23 State Attorneys General support concealed carry reciprocity

Here is the text of a letter to congressional leaders from the Attorney General of Missouri signed by 23 state Attorneys General supporting constitutional concealed carry reciprocity.
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As the chief legal officers of our States, we, the undersigned 23 state Attorneys General, write in support of the Constitutional Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 (S. 446) and the Concealed Carry Reciprocity Act of 2017 (H.R. 38). We share a strong interest in the protection of our citizens’ Second Amendment right to keep and bear arms, and we are committed to supporting federal and state policies to preserve that constitutional right. These bills, if enacted, would eliminate significant obstacles to the exercise of the right to keep and bear arms for millions of Americans in every State.

The Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution provides an individual right to own and carry a firearm for self-defense. The Amendment states that “[a] well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” U.S. Const. amend. II. As the Supreme Court recognized in District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 592 (2008), the Second Amendment “guarantee[s] the individual right to possess and carry weapons in case of confrontation.” Indeed, “individual self-defense is ‘the central component’ of the Second Amendment right.” McDonald v. City of Chicago, 561 U.S. 742, 767 (2010) (quoting Heller, 554 U.S. at 599).

The core interest protected by this right is self-defense by law-abiding citizens. This right therefore extends to weapons “in common use” and “typically possessed by law-abiding citizens for lawful purposes.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 624–25, 627 (quoting United States v. Miller, 307 U.S. 174, 179 (1939)).

The Second Amendment historically has guaranteed the right to carry firearms outside the home for self-defense. In Heller, the Supreme Court relied on the preeminent authority on English law for the founding generation, William Blackstone, who explained that the right to self-defense, codified by the framers in the Second Amendment, was an “individual right protecting against both public and private violence.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 594 (citations omitted). As Justices Thomas and Gorsuch have written, “‘[s]elf-defense has to take place wherever the person happens to be,’ and in some circumstances a person may be more vulnerable in a public place than in his own house.” Peruta v. California, 137 S. Ct. 1995, 1998–99 (2017) (Thomas, J., and Gorsuch, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari) (quoting Eugene Volokh, Implementing the Right to Keep and Bear Arms for Self– Defense: An Analytical Framework and a Research Agenda, 56 UCLA L. REV. 1443, 1515 (2009)). 

To be sure, the right to carry firearms for self-defense is not unlimited, and the Supreme Court has stated that its decisions do not cast doubt on the “longstanding prohibitions on the possession of firearms by felons and the mentally ill, or laws forbidding the carrying of firearms in sensitive places such as schools and government buildings, or laws imposing conditions and qualifications on the commercial sale of arms.” Heller, 554 U.S. at 626–27. But these exceptions all assume that the right to carry a weapon in self-defense applies in public places generally.

The Second Amendment, moreover, applies to both the Federal Government and the States. The Second Amendment is a right “fundamental to our scheme of ordered liberty,” and so it applies not just to the Federal Government but also to the States under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. McDonald, 561 U.S. at 767; see also Caetano v. Massachusetts, 136 S. Ct. 1027, 1027 (2016) (per curiam).

Nevertheless, some activist courts have held that the Second Amendment has no application at all outside the home, and thus have upheld state laws banning any firearm ownership outside the home. See, e.g., Peruta v. California, 137 S. Ct. 1995, 1997, 1999 (2017) (Thomas, J. and Gorsuch, J., dissenting from the denial of certiorari) (collecting cases); e.g., Williams v. State, 10 A.3d 1167, 1177 (Md. 2011); Mack v. United States, 6 A.3d 1224, 1236 (D.C. 2010). Further, ten states refuse to recognize any out-of-state concealed carry permits, and many more refuse to recognize out-of-state concealed carry permits unless certain conditions are met.

The citizen interest in self-defense, supported and protected by the Second Amendment, is called into serious question by such blanket refusals to permit carrying firearms in self-defense outside the home or to allow non-resident visitors to carry concealed weapons. Because some States refuse to give the Second Amendment its full import, Congress should enact concealed-carry reciprocity legislation, to help implement and enforce the constitutional right to self-defense for millions of law-abiding Americans across the country.

