I'm an author. One book and that was enough. I got a lot of accusations online when my book first came out that I was pimping my book, so I'm not going to mention the title of it in this diary. That chapter of my life is over. The thing was, I discovered the equivalent of female Viagra. It wasn't just one pill, it was a balancing act of certain things in the diet combined with strengthening the PC muscles. The approach greatly increased female libido, made clitoral orgasms easier for women, and gave some women for the first time the ability to have vaginal orgasms, i.e. orgasms from only PIV intercourse I was also attacked venomously at the time for daring to say that there were other types of orgasm besides the clitoral kind--so if you want to call that kind of orgasm something besides an orgasm, that's fine with me. I'm done fighting that battle.
My life was really difficult for several years and I was attacked on all sides. But the thing that bothered me THE MOST was that I am a scientist, and I was making this approach known for science. I tried my utmost to get a formal study going. I wrote a rigorous proposal, I had a licensed metric, I had an offer to publish my findings in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, but I couldn't get funding. I initially had offers. One of the main parts of my approach was very large amount of fish oil. I had two fish oil companies wanting to fund my research. But I later found out that their interest was because they wanted a method patent for a "cure" for female sexual dysfunction. In other words, they wanted to turn my natural approach into a prescription. When my discovery became more public, being written up in magazines, etc., the hope of a patent was gone and they withdrew their offers.
The enraging thing was that no one believed me. Common sense would say that a person discovering a way to get women to be more interested in sex and more orgasmic would have researchers beating a path to her door. Of course. Then people would lecture me condescendingly that my anecdotal data weren't data. Like I didn't know that I needed a double-blind placebo-controlled study. Still, they didn't understand how science works--I knew that my approach worked, that's how studies get started in the first place. But if a tree falls in a forest...
Now I finally have vindication. Jerks! What health research is better funded than cancer research? You would think that someone who had discovered a potential treatment for cancer would have money thrown at her, especially with all the independent fundraising groups "racing" for the cure. You would think wrong.
How Big Pharma Holds Back in the War on Cancer
Seventeen years later and cancer-free, Retsky cannot be entirely sure the treatment cured him, but he believes it likely did. Numerous laboratory, animal and small human studies suggest that low-dose, continuous chemotherapy holds promise in shrinking tumors and preventing cancer’s recurrence. But the next step—testing what Retsky did in a large-scale clinical trial—is a longshot given the way cancer treatments are developed today.
Take Michelle Holmes, an associate professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School. She’s been trying for years to raise money for trials on the effects of aspirin on breast cancer. Animal studies, in vitro experiments and analysis of patient outcomes suggest that aspirin might help inhibit breast cancer from spreading. Yet even her peers on scientific advisory boards appear uninterested, she says.
“For some reason a drug that could be patented would get a randomized trial, but aspirin, which has amazing properties, goes unexplored because it’s 99 cents at CVS,” says Holmes.
Anyhow, this vindication has been swirling in my mind today with a lot of other things I've recently read, and I have economic questions about the future of our society. I wrote a review here at dKos recently on Jeremy Rifkin's new book, The Zero Marginal Cost Society, where he predicts due to inexorable market forces, capitalism will greatly diminish, and the collaborative commons will take over. Clearly with cancer research that can't happen soon enough. But in general I'm feeling the rumblings of an economic earthquake coming. Today's diary
U.S. Solar Capacity up 418% Since 2010, Koch Bros Demand Tax on Sun
also shows that Rifkin's predictions are coming true. And completely unrelated, I also read this humorous and useful article by David Wong in Cracked today:
6 Harsh Truths That Will Make You a Better Person
He's young and doesn't quite understand how life works, but his points are interesting, harsh but interesting, sort of a tough love for millenials. But what I found most fascinating, was it seems the kernel of his idea came from a truly repellent article
Hipsters on Food Stamps
But now suddenly we're all shocked: to the economy, the English grad is just as superfluous as the disenfranchised welfare mom in the hood-- the college education is just as irrelevant as the skin color. Not irrelevant for now, not irrelevant "until the economy improves"-- irrelevant forever. The economy doesn't care about intelligence, at all, it doesn't care what you know, merely what you can produce for it.
The repellent author only looks at things from a capitalist, economic viewpoint. Why spend money for a liberal arts college education when you will never get your money back by improving your employment chances? Major in engineering or be a chump. And don't give your labor away for free! That viewpoint seems so antiquated now, and it's been less than two years.
David Wong saw how the wind was blowing and opened up the horrible idea of the repellent author by realizing that contributing to the sharing economy was also worthwhile, and much, much better than doing nothing.
If you protest that you're not a shallow capitalist materialist and that you disagree that money is everything, I can only say: Who said anything about money? You're missing the larger point.
#4. What You Produce Does Not Have to Make Money, But It Does Have to Benefit People
So my question for people who know things about economics, is what is going to be happening? Capitalist jobs are going away, and more and more capital is moving away from producing things that help society to simply being a rentier parasite on society, or even worse, actively discouraging things that might truly be beneficial to society. With everything moving to free and open source, people helping each other because it's the right thing to do rather than getting paid, how are we all going to afford room and board? This entire website is based on the collaborative commons. Is it right that I benefit from Horace Boothroyd's excellent articles here without paying him? How will we all pay for room and board when none of us have income? And even billionaires would benefit from a cure for cancer--it seems most of them have one foot in the grave. Yet with all their money they can't accomplish what the collaborative commons might?
I'm rambling. But it seems we are going through a pretty rapid paradigm shift, especially considering today's amazon bestselling books (Occupy Amazon: Elizabeth Warren, Thomas Piketty, Michael Lewis Books Surging Online). Does anyone have the skinny on how all of this will play out?