Specifically The Listening Project. A gem of a collaboration between BBC Radio 4, BBC local and national radio stations and the British Library. Tasked with capturing the nation in conversation to build a unique picture of our lives today and preserve it for future generations it’s a brilliantly gentle and real picture of who we are as a nation. If you are ever sat at your desk trying to find a voice for the rich collective of humanity we write for then I could recommend no better time spent than here. For me its  a healthy reminding kick to remember the real people that go through life not distant demographic classifications.

Please excuse my poor editing of the podcast attached I didn’t want the whole podcast only the health related conversation. It was this submission by BBC Radio Ulster that left me attempting to wake my catatonic girlfriend up on the back seat to no avail. After years of dialysis and declining health, Brendan was the recipient of a kidney donated to him by his older brother Kyron. They talk candidly about what this has meant for both their lives. Emotional heartwarming treasure.

One to the kidneys

Webicina.com is a free service that provides curated medical social media resources in over 80 medical topics in 17 languages. Their mission is to let empowered patients and medical professionals access the most relevant social media content in their own languages on a customizable platform. So how does it work? Well you simply select your condition and the form of social media you’re interested in – news, blogs, podcasts, videos, twitter feeds, etc. – and Webicina gives you a nice little list of everything available on those platforms. Currently the site covers a range of medical conditions from acne to arthritis and cancer to epilepsy. Amazing. They obviously have this whole social media and healthcare thing wrapped up.

This brings us back to course they’re running: The Social MEDia course, the idea being that “digital literacy must be in the medical curriculum globally”. The course was launched two weeks ago; it’s online and Prezi-based, with tests and gamification. The best part? It’s free!

On the site there is also a list of interesting presentations on topics such as health search engines, e-patients, medical blogging and virtual worlds. You could spend the whole day on there and still come back for more.

Have a look for yourself at www.webicina.com and www.thecourse.webicina.com/

Way back when we were on Regent Street we dedicated a wall to the 2,000 sq. Ft we were moving into here in Soho. Asking the 12 of us to input. Well its that time again, except now there 53 or us around and about. We need a bigger wall!.

We are midst the legal stuff, on 7,200 sq. Ft about 200m or 4mins (cheers google)  from where we are now. 7.200sq ft is a big area. (Rural folk; 0.16 acre = enough to feed a vegetarian for a year, Greek; half an Olympic swimming pool, Devon; detention centre sized), so we are midst two hackathons to get everyone’s input in the features, fun and stuff our new home needs.

We kick off with a list of problems for the office to solve, and a list of assessment criteria for the ideas we are going to solve these problems with. Last night amidst Princi Pizza and tarts the ideas kicked off at great pace. Dozens of them. From the simple to the extravagant, to the coolish to the foolish, all up there for everyone to vote on.

With one exception all ideas are up for grabs. All of us early bees when looking around offices in the early days noticed one consistent feature. Every office we had visited which had housed an agency that had gone bust had a table foosball. Usually with one leg kicked off as a last rebellion prior to handing the keys in. This icon of misplaced budget and Toy-town business snuck up on us in every dusty, paper strewn depressing office. They are the early warning tremors for clear financial downfall and as such categorically they are banned – never never never.

Once we have got to a list following Mondays final session I will ping it up here to hopefully encourage you to input in the usual way.

This has happened because ad libitum feeding and zero exercise are standard conditions in the rodent-breeding factories that provide scientists with mice (a $1.1 billion dollar industry). But why does it matter? It matters because, as Engber writes, ‘the inbred, factory-farmed rodents in use today – raised by the millions in germ-free barrier rooms, overfed and understimulated and in some cases pumped through with antibiotics – may be placing unseen constraints on what we know and learn.’

The problem is, so invested are researchers in the mouse that no one wants to acknowledge the possibility that there’s a problem. But if there is a problem with mice, there’s a problem with drug development: scientists chew through 88 million mice a year in experiments and drug testing, and since 1965 the number of papers involving mice and rats has more than quadrupled. According to Engber ‘we’ve arrived at something like a monoculture in biomedicine,’ the main reasons being cheapness, docility, and the mouse’s amenability to ‘the most advanced tools of genetic engineering.’

