Tuesday, January 26, 2016

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

Click to embiggen
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 businessMilford 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,
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.

6 comments:

H. Rumbold, Master Barber said...

Only if they wheel out Jeremy Bentham's autoicon at the GBC conference.

Big Bad Bald Bastard said...

Heh, it's called Bentham Science because it involves bottom feeders.

rhwombat said...

Ah. Lyme Disease. My favourite. The Australian Senate (RWNJ subbranch) is holding enquiries into both Lyme Disease in Oz AND the health effects of wind farms:

Damn. Now the acolytes of Sen Corgi St Bernardi will not only uncover the massive conspiracy that many of us in the Infectious Diseases Super Secret Society have been conducting for 30 years to Deny The Truth About Lyme Disease, but they may also discover our other terrible secret: Wind Farm Dysphoria Syndrome (WFDS) is also a borreliosis.

Human disease caused by Borrelia alanjonesii has been endemic in Oz for at least 30 years, but it is only recently that many of the characteristic features of WFDS have been elucidated – and carefully concealed by publishing only in august journals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, The Lancet and the Manly and Northern Beaches Tick Fanciers Monthly (Lifestyle Supplement).

WFDS is characterised by a debilitating fatigue in the presence of cameras, an affluenza-like illness, aesthetic distress and vertigo experienced on sighting a wind turbine (static or rotating) on land not owned by the sufferer (“Hockey’s sign”) and a constant high pitched murmur, maximal at the rectum and radiating throughout the twittersphere. There is said to be a pathognomic migratory rash, known as Erythema Chronicum Taurofaeculomigrans, which occurs within minutes of sighting a turbine, spreads to the face, and fades immediately whenever a camera is focused on it. Reports of generalised arthralgia, sporadic somnambulism, autochthonous asthenia, proctagia fugax, malignant otitis interna, terminally irritable bowel syndrome, multiple hypersensitivities to non-organic and GMO products, chakra instability, total carbohydrate, fat and protein intolerance, turnip craving and lycanthropism have been made, though relative prevalence and incidence vary widely between postcodes, income bracket and exposure to shoutback radio.

Diagnostic testing is complicated by the fact that NATA accreditation interferes with all known serologic and nucleic acid testing in Australia. Overseas labs can confirm the diagnosis by a proprietary non-disclosable method that is reliable – provided sufficient funds are available
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Treatment has been controversial. Life-long treatment with at least 100 gm of ceftriaxone daily IV, homeopathic topical doxycycline (10 ^ – 23 gm Q every full moon), probiotic yogurt-derived GcMAF and Shamanic Past Life Detoxification Behavioral Counseling or a combination of these have been suggested (on the basis of strong level 5 evidence only) in the latest edition of Therapeutic Guidelines: Gullibility Disorders.

In the only clinical trial published (Shonk Y & Dodge IER, Journal of Orthomolecular Psychiatry, 2001, 15 (2) 3177-3179), a “borderline significant” advantage was found for treatment with large sums of CSG (“Fracking for life on the Liverpool Plains!”) Compensation Cash vs smaller sums of Adani (“Galilee Basin Coal is Delicious!”) Bank Guarantees, in an unblinded double-crossed single centre study of 2.5 Investment Bankers(...'coz there are some things rats won't do, etc) in a secret offshore location that was definitely not a PO Box in the Cayman Islands.

Transmission vectors remain unproven despite several moderate scale surveys to flag and culture the midgut of Ixodes nymphs, bandicoots and Ladies Who Lunch at Avalon Cafes. PCR surveys of the Byron Bay and Gold Coast hinterland have been confounded by the universal finding of strongly upregulated genes of the Affluence Related Social Enlightenment and Holistic Orthomolecular Lexus Entitlement complex in all potential vectors tested.

The pathogenesis of WFDS has been postulated to be due to infrasound of particular frequencies, making it the first spirocheatosis to attract its normal hosts (elephants and large cetaceans) by broadcasting a signal of a frequency determined by its rate of spin. Please note that this implies that humans are only intermediate hosts, and might explain the noted predilection for humans with a BMI >30 to develop WFDS.

Smut Clyde said...

RHWombat is good at this, and should be blogging.

rhwombat said...

rhwombat is a lazy bugger, who lacks the moral fibre and attention span to blog properly.

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