Robert Lancaster goes into lunch

Next up, Phil Plait talked briefly about JREF scholarships. If memory serves, there were over 40 of them - more than 40 people attending TAM on scholarship. 4% - I'd call that pretty good, myself.

He then turned the floor over to Robert Lancaster.

I have to admit that this is where writing gets tough. I feel like a bit of an ass talking about it at all, but I really want to make some effort to tell it like it is, and not add gloss where it was not already in place.

I don't think there was likely a single person in that room that wouldn't call Robert Lancaster a skeptical hero. If you do not know, he is responsible for the Stop Sylvia Browne website. If you don't know who Sylvia Browne is and why she needs to be stopped, then go to the site.

About a year ago - shortly after the last TAM to my understanding (certainly not before as one of the highlights of the Stop Sylvia Browne website is his recounting of his post-TAM6 encounter with that hideous harpy herself) - Robert Lancaster suffered a stroke. He is still recovering.

Mr. Lancaster seems to be the most pleasant human being you could imagine. I have no idea what he was like before his stroke, but today he could not come across as more gentle. And the respect in the room for him was palpable. There was a long ovation for him as he came on stage in his wheel chair. I mean long in the Hirohito's Funeral sense. And unfortunately that set the tone for the presentation.

Like I said, this is where it gets difficult. I don't know if Mr. Lancaster has always been such a slow speaker - I suspect not. I also do not know if he had seriously given consideration to the length of his presentation, but it was long. Very long. And it seemed longer as a result of his presentational style.

He was informed that he was going long, and presumably he began editing himself at that point, but he still went well into lunch before he was virtually cut short.

I know I was torn. It was difficult maintaining attention and out of deep respect I made every effort. So did most of the people in attendance. But with lunch pending and people getting hungry something had to break.

I was expected to man the SkeptiCamp table at lunch, so once I realized that we were past the time I was supposed to take the table over, I bit the bullet and left my seat. I honestly do not know if Mr. Lancaster got to a point in his talk where the various elements of his discussion came together in a unified manner, and as a result it's actually hard to summarize what his talk was about.

At it's core he was discussing the pre-history of his stroke, his desire to talk to other skeptics who had suffered from strokes - Derek Colanduno of Skepticality being the notable example. (I too wanted to meet Derek.) - the support of his wife and his appreciation of the people who helped maintain the Stop Sylvia site during his convalescence.

There is no doubt that getting up and walking away from his presentation was the hardest thing I did during the conference.

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Over a month before TAM I volunteered to man the SkeptiCamp booth during lunch on Friday. I had made a few assumptions that resulted in me chosing that time. I had first assumed that the booth was outside the conference hall (Wrong! All the tables were at the back of the hall.) and that if I manned it at any other time I'd be cutting into the presentation time and who knew what great stuff I'd miss. I also assumed that lunch was not provided. I figured that people would be scattering in various groups to the numerous establishments within and nearby the casino. (Wrong again! A lunch buffet was part of the conference and that lunch-time mingling was a core element of the event.) Silly me. I assumed that by manning the table I'd actually be increasing the amount of interaction I had. Nope.... well, that's not fair.

Jesse Brydle - fellow Vancouver skeptic and CFI organizer - was also signed up for that window. We had a good chat while we sat there virtually alone. Got to know each other a bit better than Skeptics in the Pub had thus far allowed. We spelled each other off so we could go grab a plate of food from the buffet. (My bad on that, I grabbed a plate and sat a table with Ray Hyman briefly to listen, thinking that I'd scarf my food down and then tag-off Jesse and he could come do the same. But then they started packing up the buffet! So I ran back and sent him to get food before he missed his chance.)

As lunch wore on people returned to the tables, including Reed Esau who started SkeptiCamp. Reed fielded the most of the questions once he showed up. I suppose in a pure sense we could have abandoned our post then. Or official relief didn't show up so we ended up manning the table until the NEXT shift showed up just as the next round of presentations began. No issue with that really. I was happy to be chatting with people and talking about my SkeptiCamp experience.

Fintan Steele

Dear me, this IS going slowly. I shouldn't be too surprised I suppose. I do have a lot on my plate. Starting the Asshole Skeptic blog; finishing Beast of Bottomless Lake; doing final re-writes on another project; having a life; earning a living – the list goes on.

Here we are two full weeks after TAM (At about this exact hour two weeks ago I was standing in line at McCarran airport wondering why it was taking so long for every single person in front of me to check in to their flight and praying that Paul and I wouldn't suffer the same fate as it seemed to be causing not little amount of distress to the people actually talking to airline representatives.) and I'm still only just getting around to the first of the standard presentations.

Fintan Steele, besides having a name that evokes mid-80s TV has a resume that mind boggles. He works at Johns Hopkins and was at one point in time as an ordained monk.

His talk was one of the less easily followed of the entire weekend, but it was that way because it was crammed full of high-functioning information. He spoke about personalized medicine. "It's all the rage for pretty horrifying reasons."

