George Orwell once said that if a word can be cut from a sentence without weakening or changing its meaning, it should be cut. I propose that "greed and corruption" destroyed American politics, not "conservative" greed and corruption.

If Frank thinks I am going to buy the nonsense that conservatives have the corner on greed, he needs to ply his trade somewhere else. I know that lately the worst of it has occurred on the GOP watch. So what. That doesn't mean anything to me.

The implication is that, if we vote the GOP out, corruption will go with it. Given Nancy Pelosi's unwillingness to impeach George Bush, Congress's unwillingness to do what it takes to get their subpoenas served, the FISA vote, Barack Obama's record-breaking scramble for campaign cash, and the continued growth of earmarks, you will have to excuse me for being a little dubious. Doesn't seem like any of the new guys really want to practice new politics, does it?

If we buy Frank's fairy tale, we only turn over the reins of corruption from one party to another. So what are we supposed to do instead? Beats me. But we start by ignoring party-line propaganda. And we vote for politicians that are honest, no matter the party affiliation.

We are such a money-oriented culture. Thus, I am not surprised everyone would buy the argument that Big Pharma won't research male contraception because we won't buy it. That's not why we don't have a male pill.

The bottom line is not money, it's that the male pill is a more difficult technical challenge. A woman releases one egg a month, while a male makes hundreds of millions of sperm a month. The average ejaculate contains over 60 million sperm.

Think about it. An effective male contraceptive would have to disable every one of those 60 million buggers. It only takes one, after all, although males with sperm counts less than 10 million are often considered functionally infertile.

On top of that, males produce sperm continuously, whereas females ovulate once a month. This makes it much easier to suppress ovulation than spermatogenesis, since the event is singular and predictable in women. You only have to prevent one event a month.

Finally, women have a natural, built-in form of birth control called pregnancy. Hormones of pregnancy suppress ovulation and prevent conception -- pregnant women can't get pregnant! Men have no such natural period of infertility. The upshot of this is that women can be made artificially infertile through the use of naturally occurring hormones, or their analogues. Men can't.

Pardon my French, but male contraception is simply a harder nut to crack.

I'm sorry, but I very much disagree. People always think that if you throw enough money at a problem it will be solved.

We've spent trillions on cancer research. So where's the cure for cancer? When you consider the obscene sums paid for weight loss, I think you would agree that someone has to have a cure by now.

Except that cancer is hard. Obesity is hard. The constant scientific progress over the last hundred years lulls us into thinking that any problem can be solved; it's just a matter of effort.

Except that it's not true. I'm not saying money has nothing to do with it. I'm just saying that money doesn't have everything to do with it. If there were an obvious solution to this problem, someone would be on it. But there's not.

I actually think that waging a money war on a medical issue, any issue, is a waste of time. Most research money should be devoted to basic research. When researchers make a breakthrough, that is the time to focus on applications. But in between breakthroughs, a dollar is better spent on a scientist asking how doe this work questions rather than one chasing after a specific goal.

Most scientific advances come almost by accident, after a breakthrough sheds new light on old problems. Money is best spent searching for new insights, rather than trying to squeeze more out of the knowledge than is already there.