• Assanka My web development agency goes from strength to strength, with lots of very interesting work going on. Indeed, in May 2008 one of our websites (FTAlphaville) won a webby for being the best business blog. I’m currently exploring how virtualisation might help improve our hosting platform, with a view to deploying this over Christmas 2008 if it’s appropriate.
• Research I’m continuing my PhD work which explores how we might improve digital cameras by better understanding how the human eye focuses. I’m hoping to have finished writing up by the middle of the Autumn (fingers crossed). This work is with Prof Fred Stentiford, Dr Steven Dakin and is based at UCL’s Adastral Park campus
• Interests In my limited spare time, I’m doing the odd bit of DIY, a lot of cooking, and planning our wedding.

The first phase human trial typically occurs about 6 years into the 10 year drug development cycle. It uses healthy people to determine if there are any adverse reactions. Before this, it’s likely that the pharma company will have spent $200million in developing the drug, testing it in the lab, and on animals. The company developing the drug will have had to provide evidence to numerous approvals committees before the trial could begin on humans.

Quite simply, this is a disaster, and we should all be praying for these poor men to recover speedily, and to suffer no long-term harm. The fiasco will cause huge problems for future drugs trials, unless the cause of this can be readily determined and isolated. It’s likely that the root problem falls into one of the following:

• Wrong dosage
• Contaminated drug
• Unanticipated effect of the drug in humans

However, it’s hard to know which of these will cause the minimal long term damage to pharma-reputation in the UK. Wrong dosages occur, tragically, quite frequently, and I suspect this will be the ‘best’ outcome.

But, it should be remembered that this is a novel drug, one of a new class of drugs that’s based on proteins. With the exception of insulin, there are few protein based drugs approved for clinical use. It may be that the manufacturers still need to learn more about mass protein synthesis.

The worst outcome is that the procedures followed by the drugs company, the clinical trial providers, the ethics committees, the approvals committees, and everyone involved were correct - that no mistake was made - and that there were side effects that were not predicted. This will cause mayhem for drug development. However, it may well be the case. One of my flatmates told me that penicilin kills guinea pigs, and so if it were developed today it would never be allowed to a clinical trial. Yet over the past 70 years, it’s saved countless millions of people. Indeed, the same could be said about potatoes - they’d not be approved for human consumption if they were invented today.

It’s a mess. Let’s all stop and pause for a minute, to wish these critically ill men our full support. Then we have the reconciliation. What went wrong, and how can we fix it? But we mustn’t let this hinder future drug development.

bedag: to bemire the bottom of a dress (ie to get the ends of your jeans all tattered and covered in muck).

http://news.com.com/2102-11395_3-5974937.html?tag=st.util.print, from which:

The device, called the Mosquito (”It’s small and annoying,” Stapleton said), emits a high-frequency pulsing sound that, he said, can be heard by most people younger than 20 and almost no one older than 30. The sound is designed to so irritate young people that after several minutes, they cannot stand it and go away.

So far, the Mosquito has been road-tested in only one place, at the entrance to the Spar convenience store in this town in South Wales. Like birds perched on telephone wires, surly teenagers used to plant themselves on the railings just outside the door, smoking, drinking, shouting rude words at customers and making regular disruptive forays inside.

“On the low end of the scale, it would be intimidating for customers,” said Robert Gough, who, with his parents, owns the store. “On the high end, they’d be in the shop fighting, stealing and assaulting the staff.”

More about Cruithne

A few years ago, in Birmingham, X was working upstairs, and didn’t hear the doorbell. However, a few minutes later she thought she heard someone moving around downstairs. She went down, and saw someone in the hall. Fearing that she was about to be attacked, grabbed the closest thing she could find, a biro, and began waving it in a manic stabbing motion, whilst screaming her head off.

The man who had entered her house froze momentarily before bolting straight out of the front door and closing it behind him. He then proceeded to explain through the letter box that he wasn’t going to hurt her, but was the surveyor from the estate agents!

X eventually stopped screaming, and instead turned into a hysterical shaking twitching wreck until her boyfriend managed to come and comfort her about 20 mins later.

She told me that “there was an iron on the ironing board there, but she couldn’t quite reach it”…

You have to feel sorry for the surveyor!

It’s most important to draw your attention to the out-of-focus photo of the milk. This is “semi-skimmed milk”, as served by One, the train company operating the Ipswich line. The milk is actually skimmed milk, with “added non-milk fat”. I truly dread to think what sort of fat this was.

Bernard Wooley (not sure of the spelling) suggested to Jim Hacker that he write CGSM on a ludicrous letter he’d received.

Jim: “CGSM?”
Bernard: “Consignment of geriatric shoe mongers”.
Jim: “What?”
Bernard: “What used to be called a ‘load of old coblers’”

What a lot we can learn from Yes Minister. So, your challenge for the next few weeks is to get CGSM into your work.