Attended a wildlife lecture at the headquarters of the Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute, my first time there, adjacent to SeaWorld here in San Diego. It was jointly presented by the San Diego chapter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers and the Avicultural Society of America.

The presentation dealt with the Piping Plover‘s critical habitat recovery and conservation project around the Great Lakes area of the U.S. and was given by Ann Knutson from San Diego Zoo Global and current president of SDAAZK.

Her lecture had some really good and important information that can just as easily relate to other animal conservation issues and have become very familiar to both professional and amateur wildlife conservationists everywhere, such as climate change, loss of habitat and the introduction of non-native species of animals and plants. Unfortunately her talk was a bit choppy and unnatural. She wasn’t very comfortable presenting in front an audience, small as it was. (There was only about 20 of us in attendance, and four of those were her family members.) And every time I see one of these lectures my years of creating support graphics for these presentations bubbles to the surface and I want to go up and tell the speaker how to improve their slides.

Her presentation focused on the duties she and her team had while out there, which included handing rescued eggs and the subsequent chicks that emerged. She showed slides of the indoor enclosures as well as the outdoor habitats they used to rear the birds. She said the Plover’s numbers have been steadily dwindling over recent years mainly because of fewer viable eggs and the low success rate of hatchings, but that she and the other aviculturists feel like they are starting to make a difference.

After the presentation I waited around to ask her about two slides she showed, one which had a very young chick standing next to a mirror in it’s enclosure and another one of a clutch of eggs all with their pointy ends facing each other in a circle. During the lecture she made a point of mentioning how important it was to have them laid that way in the sand.

I asked her first about the mirror and she said it was so the chick, which couldn’t recognize itself, would feel like it was not alone, as if it were part of a group. About the eggs pointing inward she said that it was to make it more comfortable for the chicks to hatch since they emerge from the easier to break, larger ends of the eggs.

It felt good to attend another informative, free lecture where I learned stuff. Especially since this one had snacks.

Hubbs-SeaWorld Research Institute

I just said that

Inside the auditorium

Shortly before the presentation

Start of the lecture

Post-lecture moonlit bay shot

I nervously attended a lecture at The Scripps Institute in La Jolla on the future of cancer treatment grandly titled, “Are We on the Way to Curing Cancer in the Era of Genomics and Proteomics?”. At first I was worried I wouldn’t understand it at all. Wearing shorts and a nice t-shirt while walking alongside a flock of men in ties and suits that probably cost more that I made last year past a lot full of Porsches, Maseratis and Ferraris did nothing to relieve my “What am I doing here?” apprehension.

The title of the lecture was a little misleading because it was more about the future of cancer treatment, not the curing of it.

The evening began with an introduction by Michael Kalichman, co-founder and Director of the Center for Ethics in Science and Technology, who admitted that he had recently been diagnosed with stage three colorectal cancer. It was understood, if not openly announced, that his treatment was being overseen by Dr. Soon-Shiong, the evening’s presenter.

After Dr. Kalichman’s opening remarks he introduced Razelle Kurzrock, Senior Deputy Center Director for Clinical Science at UC San Diego Moores Cancer Center, as moderator for the evening.

She introduced Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong who has way too many titles to list here and is estimated to have a personal wealth of $9 billion. Suffice it to say that he is probably the most successful individual I’ve ever been in the same room with, with the possible exception of the even wealthier Bill Gates. Not only has he started and sold at least two pharmaceutical companies and now chairs a philanthropic foundation, but within the previous two weeks he had personal meetings with President Bill Clinton at his Clinton Foundation, with Prime Minister David Cameron at 10 Downing Street, as well as with the President of Thailand, all to discuss his direction on cancer treatment. He will also be going to a few other countries including China in the coming months.

His cancer regimen incorporates a joining of multiple technologies that include diagnostics, supercomputing, a network model of sharing data on tumor genes, as well as a personalized mixture of a combination of cancer drugs for multi-targeted attacks. His latest company, NantHealth, (along with NantMobile under the umbrella company, NantWorks) works to target individual cancer patient treatments with specific cancer drugs based on sequencing 22,000 protein-creating genes that directly affect cancer cells. The supercomputing technology that his company uses has dramatically decreased the computing time needed for this kind of diagnosis (less than a minute), also bringing the cost way down to less than $1000. He said that 80% of patients today are getting the wrong drug treatments for their specific cancers.

He gave the example of one of his patients who was diagnosed with cervical cancer and prescribed the usual chemo-drug therapy with terrible results. He and his team took her on as a patient and were able to target her treatment with an available breast cancer drug regimen that put her cancer into remission. He also showed a slide of a patient who had metastasized pancreatic cancer, affecting their entire abdominal and chest cavities, and who was told they had at most three months to live. He then showed a comparison slide of the same patient, fourteen months later, with no sign of cancer, after he put the patient on a targeted treatment with currently available drugs. He said his company can boast of an 84% success rate.

He is a big advocate of the FDA, working closely with them in this new endeavor. He said the scientists who work there genuinely want to help patients. On the other hand his biggest hurdle is the insurance industry bureaucracy. He said that until the insurance companies change their business paradigm from costly disease treatment to one of being rewarded for disease prevention, they will keep doing what they’re doing and making it more costly to the patients each year. Dr. Soon-Shiong said that, thanks to his efforts as well as those of others, he sees a dramatic change in worldwide healthcare within the next ten years.

What I thought would be a presentation I would be completely lost in turned out to be a fascinating lecture that I couldn’t stop being interested in and thinking about afterwards.

The evening ended with an onstage discussion between Dr. Soon-Shiong and Dr. Kurzrock, along with some very intelligent sounding questions from a few audience members.

I came away from the evening’s event feeling a little smarter and more hopeful for the future of healthcare and disease treatments.

Scripps Institute in La Jolla

Good money in genomes

The Auditorium

Dr. Soon-Shiong presenting

Post-presentation discussion

Q & A