Weird search that led to my site

OK, I'll admit it.

Like most bloggers (particularly new ones, I'd wager), I can't resist checking out my Sitemeter readings fairly frequently. It's not mainly for the number of hits (which, fortunately, have been steadily rising), although that is of course of great interest to me. No, what most interests me are the links leading to my blog. I've found some great blogs and sites that way. But even more interesting than that to me are the occasional Google searches that lead people to my blog. There are the not unexpected ones, like searches for EneMan (based on my posting of pictures of EneMan just before Christmas), of course. But every so often a truly strange one pops up. Sometimes it'll be a search that just makes me scratch my head and wonder how on earth my blog came up as a result of this search Rarely, it will be a search that disturbs me or angers me. That happened yesterday, when this came up on my Sitemeter listings.

It was a Google search using these terms: Judah Folkman false results 2005 lying. The post by me that came up was this one. (Oddly enough, it no longer appears when I do this search again.) What disturbs me is that my blog, however briefly, came up on a search by someone apparently looking for evidence to support the allegation that Dr. Judah Folkman reported false results or was in some way lying. Happily, my blog gave no support to the apparent intent of the search.

So why did this oddity tick me off? Dr. Folkman is an inspiration to me and other surgeon-scientists. He is one of the rare surgeon-scientists who has been able to excel at both surgery and research over a career spanning more than three decades. He is even rarer still in that he founded an entire area of research, that of tumor angiogenesis and how it might be targeted for therapy, with his discovery of angiostatin in 1994 and endostatin in 1997, and later with his demonstrations that angiogenesis inhibitors could cause tumor dormancy. But it didn't start there. Those discoveries were the culmination of 25 years of research, during much of which his ideas were not taken seriously by large numbers of cancer researchers. But he persevered and ultimately the evidence he produced and the discoveries he made forced his work to be accepted. Yes, there were a few bumps along the way, even in the 1990's. Early on after his description of tumor dormancy, other labs had difficulties replicating his results, but these problems were ultimately demonstrated to be due mainly to methodologic differences and differences in the purity of angiostatin and endostatin preparations. (I'm guessing by this search that a few still harbor these doubts even now, long after Dr. Folkman resolved them to the satisfaction of the vast majority of angiogenesis researchers.) Finally, my area of research is in tumor angiogenesis, and it was Dr. Folkman's work that inspired me to get involved in angigonesis research. That's why I was truly perturbed when I saw this Google search come up on my Sitemeter listings.

I've actually had the honor of meeting Dr. Folkman on two separate occasions (although I doubt he'd remember me if I were to approach him at a meeting). One time, I even had the pleasure of his sitting in on our lab meeting, evaluating our data, and giving us his input. It was an amazing boost to my ego when, at that meeting, he told me he had read a mansucript I had submitted and very much liked it. It was an even bigger boost to hear him mention the scientific paper that manuscript became during one of his talks and characterizing it as one essential paper to read on angiogenesis inhibition.

Given all that, I figured the least I could do for one of my inspirations in science and surgery was to blog about this incident. In fact, I just had an idea:

Judah Folkman false results lying
Judah Folkman false results lying
Judah Folkman false results lying
Judah Folkman false results lying
Judah Folkman false results lying

There, that ought to do it. Take that, anonymous idiot.

Now, hopefully, if that idiot (or any other) does a Google search looking for evidence that Folkman was lying or reporting false results, this post will come up as the very first result of their search, as a rebuke. And if it doesn't come up first, I'll just keep adding more and more repetitions of the terms above until it does!

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