In late 2010 Francis Collins, director of America’s National Institutes of Health, established a new agency to analyse what he called the ‘pipeline problem’ in biomedicine. The problem is that ‘innovation has slowed to a trickle. It takes more than a decade, and some $800 million, to produce a viable, new drug; among the compounds considered for testing, only 1 in 10,000 come to fruition.’ Could this perhaps be because ‘rats and mice were never so good at curing disease as they were at making data for its own sake’? Of the thousands of mouse studies for tuberculosis, ‘not one has been used to pick a new drug regimen that succeeded in clinical trials.’

The geneticist and statistician Michael Festing, one of the world’s experts on inbred lab mice, notes that ‘“the more research you do on something, the more valuable it becomes.”’ ‘A format war hides in the history of biomedicine,’ Engber writes, describing how not just one species but one particular strain, the Black-6, has become the most widely used organism in drug research. The problem is, since 1999 it’s been accepted that, for one, different mice have different responses to pain (prior to that the consensus was that every kind of mouse was essentially the same). And mice have different pain responses to other rodent species. And rodent species have different pain responses humans.

Experimental science does recognise certain fields where specific animals prove useful: for example armadillos in leprosy, prairie voles for autism, finches for language acquisition, but these models ‘live only at the margins of biomedicine…For most questions [the mouse is] a skeleton key that’s tried at every one of Nature’s doors.’ This despite the fact that, in the case of cancer, mice are prone to lymphomas and sarcomas as opposed to the carcinomas which are much more common in humans. Mouse tumours are much less varied than those seen in any hospital oncology department. They serve up ‘a bland and homogenized product, a fast-food version of the disease’. According to Robert Weinberg, the MIT biologist who discovered the first human oncogene and tumour suppressor gene, mice are ‘“the rate-limiting step in cancer research”’, and drug companies are ‘“wasting hundreds of millions of dollars on animal research that has little predictive value.’”

Engber’s article, which portrays both the problems with the mouse model and the ‘institutional inertia’ that prevent those problems from being formally acknowledged by the very people who would benefit most from their resolution, is essential reading.

Our focus for this inspiration titbit, was the exciting time filmmakers and storytellers are having exploring ways to enhance their stories via the web. One of the new genres to emerge is the connected documentary. These projects seduce you to go to a deeper level of engagement, using approaches to storytelling ar much more experiential than broadcast.

Facilitated by the efficient and straightforward to use Lotuslive Meetings software , 17 of us from across Hive and Ebee pushed towards the bleeding edge of people development. What resulted was a publication centred around our specific development requirements.

Once through name co-creation, and prioritising a list of our desired skills. In hacking pairs we searched, filtered and curated content from across the world on time management, presenting with nerves, selling creative, communications strategy, leadership, giving feedback, negotiation, communicating ideas, adapting behaviour, regulatory environments, dealing with change and also facilitation.

LotusLive was brimming with banter, encouragement, and articles to be scooped into Swarm. We voted for Hack favourite; pizza (thanks Dominos - 2 for 1 Tuesday and all) and washed it down with Stella/Carling/DC.

In two and a half hours we packaged up a diverse group of 72 articles to make anyone of us better all in a readily accessible format. Having never run a hackathon before, the most rewarding aspect for me was the vibe, everyone buzzed with efficiency and the quality focus was really there. Skills development has never been thus! If you fancy having a look through Swarm do stop by. If you want to follow the evenings activity check out  Twitter, the pace of activity was pretty cool to follow. Live it was ace.

A worlds first? Maybe. Regardless looking through the output this morning I think we can be rightly proud.

The beerground.

A while back our account management were charged with working on a pitch – internal training with a difference. The brief was beer – something the majority of our lads and ladettes (at least after a few jars I’m told) have experience of, if not marketing it, then certainly on the consumption side. In a nutshell the brief was to develop a brand that would achieve differentiation in the crowded beer market. What would it be called, who would they target, where would it be sold and where would they pitch it as far as price? They were split into teams (‘master brewers’) of two and had 15 minutes to share their thinking with us.

The big day.

