If the data is shit, then the data is shit. No matter how it was got to. You would hope that knowing it was more dangerous would compel the scientists to make sure it was worthwhile. Still, there's always more test subjects out there, I guess.

And I have to say, as an outsider, the idea that a regime that allows Stan Burzynski to continue to practice is somehow too restrictive to medical development seems absurd. It seems more like it's just cheaper to do it this way.

Burzynkski isn't actually doing any medical development, though.

I tend to look at bioethics with a very critical eye. It's extremely conservative and obstructionist. It's tried to put a stop to GMOs, gene treatments, and cloning, and it's often practiced by people without any credentials in a relevant field.

He's not, and that's what makes the fact that everyone he treats is, for legal reasons, enrolled in a clinical trial. Because he is using unproven (not for lack of trying) techniques, he claims his treatments are 'clinical trials' that people pay to be in. He hasn't published in years, his ethics board is a trough for his associates and he is allowed to continue with his 'trials'.

The rules around experimenting on live people are intended to stop a recurrence of James Marion Sims or the Tuskegee experiments (or, more local for me, the stuff Herbert Green was doing here in NZ in the 1980s).

I didn't think vampires could get herpes?

Maybe he already got it when he was alive and now he's trying to prevent tainting his young male victims??

I think it's more of them being unknown carriers. Having a necrology instead of a metabolism means they can't be symptomatic, but they can still spread STIs around the living population.

i love you HF.

Dracula is safe from herpes, but he's in a high risk group for HIV.

A herpes vaccine would be awesome, it being one of the main incurable STDs, but bad science rarely helps anyone.

Perhaps a little competition would be good though.

We are lacking new super anti-biotics exactly because of regulations and limits on patent enforcement.

Vaccines? Yeah, a Herpes vaccine would be awesome. I just wonder if the balance is that there is more money in the various anti-viral medications and creams then there would be in a vaccine.

...I'm your spirochetal clown

+1 Eric Idle