【每日阅读训练第二期——速度越障3系列】【3-17】

很邻家

Biotech patents
Taking it personally
A legal fight over a new generation of medicine
Dec 10th 2011 | NEW YORK | from the print edition
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DRUG research is in dark times, as pipelines dry up and development budgets are cut. But one shaft of light pierces the gloom. “Personalised medicine” promises to craft drugs for individuals. Genetic tests will identify those who will benefit from specific medicines. Treatment will be more effective; waste will drop. Personalised medicine has sparked excitement among drugmakers, doctors, hospitals and patients. It has also sparked a legal brawl.
On December 7th America’s Supreme Court heard arguments in Mayo v Prometheus. The suit, despite a name that suggests an ancient liver sandwich, may be crucial for biotechnology firms. America is the world’s hub for drug research. By definition, personalised medicine includes the study of genetic mutations and other personal characteristics. However, American law bars patents of nature and abstract ideas. The question is which discoveries in personalised medicine may be patented.
Prometheus is part of a series of suits over biotech patents. Courts have been active because Congress has not. A recent patent reform provided little clarity. Congress merely ordered a study of genetic testing. Judges have been bolder: in July a federal court ruled that genes could be patented. On December 7th the suit’s losers appealed to the Supreme Court.
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But Prometheus may have greater practical import, says Hans Sauer of the Biotechnology Industry Organisation (BIO), a trade group. Firms are studying genetic correlations that might predict a drug’s efficacy or determine the cause of a disease. Prometheus may determine whether methods using such correlations may be patented.
The fight has attracted the heavyweights of health care. On one side is Prometheus Laboratories, a Californian company that has patented a way to optimise certain drug treatments for individuals. On the other is the Mayo Clinic, a health and research centre. Prometheus’s supporters include BIO and several tech firms. Roche and Abbott, two big drugmakers, gave warning against invalidating patents on diagnostic tests. Mayo’s allies include the American Medical Association.
The patents in question do not concern genetic tests, though the suit’s outcome will affect them. They concern tests for the effectiveness of thiopurines, drugs that have long been used to treat gastrointestinal disorders such as Crohn’s disease. Their effect depends on how they are metabolised. Neither thiopurines nor tests for metabolites (substances produced by metabolism) were new when Prometheus’s patents were filed in 1998. But the patents cover the process for determining whether a given dose produces concentrations of metabolites within a recommended range. The dose of thiopurines could be adjusted accordingly. Prometheus sells a test based on its patents to hospitals and clinics. In 2004 Mayo developed a competing test, with different recommended levels of metabolites. Prometheus sued.
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Mayo’s lawyers say Prometheus has patented a mere observation of the body’s natural workings. Let the claim stand, Mayo argues, and firms will win broad patents over basic biological relationships, stifling innovation. Prometheus and its allies warn of an alternative apocalypse. A judgment in Mayo’s favour, they contend, will undermine existing patents and shrivel investment in personalised medicine.
The Supreme Court may not make such a broad judgment. It may instead hand down a narrower ruling that leaves many questions unanswered. A natural phenomenon may not be patented, but which applications of that phenomenon might be? When studying genetic correlations, which so-called discoveries are truly novel? Eventually personalised medicine may transform patients’ care and firms’ business models. In the near future, the greatest beneficiaries may be patent lawyers.
The Olympus scandal
The end of the beginning
Dec 8th 2011, 16:43 by K.N.C. | TOKYO    
THE tide has turned—finally. Since being ousted from Olympus in October, its former boss, Michael Woodford, had looked like he was losing the battle—despite the fact that he successfully had brought to light a massive accounting fraud. First, the company, which makes cameras and other electronic gear, defended itself and disparaged him. The domestic media and regulators stayed silent.
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Law-enforcement in Britain and America, however, swooped in—as did the international media. As a result, Japanese officialdom pressed Olympus to create an independent panel, whose conclusions it was to obey. This sounded like an exercise in Kabuki theatre: an exaggerated show of appearances. Again, it looked like Mr Woodford might be winning the public-relations battle but losing the war, which is about how to fix the firm and its dysfunctional corporate governance. Its board had let slide transactions that were used to hide investment losses dating from the 1990s.
Following a board meeting in late November, Mr Woodford resigned his post as a director because the company wanted to handle the problem internally. The plan was that existing management would hang on and name its successors. This would not have brought any meaningful change, Mr Woodford argued. Again, he seemed on the back foot.
