DrJimOlson

Easy to ignore. All of my colleagues would love to be put out of business. Sit at the bedside of one dying child and there's no room for anything but impatience at the speed of discovery.

Fortunately, patients aren't dying all the time. When I was a kid, less than 5% of kids with cancer survived to adult hood. Now we are approaching 80%!!! That's one of the great, somewhat unknown, advances in medicine in the last century! Honestly, my team and I have a blast in clinic most Wednesdays. The kids and their families are full of life and we're all in it together. Sometimes the families and our team are laughing so loud, the other doctors need to ask us to quiet down a bit.

I know right? We're busting our ass to pay for bona fide scientists (who get paid very little given their level of education) and someone just invokes a conspiracy theory and brings in millions.

A team at University of Alabama showed that a scorpion venom peptide bound to brain cancer cells - they thought it was binding to calcium channels, but were wrong - I felt that scorpions would have had millions of years to get it right - meaning a drug that crosses into the brain, so we decided to go for it. Sometimes even wrong information leads you to the right place.

I've never even touched a scorpion. We just need their DNA sequence, which we get from sources on the internet. Theoretically, we could create drug candidates from species that are extinct, if other scientists find intact DNA and sequence it!