities possibly indirectly suggesting to alumni that their donations are going for good and in the case of institutions like NASA, reassuring the public that their taxpayer dollars are well-spent.

[0] so this was an option for me. http://xkcd.com/1403/

[arjie]

Please update your profile's link to Project Marilyn. I almost skipped away and forgot about the whole thing when I saw that you weren't accepting donations. However, you are accepting donations, just at a different page.

Also, I donated some BTC and then felt like increasing it but browsers I use are now reporting coinbase in a redirect loop. You're losing money here, man.

[dnautics]

oh wow, THANK you. I had made that page invisible, and was wondering how people were being redirected to a page where they could be put on the mailing list... Gah.