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[randomchef]

i heard a piece about this on my way home from dropping off jon at work. basically, prof at uni of buffalo has discovered that tarantula venom can help treat such maladies as incontinence, heart arrhythmias, and muscular dystrophy. when asked if he had any drug companies interested in funding further research, he said that since there are "only" a

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[donut_fiend]

A friend of my brother-in-law's suffers from MD. He started at SFU a year after I did, and I'd see him walking around now and then with a cane. He exercised extensively to prevent muscle atrophy as much as he could. By the time I graduated, he'd had to cut his course load and sometimes was confined to a wheelchair. That was about four years ago. The last I heard was that he was pretty much housebound. It's pretty sick that a disease that is that debilitating, that there could be a cure or effective treatment for it, but there isn't enough money in it to make research worthwhile. Sick, sick, sick.

Banting and the rest of the team that discovered insulin, rather than seeking a patent, sold the rights to their formulation to University of Toronto for $1 as a means of ensuring that insulin could be affordably manufactured for years to come. Wouldn't it be nice if more people would do that?