Climate change theory that makes sense

Here is a link to a Youtube presentation by Henrik Svensmark.

An important, credible climate change theory.

Those who accuse others of being "Climate Deniers" cannot be trusted to be objective.

Self-learning computer program supreme at games - what next?

Here is a link to a paper "Mastering Chess and Shogi by Self-Play with a General Reinforcement Learning Algorithm.

The significance of this algorithm goes well beyond games to many aspects of human activity.

Here is the paper's abstract.  Keep in mind that previous world champion chess programs are superior to the best human Chess Masters.
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The game of chess is the most widely-studied domain in the history of artificial intelligence. The strongest programs are based on a combination of sophisticated search techniques, domain-specific adaptations, and handcrafted evaluation functions that have been refined by human experts over several decades. In contrast, the AlphaGo Zero program recently achieved superhuman performance in the game of Go, by tabula rasa reinforcement learning from games of self-play. In this paper, we generalise this approach into a single AlphaZero algorithm that can achieve, tabula rasa, superhuman performance in many challenging domains. Starting from random play, and given no domain knowledge except the game rules, AlphaZero achieved within 24 hours a superhuman level of play in the games of chess and shogi (Japanese chess) as well as Go, and convincingly defeated a world-champion program in each case.

Is the Sea Level Stable at Aden, Yemen?

This link is to a paper by Parker and Ollier.

Some reports show a rising sea level trend at Aden and Yemen.  P&O say that this is likely due to questionable statistical adjustments. Their conclusion follows.
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The tide gauge record of Aden is a composite derived from 5 distinctive sets of measurements, with the historical data, comprising 4 of these sets, ending in 1969, and the novel measurements with a new tide gauge, starting in 2007. By revising the alignment of the data up to 1969, and neglecting the misaligned new measurements, the sea levels are only very weekly rising at − 0.05 to 0.24 mm/year in Aden over the 20th century.

In Mumbai, the tide gauge record is the composite of 3 distinctive sets of measurements, with the historical data, comprising 2 of these sets, ending in 1994, and the novel measurements with a new tide gauge, starting in 2005. By revising the alignment of the data up to 1994, and neglecting the misaligned new measurements, the sea levels are perfectly stable over the 20th century.

In Karachi, the tide gauge record is the composite of 4 distinctive sets of measurements, with the historical data, comprising 3 of these sets, ending in 1995, and the novel measurements with a new tide gauge, starting in 2007. By revising the alignment of all the data, the sea levels were previously shown in Parker (2016) to be weekly increasing at +0.18 mm/year over the twentieth century.

The sea levels have, therefore, been stable in Aden, as at Karachi and Mumbai, over all the 20th century.

These and other key sites of the Indian Ocean indicate a stable sea level of about zero mm/year over the last 50 years, as shown in Mörner (2007, 2010, 2014, 2015a, b, 2016a, b), Parker and Ollier (2015) and Parker (2016).

We are doomed

Here is an article from the Wall Street Journal, by Eli Stopkols.

It seems that too many young people do not understand that Capitalism offers a higher standard of living and more freedom than Socialism, the latter being well known for ruining economies and tyranny.  A simple test of economic and civil liberty understanding is to ask someone which they prefer.

There also seems to be a lack of understanding that power leads to corruption, and that Socialism puts more power in fewer hands than Capitalism - hence leads to more corruption - or that the competition fostered by Capitalism tends to reduce the opportunities for corruption.

Too many people also view more inequality as synonymous with more poverty. Which is better, more inequality with a higher standard of living for all or less inequality with a lower standard of living for some?  Another misconception about inequality is that it reflects some taking advantage of others.  Virtually no one appreciates that random walks produce increasing inequality, hence that it is a normal outcome of a "fair playing field".  For example, if all people start with the same income and income for each person has the same positive trend growth rate plus an identical independent random element, then there will be increasing income inequality over time.

