#receptores

[psicotaipan]

¿De quien te puedes fiar?

Otro interesante vídeo de David Pozo. Descubre gracias a la morfopsicología el rostro de las personas auténticas y compáralo con el de las interesadas, las que fingen o esconden algo.

Fortaleza y Fragilidad están muy asociadas a ser auténtico o no serlo.

Porque para ser uno mismo e implicarse con los otros hace falta valor.

[otiksimr]

Some Yveltal sketches (curated from my main blog, there's some lore in the tags if you're interested.)

[abbeyofcyn]

Krang infection 43

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[seoulmatez]

baths with boothill that aren’t really baths with boothill — he’s there in the bathroom, not in the water but situated behind you outside of the tub. it’s best he doesn’t get wet. he can’t help you wash up the way any other lover might but he doesn’t let that stop him from assisting in other ways, handing you bottles of floral soap and shampoo, rinsing suds away from your hair and arms with the cup you keep on the ledge of porcelain.

it’s a tempting thought, reaching into the water beneath the fluffy bubbles in search of more — the mounds of your breasts or perhaps the plush of your thighs. despite his heavy want, he knows he can’t. though, there are other ways he can touch you, less dangerous ways. the few drops of water that roll along metal fingers as he runs them through your hair are all but insignificant. they’re cool against your skin once they reach your nape, thumbs making a home at the base of your neck while the others settle the curve of your jaw. and then he’s tipping your head back, forcing your gaze to meet his.

you smile when you catch sight of him and it takes no more than a second for him to mirror the expression. how could he not? he bumps his nose against the tip of yours once and then twice before his impatience becomes unbearable and he steals your lips in a kiss.

it’s warm, the opposite of his touch, but you love them both the same.

[kittiswt]

nobody knows how happy i am that despite how it was aired almost 3 years ago already, kinnporsche fanfics are STILL being written!! usually fandoms nowadays die off so quickly

(i could rant about this forever, but i feel like id just be reiterating what everyone else says)

ive noticed in the bl fandom especially that since theres SO many shows, and its such a broad selection, people move on quickly and theres not really a sub-fandom of sorts for every show, therefore theres a lack of really Anything besides source material… So seeing that the kinnporsche fandom is still somewhat thriving is insanely relieving! I finally dont feel like the only person stuck in the past due to being fixated on it still!!

[los-plantalones]

I’m curious about something…

Please reblog for a larger sample size! 💚🌿

[hyunpic]

“the choreo is so demanding and to get used to it you have to dance with strength. i remember we were all shouting as we were dancing… but we had lots of fun”

[lordacne]

how much do i need to masturbate to feel better? asking for myself

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

[buttfrovski]

one creek in the morning and one creek at night make for a happy life amen

[slaygentford]

ms reid calling dream lestat daffy is a huge win for my political stance as a top donor to the lestat not very smart party. so glad that we're all on the same page re lestat being utterly empty behind the eyes and not even in a psychopath way just in a truly and genuinely not a lot going on up there way

[prismsoup]

i kinda wanna give Spears a spoon full of peanut butter and see what he does with it (i'd get smacked smacked in the face probably)

bug behavior

[feen-feet]

Pitch: Cells at Work spinoff about a trans person undergoing HRT

little sex hormone gijinkas running around flipping switches like a 1930s musical, the rest of the cells going, "Well, shit, new orders I guess, get to work on those hair follicles."

[swamp-chicken]

etho and cleo playing around on stream today

[weirdtakoyaki]

IM LOSING MY MIND THESE HE ISSSSSS TYSM TO @tadpole-apocalypse for this lovely commission of my durge, Daggger 😭🥺😭🥺😭🥺❤️❤️❤️