#tcr

[not-so-rosyyy]

I DID NOT KNOW...

that i needed Tom Holland in slicked-back hair with eyeliner wearing an open-button 70s shirt till I fucking saw it!!!!

#tcr #tcr spoilers #the crowded room #tom holland

[mostlysignssomeportents]

Uncle Sam paid to develop a cancer drug and now one guy will get to charge whatever he wants for it

Today (Oct 19), I'm in Charleston, WV to give the 41st annual McCreight Lecture in the Humanities. Tomorrow (Oct 20), I'm at Charleston's Taylor Books from 12h-14h.

The argument for pharma patents: making new medicines is expensive, and medicines are how we save ourselves from cancer and other diseases. Therefore, we will award government-backed monopolies – patents – to pharma companies so they will have an incentive to invest their shareholders' capital in research.

There's plenty wrong with this argument. For one thing, pharma companies use their monopoly winnings to sell drugs, not invent drugs. For every dollar pharma spends on research, it spends three dollars on marketing:

https://www.bu.edu/sph/files/2015/05/Pharmaceutical-Marketing-and-Research-Spending-APHA-21-Oct-01.pdf

And that "R&D" isn't what you're thinking of, either. Most R&D spending goes to "evergreening" – coming up with minor variations on existing drugs in a bid to extend those patents for years or decades:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3680578/

Evergreening got a lot of attention recently when John Green rained down righteous fire upon Johnson & Johnson for their sneaky tricks to prevent poor people from accessing affordable TB meds, prompting this excellent explainer from the Arm and A Leg Podcast:

https://armandalegshow.com/episode/john-green-part-1/

Another thing those monopoly profits are useful for: "pay for delay," where pharma companies bribe generic manufacturers not to make cheap versions of drugs whose patents have expired. Sure, it's illegal, but that doesn't stop 'em:

https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/topics/competition-enforcement/pay-delay

But it's their money, right? If they want to spend it on bribes or evergreening or marketing, at least some of that money is going into drugs that'll keep you and the people you love from enduring unimaginable pain or dying slowly and hard. Surely that warrants a patent.

Let's say it does. But what about when a pharma company gets a patent on a life-saving drug that the public paid to develop, test and refine? Publicly funded work is presumptively in the public domain, from NASA R&D to the photos that park rangers shoot of our national parks. The public pays to produce this work, so it should belong to the public, right?

That was the deal – until Congress passed the Bayh-Dole Act in 1980. Under Bayh-Dole, government-funded inventions are given away – to for-profit corporations, who get to charge us whatever they want to access the things we paid to make. The basis for this is a racist hoax called "The Tragedy Of the Commons," written by the eugenicist white supremacist Garrett Hardin and published by Science in 1968:

https://memex.craphound.com/2019/10/01/the-tragedy-of-the-commons-how-ecofascism-was-smuggled-into-mainstream-thought/

Hardin invented an imaginary history in which "commons" – things owned and shared by a community – are inevitably overrun by selfish assholes, a fact that prompts nice people to also overrun these commons, so as to get some value out of them before they are gobbled up by people who read Garrett Hardin essays.

Hardin asserted this as a historical fact, but he cited no instances in which it happened. But when the Nobel-winning Elinor Ostrom actually went and looked at how commons are managed, she found that they are robust and stable over long time periods, and are a supremely efficient way of managing resources:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/05/04/analytical-democratic-theory/#epistocratic-delusions

The reason Hardin invented an imaginary history of tragic commons was to justify enclosure: moving things that the public owned and used freely into private ownership. Or, to put it more bluntly, Hardin invented a pseudoscientific justification for giving away parks, roads and schools to rich people and letting them charge us to use them.

To arrive at this fantasy, Hardin deployed one of the most important analytical tools of modern economics: introspection. As Ely Devons put it: "If economists wished to study the horse, they wouldn’t go and look at horses. They’d sit in their studies and say to themselves, ‘What would I do if I were a horse?’"

https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/27/economism/#what-would-i-do-if-i-were-a-horse

Hardin's hoax swept from the fringes to the center and became received wisdom – so much so that by 1980, Senators Birch Bayh and Bob Dole were able to pass a law that gave away publicly funded medicine to private firms, because otherwise these inventions would be "overgrazed" by greedy people, denying the public access to livesaving drugs.