We are doomed to in increasingly inefficient economy and further loss of freedom due to economic dumbth.
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ELON, N.C.—John Della Volpe, who has been polling millennials for 17 years, stood before about 150 students in a gleaming new center at Elon University this fall in search of an answer.

In his 2016 survey for Harvard University’s Institute of Politics, 42% of younger Americans said they support capitalism, and only 19% identified themselves as capitalists. While this was a new question in his survey, the low percentage of young people embracing capitalism surprised him. He had come here, in part, to better understand why.

“Maybe it had to do with the ‘American Dream,’ and how capitalism was correlated with it, but a lot of young people don’t believe in it anymore,” said Ana Garcia, a junior at the Elon event. “We don’t trust capitalism because we don’t see ourselves getting ahead.”

Largely because of such millennials, generally those born in the 1980s and 1990s, socialism has moved from being a taboo because of its associations with the Cold War to something that has found rising appeal among those polled by Harvard and in other surveys that compared different generations.

Grace Magness, an Elon freshman, has experienced the shift firsthand. Her great grandfather, she said, was named Eugene Debs after the labor leader who ran for president five times for the Socialist Party at the turn of the 20th century. “He was so embarrassed about it when he was older that he would never introduce himself using his full name,” Ms. Magness said.

For her, she says, “socialism has gotten less spooky; it’s no longer associated with communism the way it was.” She adds: “straight-up capitalism seems like it has a lot of potential to be really corrupt.”

Young people across the generations tend to be viewed as more left-leaning than their elders. Underlying the millennial generation’s leftward tilt is angst about the future, Mr. Della Volpe said. In a new smaller Harvard survey, released Tuesday, 67% of those polled said they are more worried than hopeful about the direction of the country. The fall survey sampled 2,037 peopled aged 18 to 29 in live interviews.

“If something unites these young people,” Mr. Della Volpe said, “it’s fear,” driven by their perception that they have limited economic opportunities and that society as a whole has become more unequal.

The 2016 poll also found that the millennial generation is less religious than their parents and losing faith in institutions—a finding consistent with other polls that track some of that loss of faith to the slow recovery from the deep recession that began in 2008.

“Every new group of voters is disproportionally affected by whatever was salient when they were growing up,” said Celinda Lake, a long-time Democratic pollster. “That’s led this group to be really cynical about institutions: military, government.”

In the view of Kristen Soltis Anderson, a Republican pollster and the author of, “The Selfie Vote: Where Millennials Are Leading America and How Republicans Can Keep Up,” the idea that young people tend to be liberal and become more conservative with age is misguided. “The oldest millennials are actually the most left-leaning,” she said. “If you came of age, graduated college and were job hunting around the time of the financial crisis, you might be asking, What have free markets done for you? The easy rhetoric that ‘markets are bad, government is bad’ is appealing.”

The Harvard survey has polled roughly 1,000 respondents between 18 and 29 years old annually since 2001. The sample size has grown over time. In the spring 2016 survey, it was a measure of nearly 3,200 people. The survey has a margin of error of 2.5 percentage points.

Still, millennials polled say they want a bigger role for government in making conditions better for their future. The number of young people who believe that tax cuts spark economic growth, which had held fairly steady for years, fell seven points over the past two years, according to the 2016 Harvard survey.

The AP provides another example of how media pushes an anti-gun agenda

John Lott in The Hill.  Lott is the President of the Crime Prevention Research Center.
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It is usually pretty hard to definitively identify media bias. Often pressed for time, reporters are just unaware of opposing opinions or facts. And there is no way for readers to tell what information has been left out. But an Associated Press article, which appeared in hundreds of papers from the Los Angeles Times to the Houston Chronicle, provided a unique peek at how the media selectively picks anti-gun information in order to push for gun control.

The Associated Press article edited-down a 441-word version of a longer, 1,000-word article that appeared in the Indianapolis Star and a quote from the Fort Wayne Journal Gazette. While the original articles in the Star and Journal Gazette were balanced, the AP cut down the piece by systematically excluding one side of the argument — any information that concealed handgun permit holders are law-abiding and don’t pose a risk to others.

