January 29, 2012
Harold Varmus and the Provocative Questions Project
Robert Langreth at Bloomberg News:
Why do obese people get cancer more often? How can some turtles live more than a century without ever developing tumors while mice can develop them in a year? Could treatments that hold tumor cells in check without destroying them keep people alive longer?
Answering questions like these may lead to the next big cancer breakthroughs, said Harold Varmus, director of the U.S. National Cancer Institute, in an interview. The Nobel Prize winner said the NCI would spend at least $15 million this year in a new initiative to answer 24 “provocative questions” that researchers have often neglected.
“In an effort to stop people from obsessing over the fact that the budget is not growing, I’ve been trying to engage them in workshops to define the great unanswered questions in cancer research,” Varmus, 72, said in an interview at Bloomberg’s headquarters in New York. “We’re trying to drive science in a novel way.”
Spending for the Bethesda, Maryland-based institute Varmus has led since July 2010 will decline to $5.07 billion in the 2012 fiscal year from $5.1 billion in 2010. The provocative question project will try to create a middle ground between top- down big science projects, and relying on scientists to come up with their own ideas, according to a commentary published in Nature magazine this week by Varmus and Ed Harlow, a cancer researcher at Harvard Medical School in Boston and senior adviser to Varmus.
More here. [Thanks to Stefan Saal.]
Posted by S. Abbas Raza at 02:28 PM | Permalink
Comments
The reason the U.S. gets nowhere in the war on cancer is because incompetents like Varmus are still on the gravy train payroll instead of being fired as he and his incompetent, prejudiced cronies all must be, but are not.
Unfortunately we have idiots in Congress and a President who are so stupid they are continually fooled by the likes of Varmus and his cronies who have failed now so dismally for so many decades.
Just like Obama who was awarded a Nobel Peace prize he didn't deserve while he directed several wars, Varmus didn't deserve a Nobel prize in medicine shared with his supervisor at UC SanFrancisco either, and all this shows that the bar for Nobel prizes has been lowered in the latter half of the twentieth century.
Ask Varmus how many of Otto Warburg's 500 scientific papers he has read and understood and how many of Dr. Warburg's seminal experiments he has repeated personally in a laboratory?
After the squandering of multi billions of dollars on cancer so called "research", this incompetent can't even tell you what cancer is, let alone how to cure and prevent it in the human body, but Otto Warburg, the genius in Germany proved the prime cause of cancer decades ago; oxygen deficiency to living cells over a long period of time, or respiratory impairment or the wrong energy supply. About one person dies every minute either from cancer, treatment or both, mostly from treatment but falsely reported as from cancer.
Many years ago I sent this jerk a very angry letter after my wife was nearly killed from cancer treatment, not from cancer; he never answered it but I can prove he received it not once but twice. Varmus is like the pilot of a bomber who kills innocent children and civilian victims but does not look down at the destruction he wrought. He and his cronies are the problem, not part of the answer to the cancer problem.
When I graduated from high school at Pasadena in about 56 years ago in 1956, the principal Gladyss Edwards, Ed.D. said among other things, "You have learned to win without bragging and lose without crying. You have learned to be part of the answer not part of the problem..." So long as the idiots running our government continue to keep incompetent cowards like this on the payroll, many more innocent victims will die or be imjured by the incompetent quack cancer treatments fostered and promoted by Varmus and his idiot henchmen.
Varmus should not be rewarded any longer, but prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for scientific misconduct, fraud, medical quackery and crimes against humanity.
Winfield J. Abbe
A.B., Physics, UC Berkeley, 1961
M.S., Physics, California State University at Los Angeles, 1962
Ph.D., Physics, UC Riverside, 1966.
Awards for outstanding achievement in mathematics, physics and chemistry.
Shame, shame, shame on our incompetent government for failing to fire Varmus long ago. Varmus does not possess a conscience.
Posted by: WJAbbe | Jan 29, 2012 3:07:47 PM
References:
"An Unsuccessful Effort to Deny use of State of Georgia Facilities for fund raising by the American Cancer Society" by Winfield J. Abbe, Ph.D., May, 2000.
"The Cancer Industry" by Ralph W. Moss, Ph.D., Equinox Press, NY, 1996 and earlier versions 1989 and 1980. Dr. Moss was fired from Memorial Sloan Cancer Center in New York for refusing to lie to the public about research on Laetrile.
"The Hidden Story of Cancer" by Brian Peskin, E.E., Pinnacle Press, NY, 2006-2010.
"The Truth About Hydrazine Sulfate-Dr. Gold Speaks" by Joseph Gold, M.D., www.hydrazinesulfate.org.
www.preventcancer.com
"Otto Warburg, Biochemist, Cell Physiologist and Eccentric" by Hans Krebs, M.D. and Roswitha Schmidt, Ph.D., Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1981.
"American Cancer Society America's Wealthiest 'Non-Profit' Institution, by Samuel S. Epstein, M.D. International Journal of Health Services, 1999, www.preventcancer.com.
"CancerGate-2005, W.W. Norton Co., NY, www.preventcancer.com.
In the above book by Moss you can read about the "Summerlin Painted Mouse Affair" at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New YOrk where a medical doctor painted spots on the backs of lab animals in order to defraud his supervisors and the public who paid for his disgusting research.
numerous other references could be provided too and are contained in each reference.
Posted by: WJAbbe | Jan 29, 2012 3:23:13 PM
And just remember this readers:
Next time you or your loved ones may be the next victims of the criminals running the failed war on cancer of the U.S., where the "cure" is always just around the next billion dollar corner and the drug companies have corrupted the entire failed research process and scientific method.
Posted by: WJAbbe | Jan 29, 2012 3:33:31 PM
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