Mr Woodford then began a battle-by-proxy to control the company with a new slate of directors. They would be predominantly Japanese, but include Mr Woodford himself. On the outside it seemed like he was gaining traction, but within the cosy confines of corporate Japan, it looked like he was losing.
Yet on December 6th the panel issued its report—and shifted the debate entirely. The nearly 200-page document is a blistering condemnation of the company’s practices. “The core of management was rotten,” the panel wrote, “and some around it were contaminated as well.”
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The report details how the deceptive transactions were conducted (though much remains unknown, for instance who assisted the rotten managers, both internally and externally). The panel says it found no ties to the yakuza, Japan’s mafia, nor evidence that Olympus’s executives tried to enrich themselves. Instead, it seems, they were hiding losses to prevent punishment from shareholders.
The next day, December 7th, brought an extraordinary reversal by Shuichi Takayama, Olympus’s current boss. He said that the board might step down at a special shareholder meeting—and that Mr Woodford could well return to his previous position, if investors support him. Since he had been emphasising the need for management continuity, this declaration surprised many observers. What is more, Mr Takayama had previously stuck to the line that Mr Woodford was sacked for eschewing Japanese cultural norms.
The events of this week offer the first indication that Olympus may be on its way to reform. With it, there is hope for corporate governance in Japan as a whole. Yet there are many more questions and clashes to come. By December 14th Olympus must post adjusted quarterly earnings that take into account years of misstatements. If it misses the deadline, it will be delisted from the Tokyo Stock Exchange.
Next will be an extraordinary board meeting in February, followed by the annual general meeting in June. This could be a showdown between Mr Woodford and the company’s current management. Who will take the reins? A mere eight weeks after he saw his career crumble, Mr Woodford finally looks like he is winning.
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越障
Climate change
A deal in Durban
Dec 11th 2011, 18:08 by J.A. | DURBAN
IN THE early hours of December 11th, after three days and nights of exhausting, often ill-tempered, final negotiations, the UN’s two-week-long climate-change summit ended in Durban with an agreement.
Its terms—assuming they are acted upon—are unlikely to be sufficient to prevent a global temperature rise of more than 2°C. They might easily allow a 4°C rise. Yet with many governments distracted by pressing economic worries, the deal was as much as could have been expected from Durban; perhaps a little more.
The core of it is, in effect, a quid-pro-quo arrangement between the European Union and big developing-country polluters, including China and India. For its part, the EU will undertake a second round of emissions abatement under the Kyoto protocol, after its main provisions expire at the end of 2012. That will prolong the shelf-life of a treaty that imposes no emissions-cutting burden on any developing country.
In return, all countries have agreed to negotiate a new mitigation regime by 2015 and make it operational by 2020. Crucially, this new regime will see the burden of emission-cutting shared among all countries, even if rich ones will still be expected to do much more than poorer countries.
This commitment, which was reached despite last-ditch resistance from China and India, and despite little enthusiasm for it from America, looks like the Durban summit’s biggest achievement. It promises to break a divisive and anachronistic distinction between developed and developing countries, which has thoroughly poisoned the waters of the UN process. It has also rendered it ineffective, given that the so-called developing countries given a free pass under Kyoto, including South Korea and Saudi Arabia as well as China and India, are now responsible for 58% of global emissions.
That is why the biggest developing-country polluters, chiefly China and India, were so reluctant to relinquish their freedom to pollute. With most other elements of a deal in place, almost 36 hours after the climate summit was due to have ended, the Indians were the last major obstacle to it. Their particular objection was to the insistence of the EU and its allies that the successor to Kyoto must be legally binding on all countries. “Am I to write a blank cheque and sign away the livelihoods and sustainability of 1.2 billion Indians, without even knowing what [the new agreement] contains?” asked the Indian environment minister, Jayanti Natarajan. “I wonder if this is an agenda to shift the blame on to countries who are not responsible [for climate change].”
With the prospect of no deal looming, the Europeans and Indian delegations were urged to go “into a huddle” in the middle of the conference hall and work out a compromise. They did so and, as per a Brazilian suggestion, agreed that the putative new deal would be “a protocol, another legal instrument or an agreed outcome with legal force.”