The AP article was concerned with Indiana’s decision to allow legislators and staff to legally carry concealed handguns inside the state Capitol. It’s the 21st state to officially allow carrying of handguns in some fashion at the Capitol. The Star gave a little more information, noting that Indiana is one of just two states that restricts concealed-carry to lawmakers and their staffs when inside the Capitol. The other 19 states allow permitted citizens to carry in a wide variety of places.

The AP included quotes from four people. “It’s a constitutional right,” said Republican state Rep. Jim Lucas, one of the new law's sponsors. “Everyone’s right to protection should be recognized.”

The other three people went on record as concerned about the dangers of allowing civilians to have guns in the state capitol.

• “The possibility of the presence of firearms during tense personnel situations would worry human resources professionals,” said Christopher Schrader, government affairs director for Indiana State Council of Society of Human Resource Management.

• Republican House Majority Leader Matt Lehman understood the desire to have guns for self-defense, but supported limitations on people carrying because, he said, in “confrontational [situations] someone might respond irrationally.”

• The AP article concluded with an ominous quote from Democratic Rep. Phil GiaQuinta. The representative was worried about permit holders “intimidating” others and that a permit holder may misuse his gun because “tempers can fly at night.”

Is it reasonable to be concerned that people may misuse their guns? Certainly. But only the original article in the Indianapolis Star provided another perspective on these concerns. It cited a report by the Crime Prevention Research Center, an organization that I head:

On state government grounds across the country, the Crime Prevention Research Center hasn’t found any instances of injuries due to firearms….

The Crime Prevention Research Center has tracked only two instances in the nation where a handgun misfired in a statehouse and a handful of instances where lawmakers temporarily misplaced their weapons.

The AP also ignored that the Journal Gazette cited the same Crime Prevention Research Center report to note how rare any problems were. The Journal Gazette went so far as to note my organization’s “goal is to provide an objective and accurate scientific evaluation of the costs and benefits of gun ownership.”

Could space limitations explain the AP’s decision to only use quotes that point to potential dangers from law-abiding people carrying concealed handguns? The AP could have easily replaced one of the quotes with this information. The three people’s quotes took 53, 66, and 52 words, respectively. The entire quote about the Crime Prevention Search Center took only 52 words.

Instead, the AP pushed only the narrative that concealed handgun permit holders pose a danger to others.

But states have had concealed carry laws for decades. Six states even allow concealed carrying in state capitols without permits, and eight states allow people to openly carry their guns. There have been zero reported problems with non-legislators and non-staff being able to carry on statehouse grounds.

And permit holders are extremely law-abiding. While the U.S. population commits misdemeanors and felonies at a rate 37 times higher than police, police are convicted of misdemeanors and felonies at about six times the average rate for concealed handgun permit holders in Florida and Texas.

The Associated Press has quite a reach. Its article also created a misimpression for at least some Canadians. Based on the AP article, Russell Wangersky wrote a piece for 39 Canadian newspapers about the dangers posed by permitted concealed handgun holders. I contacted Wangersky after I noticed that he had accidentally confused Illinois and Indiana, and, unlike the AP, he was honest enough to update his piece with this note:

The error was not without value — I received a note from the president of the Crime Prevention Research Center, John Lott, not only pointing out that mistake, but suggesting that I hadn’t told the whole story, in that in the 20 other states that allow the practice, there have not been any recorded weapons injuries or deaths as a result. Every piece of a debate informs the result.

The debate on guns would be very different if the national news media would report on some of the dozens of mass public shootings that have been stopped by concealed handgun permit holders. The media would also change public opinion if it reported on how virtually all mass public shootings take place in areas where citizens are banned from possessing firearms for protection.

Rarely is there such clear evidence of biased self-censorship by a news organization. The AP portrayed concealed handgun permit holders as a danger to others while editing out information showing that no such danger exists.

The road to tyranny is paved with making it easy to get the bad guys

Jonathan Turley gets it right again.