On September 21, the NIH quietly published an announcement of one of these pharmaceutical transfers, buried in a list of 31 patent assignments in the Federal Register:

https://public-inspection.federalregister.gov/2023-20487.pdf

The transfer in question is a patent for using T-cell receptors (TCRs) to treat solid tumors from HPV, one of the only patents for treating solid tumors with TCRs. The beneficiary of this transfer is Scarlet TCR, a Delaware company with no website or SEC filings and ownership shrouded in mystery:

https://www.bizapedia.com/de/scarlet-tcr-inc.html

One person who pays attention to this sort of thing is James Love, co-founder of Knowledge Ecology International, a nonprofit that has worked for decades for access to medicines. Love sleuthed out at least one person behind Scarlet TCR: Christian Hinrichs, a researcher at Rutgers who used to work at the NIH's National Cancer Institute:

https://www.nih.gov/research-training/lasker-clinical-research-scholars/tenured-former-scholars

Love presumes Hinrichs is the owner of Scarlet TCR, but neither the NIH nor Scarlet TCR nor Hinrichs will confirm it. Hinrichs was one of the publicly-funded researchers who worked on the new TCR therapy, for which he received a salary.

This new drug was paid for out of the public purse. The basic R&D – salaries for Hinrichs and his collaborators, as well as funding for their facilities – came out of NIH grants. So did the funding for the initial Phase I trial, and the ongoing large Phase II trial.

As David Dayen writes in The American Prospect, the proposed patent transfer will make Hinrichs a very wealthy man (Love calls it "generational wealth"):

https://prospect.org/health/2023-10-18-nih-how-to-become-billionaire-program/

This wealth will come by charging us – the public – to access a drug that we paid to produce. The public took all the risks to develop this drug, and Hinrichs stands to become a billionaire by reaping the rewards – rewards that will come by extracting fortunes from terrified people who don't want to die from tumors that are eating them alive.

The transfer of this patent is indefensible. The government isn't even waiting until the Phase II trials are complete to hand over our commonly owned science.

But there's still time. The NIH is about to get a new director, Monica Bertagnolli – Hinrichs's former boss – who will need to go before the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee for confirmation. Love is hoping that the confirmation hearing will present an opportunity to question Bertagnolli about the transfer – specifically, why the drug isn't being nonexclusively licensed to lots of drug companies who will have to compete to sell the cheapest possible version.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/19/solid-tumors/#t-cell-receptors

My next novel is The Lost Cause, a hopeful novel of the climate emergency. Amazon won't sell the audiobook, so I made my own and I'm pre-selling it on Kickstarter!

#pluralistic #pharma #incentives dont matter #incentives matter #drugs #uspto #nih #national institutes of health #cancer #patents #kei #knowledge ecology international #james love #jamie love #bayh-dole #bayh-dole act #tcr #scarlet tcr #t-cell receptor #Christian Hinrichs #entrepreneurial state #human papillomavirus #hpv #solid tumors #monopolies

[neverevan]

Tom Holland finally living up to his twink potential was not on my 2023 bingo card, but here we are.

#tom holland #the crowded room #tcr #my stuff #ramblings

[shellshocklove]

TOM HOLLAND the crowded room new york premiere

#a little late but the green suit opened button and the slutty chain was 🤌 #tom holland #the crowded room #tcr #tomhollandedit #tomhollandnet #marvelcastedit #mcucastedit #usersilk #userrajan #useraurore #mancandykings #fyeahspiderman #spideycentral #*gifs

[dehue]

Oh sweet parallels

#tomdaya #tom holland #zendaya #tcr #the crowded room #euphoria

[ayo-edebiri]

First look at Tom Holland as Danny Sullivan in the Crowded Room (2023)

#tom holland #thollandedit #byaurore #the crowded room #userbbelcher #userconstance #userjasmine #usersavana #tuserrobin #tuserrachel #tuserpris #userallisyn #nessa007 #noalook #userquel #userzo #usernani #tcr #tcr spoilers #every time i gif fast i have war flashbacks (sk*m france)

[ikemengoessbrrrrr]

Local creation discovered handphone

Small comic inspired from @catsafarithewriter incorecttcrquotes

#Baron and his rectangle #don't let him discovered tiktok or twitter #or even tumblr #agfsgfdgs #the cat returns #tcr #baron humbert von gikkingen #incorrecttcrquotes #tcr fanart

[hiemalice]

I hope everyone fangirling over tom holland’s new series The Crowded Room remembers that you are getting this cost at the lives of real fucking people living with DID. You are watching a romanticization of a man who threw the DID community under the bus by winning a case of “my alter did it” which people have spent decades fighting against. You are letting the man who turned the serial killer alter into reality, who turned this disorder’s stigma REAL.

