Another of my favorite pictures
The kitten is Patches
As an adult, Patches was universally known as the World's Most Beautiful Cat
When I was a boy I was always poking my nose into adult
publications, then running to my father to discuss my discoveries. Like many other children I had an inexhaustible
reservoir of enthusiasm, and was hopelessly gullible. Thus often, when I breathlessly expounded my
latest revelation to my dad, he would be forced to say something like “Well,
Buck, think it through again. This guy
sounds like a snake-oil salesman to me”.
“Snake-oil salesman”.
What a great phrase! A snake-oil
salesman is someone who wants to sell you something (snake oil) that he knows
to be completely worthless. Apparently
when my father had been a boy there actually were such guys, pedaling elixirs
from the back of their wagon. This stuff
contained alcohol, petroleum products, pig blood, mashed up onion, other stuff –
and water. Whatever its chemistry, it
could grow hair, cure erectile dysfunction, eradicate cancer, and make the
girls love you. Of course, you had to
drink the whole big bottle to realize these benefits – and by the time you did
that the snake oil salesman was in the next state.
Well, there are still snake-oil salesmen about, but it’s
getting harder to identify them. Take,
for instance, Photosoft and NGPDT. An
Australian small-cap biotech (Invion) is developing and testing a cancer cure
that sounds too good to be true. It is
doing so in cooperation with a cancer research outfit based in Melbourne,
called the Hudson Institute. The way
this works is simple: the patient consumes or is injected with a fluid based on
chlorophyll. For some reason this stuff
congregates in cancer cells. Then the
patient is bathed in a special kind of light – NGPDT stands for next generation
photodynamic therapy. Somehow the right
wavelength of light activates the chlorophyll, producing inflammation and death
of the cancer cell. Wow!
As far as I can see, both Invion and the Hudson Institute
are legit. Moreover, this photodynamic
therapy has been shown to kill ovarian cancer cells – in vitro. Furthermore, other
uses of light to activate cancer-killing products are known; see, for instance,
my blog
So, what’s with the snake oil? Well, when you Google Invion, or Photosoft,
you find, lurking about three articles down, an analysis by something called
uSpike, which claims that it’s all a jug of snake oil, proffered by some shady
characters out of China. But, if you
research uSpike you find that it doesn’t make you feel warm and fuzzy about its
reliability either. So, what the hell?
I guess that the lesson here is, we need the FDA, and we
need to maintain a healthy level of skepticism.
Here is one article on Photosoft.
There are lots more.
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