People ignore the unavoidable tradeoff between making it easy for the government to get the bad guys and loss of freedom.
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The cellphone is rapidly becoming the most universal accessory among human beings anywhere in the world. The expansion of its use and capability has made the cellphone not just a communications device but the planner, personal computer, mapping mechanism and record storage device for most people.

It has another function that most people do not fully appreciate: tracking device. The use of the cellphone as a surveillance tool is at the heart of a major privacy case heard by the Supreme Court this week in Carpenter v. United States. At issue may be the very future of privacy in America. This argument is occurring almost 50 years to the day that the court issued its historic decision in Katz v. United States, which established the current test for privacy. The question is whether the court will celebrate that anniversary with a new ruling effectively gutting privacy for future generations.

The great burden of civil liberties is that we often must fight for our most cherished principles in defense of the least redeeming persons. As is often the case, this controversy starts with a thoroughly unsympathetic character: Timothy Ivory Carpenter, who was the ringleader of a gang accused of a series of robberies including, ironically, the robbery of cellphone stores in and around Detroit. The gang valued smartphones and so did the police. The police asked cellphone carriers to track Carpenter’s phone for 127 days. The companies supplied 12,898 tracking locations from Carpenter’s movements, including locations near the robberies. He was arrested and eventually given 116 years.

Privacy and technology has always been locked in an existential struggle. The Supreme Court has repeatedly (and rather dim wittedly) adopted privacy protections that were tied to fixed technological capability. Technology quickly made a mockery of such protections. For example, the court adopted the “trespass doctrine” in 1928 as the core protection of privacy of the Fourth Amendment, requiring a warrant for any surveillance involving trespass on a target’s person or property. Advances soon made the ill-conceived doctrine irrelevant as the government adopted forms of surveillance like laser-window pickups, parabolic microphones, and other devices that could place citizens under surveillance without touching their homes or property.

The Supreme Court responded in December 1967 with what many consider to be one of its greatest and most eloquent decisions in Katz. That case rejected the trespass doctrine and declared that “the Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.” The decision reversed a long erosion of privacy protection and required greater use of warrants by the government. Under the Katz test, warrants are needed when there is a “reasonable expectation of privacy” by a citizen. However, that test planted the seed for its own demise. The danger is that, as forms of surveillance increase, particularly with private surveillance in workplaces, businesses and homes, our expectations fall. As expectations falls, warrantless surveillance increases further in a vicious cycle that continues to lower privacy protections.

The fact is that my students live in a surveillance-saturated environment and have a fraction of the privacy protections that my generation enjoyed. The Carpenter case shows how flimsy our laws have become in protecting privacy, a trend that has been accelerated by both Democrats and Republicans in Congress who see little advantage in defending privacy over new police powers. Thus, in this case, the police simply avoided asking a judge for a warrant with a showing of probable cause. Notably, probable cause itself is relatively easy to establish and warrants are rarely denied. In this case, it would have been quickly granted. Instead, the police demanded the information under the Stored Communications Act, which requires only a showing that there were “reasonable grounds to believe” that the records sought “are relevant and material to an ongoing criminal investigation.”

Notably, the government is relying on the 1979 decision in Smith v. Maryland, which is itself based on a technological relic. In that case, the court ruled that there is no expectation of privacy in phone numbers because we all “give” the numbers to a third party (the telephone company) to make calls. It is an anachronistic view that raises the image of a switchboard operator as opposed to computerized systems that merely transmit and connect numbers. Yet, the government is arguing that cellphones are no different in “sharing” a signal with companies like AT&T. This ignores that consumers have little choice. Moreover, even under the myth of the Smith case, there is no active sending of the signal for a cellphone user. It is part of this ubiquitous technology. If you have a cellphone, it emits this signal. The government wants the court to treat the use of a cellphone as a type of waiver of privacy.

In 2012, the Supreme Court resisted the encroachment of technological advances in United States v. Jones, when it ruled that police need a warrant to attach a GPS tracker on a car. Now, however, the government can negate that case by just using the cellphone inside the car to achieve that same result. Indeed, the case could negate a host of rulings in allowing the government to follow you within buildings, despite a 2011 ruling barring the warrantless use of thermal devices for such purposes.

