Re: Mmmm, Tastes Like Antibodies

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I think pharma-food is one of the coolest ideas I've ever heard of; one constantly hears stories about poor people dying from diseases that simply don't exist for us anymore b/c there is no inexpensive vaccine delivery system.

I'm sure that there are ways that this can go wrong, but ... unbelievably cool.

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2

Interestingly, I just heard a Merck pharmaflak on the BBC World Service talking about an HPV vaccine as a partial replacement for lost revenue from Vioxx. Nothing about potatoes as a delivery system - talk about an Atkins-unfriendly neutraceutical.

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3

Screw this! I want calorie free oil for potato chips!

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4

They have calorie free oil for potato chips. Or they did. It was some soybean oil, I think, that had been modified to be indegestable. I'm not sure if it's still on the market. Tasted really, really bad. I think it was called Oleander - no thats a poisonous flower . . . can't rememeber.

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5

Olestra.

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Which allegedly has bad effects on the digestive system, though Proctor and Gamble denies this.

I was at a party once with fortune-cookie-style slips of pomes from the Olestra Haiku page; now sadly gone. Some remnants here but not my favorite:

Daughter envious

of mother's clean underwear;

Olestra complex.

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7

HPB vaccine as replacement for Vioxx revenue? This sounds more like gene therapy - Merck execs eat GE potatoes to recieve a much needed capital infusion . . .

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8

Mark - the pharmaflak was talking about HPV, not HPB. The pitch was that it was not only something that just about everyone has, but as a way of preventing cervical cancer (a noble end.)

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9

The introduction of Olean produced a phrase that is as nauseating as "titties" is unsexy. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in saying, "Anal leakage."

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