He began with Hippocrates and the "significant step" that was the "the four humours." How having your humours out of balance was believed to cause virtually all maladies. If you weren't feeling well it was simply a matter of rebalancing your humours – black bile, yellow bile, blood and phlegm. Steele contends that Hippocrates medicine was effectively personalized medicine of its day. Each person was individually diagnosed and treated with the limited procedures of purging and bleeding and so one that were available at the time. They filled in the gaps – and there were many – with theology and superstition... aren't they the same thing?

After roughly two centuries of this limited form of medicine it became gradually apparent that environmental circumstances also impacted significantly upon a patient's well-being. (Funny how self-evident that seems now.) It was also noted that deliberate application of various compounds could similarly affect people in both positive and negative ways. Even to the point where a small amount of something might be positive, but a large amount would be detrimental to health. But it was still all very alchemical in its approach.

The line continued to be pushed further and further as we began to understand human anatomy and get a better observational sense of medicine.

He pushed on ahead to the current century (and I am a little unclear as to whether he meant that literally as in the last nine years, or if he meant it a bit more colloquially to include part if not all of the 1900s as well.) And how we have good analytical tools and a growing genetic understanding and a really quite remarkable knowledge base of how the human body actually works – all supported by the processing power and data crunching blunt force of modern computers. This has brought us to a place where we can provide the illusion of good understanding of precise personal circumstances and convince ourselves that there is a real opportunity to practice personalized medicine.

"This brave new world is driven by technology; basically science-based; and generally over-hyped."

I found this statement to be quite interesting. There is a lot of dealing in practical or actual absolutes in skepticism. "This IS true." "There is a utter lack of data supporting those claims." "The chances of that being true are diminishingly small." Yet here we had one of our first speakers of the weekend saying "Gee this is neat. It may even be close. It's certainly well-meaning. But we aren't really 'there' yet." The detractors of skepticism would serve themselves well to note that we aren't strictly sticks in the mud. We are merely cautiously pragmatic.

From there he moved into a discussion of genomics. The first genome was sequenced in 2003 for a cost of about 10 billion dollars. Of the data collected, roughly 1.5% (a bit more) currently means anything to us. Since then the speed and cost of sequencing had dropped considerably. "By this time next year it will be possible to sequence an entire human genome in a week for the cost of about a thousand dollars." As a result we are gathering useful data at a huge rate (currently 3 petabytes) and increasing fast – with a major point being that variability is vast and countless.

Sampling the genome is much cheaper than full sequencing – so we can look at relevant areas and skip the parts that can be predicted with accuracy or that aren't relevant. IE. If you are concerned about a specific inheritable disease (there are many if you include propensities), you can look for that disease's genetic flags and ignore eye-colour. There are plenty of 'association areas' for different diseases – I assume that means correlated genetic patterns – and this IS cool information.

As time has gone on different diseases have fractured. Steele uses the example of leukemia – which prior to the 1900s was indistinguishable from lymphoma, but then became identifiable as a separate disease. It then fractured into acute and chronic forms and by now is a spectrum of various types of leukemia – to say nothing of over fifty different lymphoma types.

This growing awareness of variety helps us understand why some people respond to certain drug but not others. Some people might have a specific genetic pre-disposition to react favourably to certain medications. See where this is going? If we can understand the specifics of a person's genetics then we can recognize how they will respond to different treatments, or narrow down the possible specific maladies they might be more susceptible to. We are walking towards the notion of personalized medicine. But we are not there yet. Recall we have only got 1.5% of the information applied in any useful manner.

The promise of personalized medicine is still premature. Yet it has still entered the marketplace. Companies say that they can provide it, but it is a lie. Statistically there are still far too many holes (which on an editorial note, I suspect are in part the exploitational opportunity that is needed for said companies to be able to take advantage of people) for true efficacy.

The science behind it is solid. But the reasoning and expectations that have followed is where the failure lies.

He then moved into a tangent about how ordering your moral hierarchy of a list of various acts – including masturbation, incest, homosexuality, rape, and beastiality amongst others – depends on your first principle. If you believe sex is foremost about procreation, you order the list differently that someone who doesn't. It was interesting, but I don't really think it was necessarily relevant to his larger talk.

His following point essentially pointed out that our scientific knowledge when compared against biological complexity has (my term) a breaking point. We absolutely DO understand a lot. But it is easy to misapply the bleeding edge of that knowledge. Anything beyond that line is hokum – magical thinking. Genomic study is not to be dismissed – it is very important but it is far from really being an understood and manageable knowledge base. But our current appearance of dominion is illusory hubris. For one thing, the understanding of genomics is working towards understanding how biology works – not how the individual works. Perhaps we'll take that next leap some day, but it's not today and it's not in three years when we can sequence a genome between breakfast and lunch for two hundred dollars.

Personalized medicine is popular because its "all about me" and we are narcissistic at the core. It sounds scientific – it uses the language of science. It doesn't take a fool to fall for this – not at the least.

Connie Sonne follow-up the JREF video

Not much to say here. The JREF has released the video of the Connie Sonne MDC preliminary test.

I'm linking them here for ease of reference to my other post about it.

PART 1

PART 2

PART 3

PART 4

Riveting, huh?

And the press conference on Skeptic Zone #40