I hope you know that while you’re excited for you celebrity crush’s new series, we are getting mocked and harassed by citizens and medical fields alike. That we are getting driven to suicide and being murdered because of the fearmongering. This is the cost that comes with it.

You have blood on your hands.

#tom holland #the crowded room #bad representation #mental health #mental illness #tcr #did osdd #dissociative identity disorder #jason isaacs #zendaya #tomdaya

[ghost-facess]

spot the difference (challenge impossible)

(inspired by recluseraven's post)

#the crowded room #tcr #danny sullivan #tom holland

[crazykuri]

#the crowded room #tcr #tom holland

[not-so-rosyyy]

TOM "work so hard honing your craft the haters can't even hate" HOLLAND 29th Critics' Choice Best Actor Nominee The Crowded Room

#tom holland #the crowded room #tomhollandnet #tomhollandedit #tcr #danny sullivan #tcr spoilers #cinemapix #cinematv #tvedit #tvandfilm #dailyflicks #spideycentral #mcucast #apple tv plus #apple tv

[introspectionissexy]

Adam Lanza: Animal Rights and Veganism

Created only as a resource for those interested in Adam's morality, not as glorification or positive reinforcement of his mind's workings.

Statements as spoken by Adam on his YouTube channel 'CulturalPhilistine' (2011-2012), regarding his views on Animal Rights and Veganism.

"The McDonalds corporation exploits animals. I’ve been a vegan since I was thirteen but it’s kind of … completely r*tarded to think that you’re actually accomplishing anything by not . . . being a vegan doesn’t mean that you do not harm animals, by living, by choosing life you are … it’s, life is innately harmful, life is innately coercive to everyone else..."

------(Pointless) CulturalPhilistine: The Movie {28 September 2011}

"I used to think it was a contradiction for people to say, um, that it was a contradiction for people to say that b*stiality somehow violated an animal’s rights and yet those same people, the same meateaters, would advocate factory-farming. And they didn’t think that violated animals” rights, when how could you possibly say that having sex with an animal violates its rights but killing the animals not? It didn’t make any sense to me."

------Rambling vlogrant of a ruminative vagrant {8 September 2011}

"'Two: It seems you’re always on some sort of diet?' By definition, yes."

------(Pointless) CulturalPhilistine: The Movie {28 September 2011}

Statements as written by Adam on the online forum 'Shocked Beyond Belief' under pseudonym 'Smiggles' (2009-2012), regarding his views on Animal Rights and Veganism.

------ {30 December 2009} (Vegan Cookie Recipe)

------ {26 February 2012}

------ {20 May 2011}

------ {16 August 2011} Context: A post was made accusing China of reportedly selling pills made from humans.

Statements taken from personal document "Me" on his private computer.

"I think I want her to be at least vegetarian."

------ Adam describing his ideal partner

"I need new: Non-leather chair Non-leather shoes Non-leather Swatch-band Non-lanolin supplement Non-lanolin sanitary wipes"

------ 'To-Do' list

#Adam Lanza #sandy hook #tcc #gun violence #Tumblr tcc #smiggles #Mass Killer #True crime #true crime community #TCR #True crime research

[destinyc1020]

This is AWESOME Tom as Danny/Ariana fan art! 🎨😃👌🏾

#fan art 🎨 #TCR #the crowded room #tom holland

[shellshocklove]

- I have these blank spots

TOM HOLLAND as DANNY SULLIVAN the crowded room | june 9th

#tom holland #the crowded room #tomhollandnet #tcr #usersilk #userrajan #useraurore #userjasmine #filmtv #cinematv #tvedit #smallscreensource #dailyflicks #userconstance #usersavana #tuserrobin #usernani #userrobin #userbbelcher #*gifs

[peraltuki]

Imagine you're in the middle of the woods with a psycho who won't stop asking you if you'll go to his fourth of july party or if you want to bang your best friend. Worst coming out of the centuries like

#Ronan said yes i like men STOP ANNOYING ME #tcr #the raven cycle #the raven boys #the dream thieves #the dreamer trilogy #joseph kavinsky #ronan lynch

[tzthrowbacks]

it's giving :

#😭 #tom holland #the crowded room #tcr