Pitch day was yesterday and I think I’m right in saying that everyone, not least the panel, had a really enjoyable day, with a few lessons learnt. Sure, there were a few late nights and it came ‘at just so the wrong time’, but as we all know this is part of real life pitching. And as with real life pitching there was an upbeat, post pitch mood and a few beers had.

The panel consisted of myself, my learned colleagues Tim Scorer and Emma Jarvis and two old battle hardened ad lag friends of mine and now friends of Hive, Matthew Howells and Dom Lyon. Now I’ve spent many an enjoyable afternoon in pubs with Matthew and Dom, but never have I judged anything with them, with maybe the exception of the local talent.

In fact it wasn’t overly different, just that the talent took on a different form (ideas, although it is true to say some had ‘legs’ and could probably go the distance), but didn’t cost an arm and a leg (what is it with bloody legs) in buying them drinks all night and didn’t leg it afterwards (struggling with my third leg analogy!).

Over legs and back on form.

So we had 5 teams presenting to us in the upstairs room of The Blue Post Pub. There were thrills, spills (literally – poor Helen managed to soak herself in beer that had been intended as a taste test) and some ideas with a difference.

We, the panel, scored them on presentation (i.e. delivery), product idea and strategic argument – to a set criteria including market context, defining the need state, critical discussion points, strategic recommendations and generally challenging conventional thinking and reaching breakthrough ideas.

Breakthrough ideas versus broken glasses.

Overall the quality was fantastic – a real pleasure to observe.

We had fantastic innovative ideas – such as self-chilling beer – which would no doubt bring yet more peace and utter harmony to our tree-hugging festival going friends.

We had fantastic names such as ‘Bucking Fear’ a real alternative for penniless students and ‘Cavalry – you know when it’s time’, a combination of beer and guarana – the healthy option tackling, drinkers dip and maybe even brewers droop.

Some very clear cut targeting with ‘ETE’ and a female target, in this traditionally male market. The female audience was also embraced with AIG – the Goddess of Health – a sophisticated and conscientious alternative to vino collapso.

Learning.

It’s fair to say that there was learning on both sides of the room.

From the judging point of view it was great to see how much effort had been put in. Pitch theatre, as long as it’s relevant, really does help in dramatising ideas and if there are a myriad of agencies pitching no doubt helps stand-out. Also, the fact that no presentations were delivered via powerpoint did mean there was nowhere to run, nowhere to hide – ‘face to camera’ type scenario.

From the pitchers point of view I hope they walked away proud of their efforts and hopefully with a few leanings on how they may have done it differently – it’s only through trial and error than we can up our game.

Many thanks to Matthew and Dom for their excellent feedback to the teams. Well done to Clare and Matt for their winning pitch – ‘Cavalry – you know when it’s time’. They are now the official agency brewers and will be making their beer for real – soon to become our agency beer of choice.

Next time you’re passing feel free to drop in for a jar.

There is almost no information on who Francesco Saroglia is and to date no one has been able to find any other examples of his work. Although he’s mentioned by numerous sources as the designer of the Woolmark, the Alliance Graphique International (AGI) attributes the logo design to Franco Grignani (1908-1999). The site suggests that he entered the competition under a pseudonym because he was a member of the jury charged with selecting the winning design. Another theory that has been put forward is that the logo was submitted by another of the panel’s judges – Spiriti.

It’s thought that Grignani was approached by Spiriti, an owner of an Italian advertising agency, and asked to design the Woolmark logo several months before the competition. Shortly afterwards, Grignani was invited to be on the judging panel only for him to see the very work he’d submitted to Spiriti months before entered by an unknown designer called Saroglia.  The story goes that he was so embarrassed that his work had been stolen that he decided to conceal the fact that it was his design. When the other jury members chose it as the winning logo, he tried to overturn the decision but in the end it was his logo that was chosen.

Years later in an exhibition on his work he displayed a sketch from his diary with nine possible Woolmark designs that he’d given to Spiriti, and which had been entered into the IWS logo competition.  Furthermore Grignani’s previous work shows that he was clearly interested in Op Art and played extensively with arrangements of black and white stripes.

The Woolmark is a timeless icon, beautiful in its simplicity. It looks clear and neat when it’s shrunk right down to fit on a label and powerful when enlarged on a billboard; most importantly it’s a great graphical mystery. And that makes it my favourite logo.