The government hopes that the “third-party” mythology will drive a stake into the heart of privacy protections under Katz and these other cases. The fact that a warrant would have been easy to obtain in this case is both telling and chilling. Historically, governments have resisted any limitations on their power even when those limitations are workable and reasonable. Yet, it is not always easy to get a free people to surrender their privacy. To do so, citizens are fed false tradeoffs between privacy and security despite the fact that courts overwhelmingly approve warrants. Indeed, technology has made it faster and easier to obtain warrants by telephone and email.

Members of both parties have yielded to the demands for greater and greater surveillance power. They know that they are rarely given credit for defending privacy but could be blamed for not being sufficiently tough on crime or terrorism. For them, the choice is easy. For the rest of us, it is far more serious. If successful, most citizens will not only be practically forced to carry around a government surveillance device but will literally pay for the privilege. Make no mistake. To paraphrase the AT&T slogan, the government is on the verge of “rethinking possible” under the Fourth Amendment and could force the rest of us to rethink privacy in America.

Concealed handgun permit holders have stopped mass public shootings and other mass attacks.

Here is a link to John Lott's Crime Prevention Research Center website.

Concealed handgun permit holders save lives.

Compiling Cases where concealed handgun permit holders have stopped mass public shootings and other mass attacks

Cancer drug starts clinical trials in human brain-cancer patients

From Science Daily.
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A drug that spurs cancer cells to self-destruct has been cleared for use in a clinical trial of patients with anaplastic astrocytoma, a rare malignant brain tumor, and glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive late-stage cancer of the brain. This phase Ib trial will determine if the experimental drug PAC-1 can be used safely in combination with a standard brain-cancer chemotherapy drug, temozolomide.

The trial is approved for patients who have seen their cancer progress after first-line therapy. This is an extension of an ongoing human phase I clinical trial of PAC-1 alone in patients with various late-stage cancers. Phase I trials are designed to test the safety of new drugs in human patients.

PAC-1 is unusual in that it is able to cross the blood-brain barrier, a formidable obstacle to most anti-cancer drugs. The drug targets procaspase-3, an enzyme that is overexpressed in many cancer cells, said University of Illinois chemistry professor Paul Hergenrother, who discovered PAC-1's anti-cancer effects more than a decade ago. After tests in human cell lines and rodents proved promising, Hergenrother and veterinary oncologist Dr. Timothy Fan, a professor of veterinary clinical medicine at Illinois, tested PAC-1 in pet dogs with a variety of naturally occurring cancers.

"Most cancers have elevated levels of procaspase-3," Hergenrother said. "When it is turned on, procaspase-3 kills cells."

Cancer cells override this normal cell-recycling pathway, however, he said.

"PAC-1 restores the activation of procaspase-3 and, because this enzyme is elevated in cancer cells, targets cancer cells over noncancerous cells," he said.

PAC-1 has been evaluated in pet dogs with naturally occurring osteosarcoma, lymphoma and, most recently, glioma -- a brain cancer similar to glioblastoma in humans. One 2016 study found that the combination of PAC-1 with doxorubicin, a chemotherapeutic agent that also is used in humans, saw tumor reductions in four of four dogs with lymphoma and in three of six dogs with osteosarcoma. The trials in dogs continue and, so far, have found PAC-1 to be safe, with few observable side effects apart from occasional gastrointestinal distress. The researchers report their latest findings in rodents and in dogs with brain cancer in the journal Oncotarget.

Dogs with certain naturally occurring cancers may be better than other animal models of human cancers because mice and rats used in many cancer drug-testing models must be implanted with human cancer cells to mimic specific types of tumors, Fan said.

"This requires that the rodents be immunocompromised to mitigate rejection of human cells," he said. "As such, most rodent tumor models do not faithfully recapitulate the tumor microenvironment -- in particular, the body's immune surveillance of the tumor.

"Rodent models are limited, but they are still useful," Fan said.

Certain cancers in dogs are genetically similar to those in humans and respond to the same medications. Dogs also are more similar in size to humans, and so can be better models to evaluate how well drug agents perform on larger tumor masses.