What that may mean is anyone’s guess. It was sufficient for the EU, whose belief in legally enforceable international agreements is shared by the Brazilians, to claim success. Yet it is also unclear how important this distinction really is. The Kyoto protocol is legally binding, but contains no provisions to enforce penalties against those who fail in their mitigation endeavours. This has allowed Canada to overshoot its target, massively, with impunity. Unless penalties for failure are inserted into the successor protocol, or instrument, or outcome—which China and India would almost certainly not allow—it is hard to imagine how it would have greater force.
A more important issue will be the scale of the future regime’s ambition to curb global warming, as reflected in the mitigation targets countries assume under it. The Durban agreement includes an acknowledgement that there is a widening gap between the mitigation efforts currently promised and those required to keep warming within the broadly recognised 2°C safety limit. It remains to be seen whether this will spur countries to take the costly actions that closing this gap would require. The inadequacy of action on climate change hitherto suggests it may not.
Agreement was also reached in Durban on a package of other climate-friendly additional measures. Perhaps most notably, they included agreement on the broad design of a global Green Climate Fund, which will funnel some of the $100 billion that rich countries have promised to make available to poor ones by 2020, to help them cut emissions and adapt to climate change. Again, there was no agreement—and little discussion—on the important question of where the money will be found.
Business leaders, among whom such things matter, appeared unimpressed by these omissions. “The agreement reached was more of a victory for the UN process, than for the global climate, or in creating a new business imperative,” said Jonathan Grant, head of sustainability and climate change at PwC. “Business will shrug its shoulders over Durban and wait for direction from national capitals.”
Among the main players in Durban, the Europeans emerged with most credit. Even as EU leaders were attempting to negotiate the survival of their currency, in Brussels on December 9th, their negotiators were most prominent in Durban and surprisingly forthright. A cynic might reflect that this signalled how toothless the UN process has become. Yet the Europeans’ efforts were appreciated by many developing countries, including poor African and small island ones most threatened by global warming. Their strong support for the EU’s proposals made it much harder for the Indians and Chinese to decry them as a developed-world plot against the poor and helpless.
Among the big developing countries, India may feel most aggrieved. Not unreasonably, it fears that any mitigation action will impose costs on it that it can ill afford to pay, in particular by constraining its ability to grow its economy and thereby withdraw millions from poverty. China, the world’s biggest polluter, whose average emissions per head are already bigger than some European countries, will worry less. It has long seemed resigned to having to undertake more stringent emissions-cutting, indeed its recent heavy investments in renewable energy and energy-efficiency schemes suggest it foresees profits in this.
America has reason to be glad of the outcome. It has long bewailed the asymmetry of the Kyoto protocol—this was the ostensible reason why it failed to ratify it. Yet it was apparent in Durban that the American negotiators, envoys of a put-upon Democratic president, showed little enthusiasm for almost any part of the international process.
Their objections to some elements of the final deal were, though roundly denounced, in fact perfectly reasonable. They worried, for example, that the global Fund would be too tightly bound to the wider—slow-moving and largely ineffective—UN process. It is a shame they could not get their way in keeping it more separate.
And yet, that the world’s most powerful country—whose scientists have made a vast contribution to climate science—was reduced to playing a bit-part in negotiations over the future of the world’s climate was more than unimpressive. It was demeaning. And next time America demands that China, India or Brazil take bold steps for the global good, on trade or security, it will no doubt be remembered.
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xeyyxzty

58''1'11''
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5'27''
an agreement on climate change
全球可能不只上升2度，可能达到4度~
京都议定书要到期了~准备签订新条约~
新条约不再区分developed countries and developing countries~不太好（是吧？）
中国、印度两大主要污染国~
......忘记了这一段，没太看懂
新条约...北朝鲜、阿拉伯国家...忘记了
中国的压力小一些，最近在新能源方面大笔投资~印度压力大一些
欧洲在应付currency crisis时还要对climate change进行研究~希望brazil, china, india等能接替他们（是嘛？）

maxiv

1    00:02:05.56    18.6%    00:02:05.56    18.6%    2011-12-13 1:11:42    
2    00:04:34.32    40.5%    00:02:28.76    22.0%    2011-12-13 1:14:11    
3    00:06:54.34    61.2%    00:02:20.02    20.7%    2011-12-13 1:16:31    
5    00:09:03.94    80.4%    00:02:09.44    19.1%    2011-12-13 1:18:41    
6    00:11:16.69    100.0%    00:02:12.75    19.6%    2011-12-13 1:20:54

linhan50

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linhan50

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fox0923

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南瓜0729

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Richardyu

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zz42050524

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今天快速感觉很难，好多单词不认识

gray0505

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