The author is a former NHS doctor who scrutinizes how we have treated and trusted.  He points out the one truth behind centuries of unscientific meddling:  for better or worse, nothing in medicine is as difficult as doing nothing at all. Amongst the hard-learned lessons stitching these chapters together, people like to be helped and doctors like to help.

The problem, says Burch, is that this altruism has been through a mangle of self-delusion. Even those who truly believed in their cures ended up inflicting a lot of nastiness and suffering.  Burch doesn’t reserve this contempt for pre-science cranks – in fact he regards most treatment prior to the mid 20^th century as dangerous tinkering by candlelight.

Rhetoric by the spoonful kept western medicine going. Increasing urbanization meant failings went ever more public, so an eloquent get-out clause could save the day. It was generations of genius that produced what we know as good practice – starting with people like Francis Bacon facing up to their ability to be wrong. But while theory was coming on, practice meant practice – every treatment was an experiment on an actual living person.

Beyond tales of the big drug discoveries –insulin, aspirin, penicillin – we are reminded that drugs work in many ways. One way is to make you better (quinine), another is to make you imagine so (morphine). Before we get too abstract, let’s gaze into the terrifying cradle of the modern randomized trial – which is really what this book is about.

Far from the laboratory or bewigged Royal Society halls, it was the battlefield or POW camp where the boys (control arm) were separated from the men (active arm). Each time, a tiny percentage of mistakes was ironed out, and the method improved time over time. As you can imagine, ethics back then meant being extra nice to the prison guard in return for more gauze, or agonizing (as Cochrane did) over how to divide prisoners up into treatment and placebo arms.  Sociologically, it’s interesting to see how ethics has evolved from a quickfire mental calculation into whole conundrums that demand the attention of all soceity. We engender more subtle kinds of warfare when we talk about designer babies and radical life extension.

While the author can be quite vehemently dismissive of altruism (far from being ignorant chancers, our deluded quacks have actually foisted “evils” on the world), and even more so of alternative and non-traditional medicines, he avoids preaching on the modern scientific method as a moral elixir. “Trials tell you certain truths about the world, but not others.  They add to your ability to make decisions – not to your ability to make them” (p.304).

It is not smug progress but a sense of enfeebled ignorance that lingers. We’re back where we started with the desperate trust we place in those we think know more than us. Burch’s final warning is on this self-delusional blinding. So that, what we are pressed to solve is not immediately gene therapy and machine intelligence; what we are left muddling over is not which of our very own “evils” a future society will look back on in shame. We have a pretty good design for finding out what works empirically. We have a grand design where the more we don’t know, the more violently we defend our opinion. Where’s the medicine for that?

As usual the pre meeting nerves are there, having spent hundreds of hours getting segments, multiple audience propositions and clinical stories up and straight,  the first rush of ‘customer’s into the room provide a valuable rush of flight of flight. When we settle, the third biologic response benefit kicks in – facilitate. A skill set that doesn’t come naturally to me but one I know I need to have at my level. Keeping energy high, capturing comments, shepherding discussions, mindful of quality. It has all been great fun.  The two days have been spent rushing from room to room, working with local markets on templates, multiple launch scenarios and the important decision on where to take a stand!

The biggest challenge we often face is to get local markets to work together. The  regional/global to local dynamic is an established and prevalent behavior. But it’s the side to side interaction that’s so valuable, the sharing  of conclusions and working,  co-create and solving and of course having the odd wrangle.

One vital lesson we learned, is that local teams are immensely valuable when it comes to challenging other local markets to be more ballsy. Traditionally the preserve of central functions, the niche’s we find ourselves pursuing are driving a new dynamic, and one that I really enjoyed seeing. Whether it be price, patient segment, base case clinical data, local to local challenges proved hugely useful. Tather than concentrate on the local teams working in isolation, focused on their positioning we found that having markets in the same room, with a remit to share with the roomies drives a better braver end product. Once permission to get involved prior to sharing with the wider central team and all was given, great gusto (Spain), heated discussion (Italy), and incisive rationality (France) all drive some really worthwhile debate.

PS sorry about the image this week. V poor.