"I look at pets with spontaneous tumors as being complementary to rodent models and recognize that not all discoveries in pet dogs will necessarily translate similarly to people," Fan said.

The ongoing clinical trial of PAC-1 in human patients with late-stage solid tumors and lymphoma has shown that the drug is well-tolerated at tested doses up to 450 milligrams per day, said medical oncologist Dr. Arkadiusz Dudek, who chairs an advisory board for Vanquish Oncology, which is funding the clinical trials.

The extension of the phase I trial to brain-cancer patients will begin with a PAC-1 dose of 375 mg per day and will increase the dose incrementally to test its safety in combination with the standard brain-cancer chemotherapy agent, temozolomide, he said.

So far, the clinical trials of PAC-1 alone have seen no significant side effects in humans. None of the human patients in the first five dose levels of the single-agent trial has dropped out as a result of side effects, the researchers report. The team cannot report on clinical outcomes in a phase I clinical trial, since such trials are designed to measure safety, not efficacy.

Surgery is a first-line therapy for anaplastic astrocytoma, followed by treatment with temozolomide, a chemotherapy drug that is one of the few effective treatments for brain cancer, Dudek said. Humans with glioblastoma multiforme usually undergo surgery to remove as much of the cancerous tissue as possible, followed by radiation and oral treatment with temozolomide.

It is almost impossible to find and remove all glioblastoma cancer cells in surgery, however, Dudek said.

"Glioblastoma multiforme has this feature of spreading silently along the blood vessels inside the brain," he said. "That's a reason why most patients will unfortunately have disease coming back later on after surgery and radiation."

The median survival time for human patients with glioblastoma undergoing the standard treatment is about 15 months.

The three dogs in the glioma trial received daily oral doses of PAC-1 in combination with temozolomide and "curative-intent" radiation.

Temozolomide is normally too expensive to use in canine patients, Fan said. The dogs tolerated the combination treatment very well and responded well to the therapy, he said.

"All three dogs had, at the very least, what we call a partial response, which means more than a 30 percent reduction in the tumor," he said. "And one of the dogs had a complete response, as identified with serial MRI scans, with a 100 percent reduction in the tumor mass 84 days after combination therapy."

Fan said a much larger study in dogs would be needed to determine whether the therapeutic effects were consistent and reproducible, and to quantify how much PAC-1 contributed to the positive results.

Vanquish Oncology, a drug-development startup company Hergenrother helped found in 2011, has licensed the technology from the University of Illinois and is focused on moving PAC-1 into the clinic. As with any investigational agent, determining the true safety and efficacy profile of PAC-1 will take several years of human clinical trials.

An example of the importance of considering tradeoffs

Matt Ridley's blog entry "Beware The Fall Armyworm" shows the consequences of failing to consider tradeoffs.

Yes, beware the fall Armyworm - but also beware single issue thinking.
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An even more dangerous foe than Robert Mugabe is stalking Africa. Early last year, a moth caterpillar called the fall armyworm, a native of the Americas, turned up in Nigeria. It has quickly spread across most of Africa. This is fairly terrifying news, threatening to undo some of the unprecedented improvements in African living standards of the past two decades. Many Africans depend on maize for food, and maize is the fall armyworm’s favourite diet.

Fortunately, there is a defence to hand. Bt maize, grown throughout the Americas for many years, is resistant to insects. The initials stand for a bacterium that produces a protein toxic to insects but not to people. Organic farmers have been using the bacterium as a pesticide for more than five decades, but it is expensive. Bt maize has the protein inside the plant, thanks to genetic engineers, who took a gene from the bacterium and put it in the plant.
Bt maize has largely saved Brazil’s maize crop from fall armyworms.

However, influenced by European environmentalists, most African countries forbid the growing of genetically modified crops. This is a pity, because unless they change their attitude fast, they will face the prospect of using far more pesticides, which small-scale farmers cannot afford, and which come with environmental and safety risks, or suffering famine, relieved by expensive imports of food.

