The Binary Circumstance

Both the Seattle Times and the Seattle-PI reported today that Ric Weiland, who was one of the first five employees at Microsoft, left millions to nonprofit organizations focused on gay rights and HIV/AIDS. For many of the organizations, the donations he gave them were the largest donations they have ever received.

Weiland committed suicide last year at the age of 53 after a long battle with depression.

I had never heard of him before today but have certainly used products he wrote or developed. I found his story fascinating. He was obviously a brilliant, remarkable gay man who lived a full, rich life.

I find it interesting that he was unable to find happiness even though he was in a long-term relationship, had strong family connections and was active and respected in his community. We are constantly being told that those things are protective against unhappiness. But in his case those things and the fact that he was in great physical shape and very wealth were not enough. Depression is a puzzling problem.

I’d certainly like to know a lot more about his important life. It sounds like his depression was being managed until he suffered so many deaths in his family. Personally I find it depressing that a gay man of such enormous accomplishments felt he had leave much of his fortune to support the battle for basic human rights for gays and lesbians in our culture. I wonder if that got to him as well. If he had been straight his life would have been different just because of the political climate in our country.

Presidential candidate Gov. Mike Huckabee isn’t happy with the Constitution that has made the U.S. one of the greatest countries that has ever existed. He wants to violate the Constitution by making it reflect his own religious view of God.

“[Some of my opponents] do not want to change the Constitution, but I believe it’s a lot easier to change the constitution than it would be to change the word of the living God, and that’s what we need to do is to amend the Constitution so it’s in God’s standards rather than try to change God’s standards,” Huckabee said, referring to the need for a constitutional human life amendment and an amendment defining marriage as between a man and a woman.

Isn’t it just a tad unpatriotic to write violations of the First Amendment into the Constitution?

Meanwhile, there are those Christians who are blaming the spread of MRSA, the antibiotic-resistant “flesh eating” bacteria, on gays.

Epidemic Feared - ‘Gays’ May Spread Deadly Staph Infection to General Population

It’s like the early years of AIDS all over again.

MRSA is the result of attacking bacteria with antibiotics. Through the natural process of evolution and natural selection, the bacteria mutates into new antibiotic resistant strains of bacteria. But since Christians for the most part reject evolution, even when evidence for it is happening right in front of their eyes, they blame gays.

Antibiotic resistant bacteria are the price we pay for antibiotics which are an exceptionally valuable tool in fighting disease, just as drug-resistant HIV is the price we pay for drug cocktails.

Christians held up AIDS research for years by claiming that it was God’s punishment for homosexuality even though the vast majority of cases have always been in the heterosexual population.

Let me be blunt about this: Millions of people, including millions of children, have died because of the ignorance and anti-science views of Christians in the arena of HIV/AIDS, not to mention other diseases at other times in history. Must we new endure the same nonsense when it comes to MRSA?

How many millions will they kill this time?

What a catastrophe it would be for rational thought and science to have a president who would write such nonsensical premises into our Constitution. It should also be noted that Huckabee is on record and very proud of the fact that the doesn’t believe in evolution.

If you don’t accept evolution, it is impossible to understand diseases and how they impact the human population or how treatments can alter the disease causing pathogens by causing them to mutate and evolve into resistant strains.

For more on MRSA read this article. Pay particular attention to words like “evolve,” “evolved,” and “evolution.”

Hat tip for some of these links.

From the Seattle Times:

A former University of Washington AIDS researcher committed scientific misconduct by altering images and fabricating data, a UW investigation found.

Investigators recommended that Scott J. Brodie be banned from future employment at the university. All his research is now “viewed with suspicion” and subject to independent verification, according to a UW Investigation Committee Report.

“Accepted scientific practices do not allow a scientist to falsely label an image as suits his or her fancy simply because such work is conducted in the scientist’s lab; to do so is instead a gross deviation of accepted scientific practices,” the investigators wrote.

Investigators found that Brodie falsified data in 15 instances — in published and unpublished journal articles, and grant proposals. The research in question included cellular responses to the HIV virus.

The 16-month investigation of Brodie was unusual and disheartening, said Denny Liggitt, chairman of the UW’s Department of Comparative Medicine and one of the three investigators who reviewed Brodie’s work.

Not only did it cast doubt on Brodie’s own work, but it also created problems for many other researchers who relied on his data, Liggitt said.

“The problem with things like this is that people build on someone else’s knowledge. It wastes money, it wastes time and it can lead science in a wrong direction,” Liggitt said. “Even the smallest misguidance can cripple a very large investigation.”

[…]

Liggitt said scientific-journal editors have become increasingly concerned about the ease with which images can be manipulated through computer programs such as Photoshop. He said an image can often impress a reviewer or make a point that a lot of narrative cannot — and the old adage that an image is worth a thousand words rings true.

He said medical research and HIV research in particular is highly competitive, with the National Institutes of Health making cutbacks and many researchers competing for limited funding. Getting published can help bolster a researcher’s push to land the next grant, he added.

“It’s ugly out there,” Liggitt said. “There are a lot more desperate people because of the cutbacks.”

Even worse, when so much research money in controlled by the government, it causes the entire scientific community to tailor their work to give the government what it wants. That will ultimately skew science to support a political agenda.

A promising HIV vaccine trial was recently halted when it appeared that those in the vaccinated group were becoming infected with HIV at a higher rate than those receiving the placebo.

The vaccine used a disabled form of a common-cold virus to carry three synthetically produced HIV genes into the body. It was hoped that those genes would spur the body to unleash an HIV-targeted immune response using so-called “killer” T cells.

Neither the cold virus nor the HIV genes could reproduce, so volunteers could not catch a cold or become infected with HIV directly from the vaccine.

Researchers knew in September that men who were receiving the vaccine were catching HIV at a higher rate than the men who received the dummy shots.

In an initial review, they found 24 HIV infections among 741 men who received at least one dose of the vaccine. That compared to 21 HIV cases among 762 men in the placebo group.

A smaller sample, limited to those who had received at least two vaccinations, found 19 infections in the vaccine group and 11 in the placebo group.

That was enough to pull the plug on the trials Sept. 21.

These are puzzling results.

We’ve known for a long time that HIV thrives when the immune system is stimulated. These results raise the question whether immune system stimulation of any kind from things like vaccines, allergies, or diseases make it more likely for individuals to become infected with HIV.

It also raises ethical questions about testing HIV vaccines if in fact it turns out that they could increase the likelihood of becoming infected.