Home Home Arrow DVC LLC Arrow Bugs and Drugs Blog

Bugs and Drugs Blog

Bugs and Drugs Banner

Updates from DVC President Dr. Robert V. House on topics related to biopharmaceutical product development.  Click each title to view the entire post.

Getting old is (still) a bitch
November 29, 2011 - A good friend and colleague of mine, an expert in breast cancer, told me that as he has gotten older, his focus has switched from breasts to prostates. (This is a funny quip, but he assures me it's true.) Like my friend, as I have gotten older my interests have evolved, although thankfully not quite so divergently. Rather, as my various systems don't obviously work as well as they used to, I've researched the effects of age on the immune system, and I'm not liking what I've learned.
Misguided Protection
November 17, 2011 - Let me state for the record that any political decision that uses "for the children" as its basis triggers a response from me somewhere between indifference and anger. Any efforts by society to make the world a better place should be rooted in the here-and-now, with benefits to accrue to future generations.
Get your facts straight
October 6, 2011 - A few years ago I served as a board member of an industry group; at one of our meetings, a discussion broke out and I voiced my opinion on the topic at hand. The chairman of the board (and a thoroughly unpleasant piece of work he was) barked at me "I believe you should get your facts straight".
Waiting for the Zombies
July 11, 2011 - Who doesn't love zombies? They're are all the rage now, in movies, on TV and in video games. In the old movies like "White Zombie", zombies were corpses reanimated by magic to serve evil purposes. In the 60s and 70s zombies were shuffling corpses driven to kill and eat the living by some natural yet undefined source (Night of the Living Dead comes to mind here). Neither type of zombie seems very scary, and one wonders just how hard it would be to escape from awkward, shuffling corpses. ...
Offensive Immunology
February 28, 2011 - The balance between the human immune system and the external microbial world is a delicate one. The very mechanisms responsible for recognizing and destroying the countless attacks by various bacteria, viruses, parasites, fungi and so forth can, if unchecked, turn against the very body they were intended to protect.
Don't Blame Mother Nature
January 27, 2011 - Like many of you, I spend a considerable bit of time attending conferences; in my case, many of these conferences deal with the twin subjects of bioterrorism and emerging infectious diseases...
Bad always wins. Deal with it.
November 11, 2010 - I recently read a fascinating blog in Harvard Business Review entitled "Bad Is Stronger Than Good: Evidence-Based Advice For Bosses". The premise is that negative influences in an organization are always more powerful than positive influences...
What Happens Next?
October 28, 2010 - Occasionally, I'm bemused at the decisions that people make that suggest they have not given even short-term consequences of their actions a neuron's worth of electricity. I've seen grown men brandish baseball bats...
This is Not the Dark Side
July 28, 2010 - Recently published comments from Dr. Donald Berwick, the new head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, caught my eye. Dr. Berwick, in praising the concept of redistributional health care, said that "You could have let an unaccountable system play out in the darkness of private enterprise instead of accepting that a politically accountable system must act in the harsh and, admittedly, sometimes very unfair, daylight of the press..."...
This is What You Want, This is What You Get
July 16, 2010 - Obsession is a curiosity to me, whether it is exhibited by humans or animals. My African Grey parrot Martin exhibits it, and her single-mindedness often results in a level of destructiveness far out of proportion to her size. With the intelligence of at least a human 4-year-old, her behavior can be attributed partly to intention, partly to instinct. Consequently, her fixations and their eventual resolutions must forever remain a mystery to me and I must accommodate her plan of action. This type of behavior is unfortunately not confined to animals. ...