Fortunately, inch by inch Africa is changing its mind on biotech crops, though only South Africa has approved Bt maize. Nigeria, Uganda, Ethiopia and Kenya are slowly changing their legislation. But bureaucrats with empires to build keep putting roadblocks in the way of change, and environmental pressure groups are campaigning to undermine the efforts.

Some years ago I spoke to the leaders of a large charity working with African farmers and asked them why they did not come out in support of biotechnology. They replied that they dared not do so for fear of retribution from the big environmental pressure groups, such as Greenpeace, for which opposition to biotechnology is a totemic issue when fundraising in Europe.

Money came before humanity, in other words. Greenpeace’s former director, Stephen Tindale, changed his mind about biotechnology and said two years ago, before his death: “I worry for Greenpeace and the other green groups because they could, by taking such a hard line . . . be seen to be putting ideology before the need for humanitarian action.”

Last year 129 winners of the Nobel prize signed a letter, saying: “We urge Greenpeace and its supporters to re-examine the experience of farmers and consumers worldwide with crops and foods improved through biotechnology.” Yet Greenpeace remains opposed to biotech crops. The European Parliament also voted to accept a Green Party report arguing against involvement in a new international agricultural technology initiative in Africa because of the involvement of biotech firms. A Kenyan farmer, Gilbert Arap Bor, wrote: “They want us to remain agricultural primitives, stuck with technologies that were antiquated even before we entered the 21st century.”

More than half of the two billion people who will be added to the world’s population by 2050 will be Africans. Yet feeding the continent’s growing population, largely from African farms, is possible. And, like Asia before it, Africa can initially prosper through agriculture more than any other industry, but only if there is a green revolution of farming modernisation comparable to what happened in Asia in the Sixties.

The average yield of an African maize crop is less than a quarter of that of a North American crop, even before the effect of the fall armyworm. This is largely down to a lack of fertilisers, pesticides, hybrid seeds and biotechnology, and frequent drought. Hybrid seeds alone, produced by conventional breeding, can deliver improvements in yield of 20 to 30 per cent, I’m told. Drought-resistant varieties, also conventionally produced, can double the yield. But neither helps against the fall armyworm.

The African Agricultural Technology Foundation is co-ordinating a public-private partnership called Water Efficient Maize for Africa (Wema). Its aim is to develop drought-tolerant and insect-protected maize using both biotechnology and modern techniques of conventional breeding. Its first product, a drought-tolerant, white maize hybrid seed, was delivered to farmers in Kenya four years ago. It resulted in a harvest of 4.5 tons per hectare, compared with 1.8 tons normally. The Wema project has the support of industry to make the varieties available royalty-free to smallholder farmers in sub-Saharan Africa through African seed companies. Monsanto, for example, is giving away its intellectual property in the region.

Ah, say its critics, but Monsanto is hoping that Africans will use its hybrids and thus become rich enough to buy more seeds from it one day. Yes, and what is wrong with that? Suppose Wema does result in many African smallholders earning enough money to buy a tractor, put a child through school and go into the market in search of the best seeds, as well as sufficient fertiliser? Where’s the problem? All right, say the critics, but resistance to the Bt toxin is already developing in fall armyworms in Brazil. True, but so is resistance to insecticides. Agriculture is an arms race against the other species, and newer techniques should keep us easily one step ahead, so long as we do not prevent them.

The next technology to help farming will be gene-editing, different from the transgenic technique that produced Bt maize, and involving the introduction of no foreign DNA, the thing that critics say they most object to. A tweak to the genes of maize can make it resistant to maize lethal necrosis, a viral disease hurting yields in parts of Africa. There is an opportunity for Britain here. Freed from Europe’s deadly precautionary principle, British plant scientists could be well placed to support their colleagues in Africa.

Those who think poverty a price worth paying for nostalgia say we should go back to traditional agriculture, in better harmony with the land. Not if we want wildlife. Globally, if we had the yields of 1960 we would need more than twice as much land to feed today’s population. In which case, you could kiss goodbye to all rainforests, nature reserves and national parks.