MISCmedia for 3/20/01
Critic-al Conditioning

ONE OF THE NET'S first writer-success stories is Aaron Barnhart.

Back in the Iron Age of online communication (circa 1993-94), Barnhart started a weekly e-mailed column, Late Show News, covering late-night TV with a particular David Letterman emphasis.

Barnhart's searing, witty, and attitude-free insights got him a cult following that led to freelance assignments for "real" print publications, and eventually to his getting a job as TV critic for the Kansas City Star.

Barnhart's been dealing with leukemia lately, and talks frankly about it at his TV Barn site.

Among his comments is his personal experience with the kind of genetic-based therapies whose early unperfected forms, and their associated tragic human clinical trials, were the topic of last week's Seattle Times long investigative series.

The Times stories repeatedly depict the therapies Hutch studied, and the trials thereof, as one big horrible disaster, spurred not by scientific inquiry but by the financial interest held by the Hutch and some of its physicians in the products being studied.

But Barnhart (whose paper is owned by Knight-Ridder, which owns 49.5 percent of the Times) notes on his site that if it weren't for those crude, early versions of the therapies, the more perfected versions he's using wouldn't have been developed.

Yes, many people died in the Hutch's early tests. But many of them would have died from their cancers anyway. And it's because of what the Hutch and other institutions learned from those tests that the current therapies are around to help prolong the life of one of my favorite online writers.

The remaining issue raised by the Times series is whether patients in the clinical trials knew how experiemental and risky their treatments were. Based on his experience, Barnhart writes that that's an issue endemic to the whole medical-research industry, not just to the Hutch.

NEXT: Tell me a story.

ELSEWHERE:

• I can't believe a creative genius like Elvis Costello actually picked McCartney's Band on the Run LP among his all-time faves (found by Slumberland)....
• The grudgingly accepted compromises of life after the culture wars....

RECENT HIGHLIGHTS:

• Music to accompany the mattress mambo.
• Goodbyes to film critic John Hartl, the outre-music zine The Tentacle, and some cool stores.
• A last lingering look inside the OK Hotel.
• Seattle as a city that works (and works and works).
• The terrible beauty of the freeways.
• The end of our little makeover parable.
• PBS discovers marketing to kids.
• Courtney Love reinvents herself as an anti-major-label crusader.
• Handicapping the Seattle mayoral race.
• The local Mardi Gras ought to be just as dumb and naked, just less fight-prone.
• Fun, sort of, with earthquakes.
• Hardcore porn producers tone down their works for a new mainstream market.
• Comparing a couple of WTO protest videos.
• That integral aspect of the Seattle zeitgeist, complaining.
• Previewing a whole empire of MISCmedia products.
• Does the "Northwest Lifestyle" personality type even exist?
• An amateur experiment in age-regression therapy.
• A fantasy-fandom HQ pulls a disappearing trick.
• A photographic ode to the wonders of snow in Seattle.
• How a conspiracy theorist might view the power-crisis mania.
• Complaining about the Filmlooked versions of Red Dwarf.

ARCHIVES:

• 2001, 2000, 1999, 1998, 1997, 1996, 1995, and 1986-94 columns
• Reviews of literature & art, nonfiction & culture criticism, movies & videos, and music & noise
• Longer articles and essays
• Some slightly weird little fiction pieces
• X-Word crossword puzzles, now with on-screen solving
• Cyber Stuff, links to cool and/or useful sites
• A listing of many Things I Like (and a few things I hate)
• The origin and future of MISCmedia