Succor or suckers? Benefit, risk, and the therapeutic misconception
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction Patients with undiagnosed glioblastoma multiforme – an advanced form of brain cancer – typically arrive at the doctor's office complaining of headaches and weakness; a good many might also have experienced a seizure. Within a year, approximately half will be dead. Progress against glioblastoma has been halting, and even modest improvements in treatment, like a median extension of survival of two and a half months, are greeted as breakthroughs. And so it was that, in 1992, a 51-year-old woman, whose husband was a prominent lawyer and chair of the board of the San Diego Cancer Center, was diagnosed with glioblastoma. Conventional therapies were unsuccessful in controlling her disease, and the woman sought enrollment in a gene-transfer study being planned at the San Diego Cancer Center. The problem was that the protocol had not yet been reviewed by the RAC, which met every three months; the patient was expected to live no more than two. A former client of the woman's husband knew Iowa's Senator Harkin, and offered to contact him to see whether political pressure might be brought to bear. Shortly thereafter, Harkin forwarded a letter to NIH head Bernadine Healy requesting that she waive normal RAC review, though the developer of the intervention, Ivor Royston, had previously stated that he was “not optimistic that this therapy will work for his patient.” RAC members bristled at Healy's involvement; they furthermore considered the supporting preclinical data insufficient to justify the protocol.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.010 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".