Oh, Edmund, can it be true, that I hold here in my mortal hand a nugget of purest green?

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1. We are not in the habit of classifying chemical reactions according to their location along the visible spectrum, but I have to say that 'green chemistry' sounds like something that the Riddled Laboratory should look into. Especially if it involves absinthe. Chartreuse, not so much.

But flattered though we are by the invitation to avail this offer and share our scientific excellences (and interact with world class professionals), we cannot help notice that the Esteemed Congress is one of a string of anal beads Esteemed Congresses organised -- by professionally for scientists! -- at the same hotel. Almost as if its only purpose is to fill a few over-priced hotel rooms in a festering apocalyptic hellhole (surely Dubai cries out for the Enema Tube of God) and extract some money from academic wannabees who cannot handle the normal 'peer-review', 'minimum standards' aspect of padding their CVs. It has reinforced our determination to get into the whole Predatory Scamference grift.

"Hemanth Kumar" would not be so sanguine with his suggestion that we 'revert back' to unsubscribe, if he had witnessed that time we put Another Kiwi in the Evolvamat with the controls set in reverse. The brow ridges were bad enough, and the gill-slits, but the Lemurian Appendix was particularly disturbing.

2. Readers, both of you, may also enjoy the “Global Biotechnology Congress”. This is a curiously Janus-faced entity; it also pimps itself out under the name of “Drug Discovery and Therapy World Congress”. The DDTWC occupies the same lecture rooms at the same time as the GBC -- with the same speakers and the same programs -- in an apparent violation of Pauli's Exclusion Principle.

It sounds all prestigious n' shit until one finds the GBC website specifying “Bentham Science” as its media partner, and promising to stovepipe the proceedings straight to a Bentham journal, Bentham Science Publishers having earned a certain fame as tireless spamming predatory scum. Closer inspection reveals the organiser of GBC / DDTWC to be Eureka Science, Bentham's copy-editing section and marketing arm, who use the same network and domain for blasting out the spam.

Naturally we wonder, as we target our own business plan and clientele, what kind of plonker falls for these scams?

Now there is a name to conjure. Dr Lee first came to the attention of Riddled as an advocate / salesman of green tea for curing cancer. In dogs. Allowing us to use the "Novelty Teapots" tag. Note that we strongly oppose the administration of green tea to animals... especially to demonic red-eyed invisible monkeys, as its side-effects include hallucinations of sober Church-of-E clergymen.

Lee is also noted for inventing a new 99%-TAQ-polymerase-free form of PCR. It has many advantages, such as identifying fragments of DNA in situations where standard methods cannot detect it, e.g. bound (in an aberrant, non-double-helix configuration) to the aluminium-salt excipients in vaccines. The DNA in this covert form travels to the brain and kills the vaccine recipient. The existence of this "non-B-conformation" is proven beyond doubt by the double-secret-probation invisibility of the DNA under other forms of scrutiny.

Lee has battled the scientific establishment with lawsuits and appellatory petitions, on account of the establishment's refusal to mandate (and franchise) his proprietary method as the standard test for Lyme Disease, Human Papilloma Virus and (more recently) Ebola. Indeed, it was the refusal of mainstream science to publish his papers that forced him to deposit them in pay-to-print jizz-bucket journals from SCIRP. He is, however, popular and much-run-after in anti-vaccine circles.*

3. If you appreciated the GBC, you'll love the 2014 CALRB Symposium... organised by the Coalition Against Lyme and Related Borrelioses. This was intended to pressure US legislators to recognise the hidden prevalence of Lyme Disease, and fund wider testing (preferably using Sin Hang Lee’s proprietary PCR technology). It attracted some attention from Chronic-Lyme skeptics. Nevertheless the advertisements paid press-releases flew as thick as lawsuits cherry petals in spring:

The Coalition Against Lyme and Related Borrelioses, Inc. (CALRB), a non-profit organization which promotes science based Lyme disease testing and research, agrees with Dr. Lee’s approach, said Kevin Moore, president and executive director of CALRB.

Moore’s enthusiasm for Dr Lee is not enormously surprising, for when he isn’t Presidenting over TOTALLY GRASS-ROOTS organisations like CALRB, he is "Media Relations Director for Milford Molecular Diagnostics Laboratory", which is to say Lee’s business partner / press agent. While the CALRB website (shuttered and blank, now that it has fulfilled its purpose) was set up by Jessica Vigliotti -- Lee’s erstwhile laboratory employee and co-author.

We in Riddled Research are impressed by this concept of taking on a press agent as one's closest research associate, and we would hire one ourselves, except Evangeline van Holsterin (chief barmaid at The Old Entomologist) informs us that her vile nephew Throgmorton is currently living in the past, having borrowed the Riddled time machine. Other applicants for the post are invited.

4. Oh Great Gazoogle, speak to us of Lee's Lyme-diagnosis business “Milford Molecular Diagnostics”!

Veritable Parade

There turns out to be a veritable parade of press releases heralding that lab’s capabilities, and lavishing praise upon Sin Hang Lee’s world-shaking accomplishments. He is especially proud to be Invited Speaker at Prestigious Meetings which prove to be bogus mockademic get-togethers, sad little money-extraction exercises from scammers and grifters at OMICS. It may well be that Lee pays the press agencies to pump announcements out through their websites every time he flushes the toilet. But his attendance at a conference is a useful gauge of its quality, so his career is not completely without value to science.

5. In further Green Tea / novelty-teapot news,

Don’t put balls of tea-leaves in your vagina.

I had been under the impression that a 'pessary' was a variety of wild pig, so it is good to be corrected on this point.

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* Dr Lee is currently back in the news, where "news" is a term of art meaning "websites of shouty people with a fondness for magical thinking and CAPITAL LETTERS". He has sent out an Open Letter to Dr. Margaret Chan of WHO, petitioning her to question the scientific consensus about the Gardasil vaccine, as it conflicts with his own science.

Evidently someone in NZ used the Official Information Act to obtain several hundred e-mails (centred on a NZ inquest in which antivaxxers blamed Gardasil for a death), and passed them on to Lee. He was unable to find any sign of malfeasance in them so his 16-page letter consists of dark hints as to what might have been in the redacted parts of the e-mails, complaints about the disrespect paid to his own unreplicated results, and unsupported allegations which Someone Should Investigate.

Understandably, the shouty people do not attempt to summarise Lee’s letter, as that would reveal its gaseous nature; they settle for hinting at its contents, a kind of meta-hint built on Lee’s own insinuendoes.

This will not be in the final exam.

UPDATE: isn't this timely? From today's fishwrap:

The backstory of this regrettably insider-baseball saga is that back in 2012 an inquest was held. The parents of a young woman were inclined to lay the blame for her death upon her Gardasil vaccinations, so they called in the Cluedo team of Drs Chris Shaw and Sin Hang Lee to run some uncontrolled tests and present their heterodox "Viral-DNA contamination, in the library, with the aluminium" theories of causation. And great was the revelling among vaccine alarmists.

Here at Riddled we do not rate for insider baseball, on account of the broken windows; it turns out to work better as an outdoors game. Anyway, various New Zealand doctors were too polite to say "This is all my bum" and found more diplomatic ways of expressing the same idea, which is why they were invited to testify at the inquest and I was not.

Coroner Garry Evans retired at the end of last year, but he must still be clearing his desk, and only now released his findings on the case. He does not even dignify Shaw and Lee's theories to the extent of citing them by name.