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it's just that without Myriad, *no one* would know that having the BRCA1 gene was a precursor to breast cancer.

Are you ^!&%! kidding? Are people so bamboozled by the FUD of pharmaceutical companies that anyone who doesn't know the truth assumes that the big, nice company must have sunk a ton of time and money into finding this gene from scratch, and without them the gene would never have been found? The truth is very, very different, and this is why Myriad is so hated in the scientific community.

BRCA1 was discovered by Mary-Claire King, now a geneticist at the University of Washington, following over a decade of government-funded basic science work that started when she was a graduate student and then junior faculty at UC Berkeley. Back then genetics was hard work - not hard like today, *really* hard. When she started no one really believed that one could even find a gene for a trait that wasn't expressed 100%, it just seemed too complicated to pick one mutation out of a huge haystack when you had to allow for some people having the bad mutation yet having a normal phenotype. Remember this is before the human genome project, before automated sequencing; she even started before PCR. Just pinning the candidate gene down to one small region of one chromosome took over a decade of work by dozens of people.

As the process came towards fruition, they first narrowed the field to a small part of chromosome 17 (paper), then made a laborious map of the region of interest (paper), and then together with a group at the NIH, they identified the actual single gene we now know as BRCA1, sequenced it, and spelled out the mutations in it that caused breast cancer in the affected families (paper1, paper2). Notice that all of this was done completely in the public eye, with all of her lab's results published immediately so as to help other researchers advance the field with her. It was good science.

But wait, where's Myriad genetics so far? What's left to do? Didn't we already "discover" BRCA1? How could anyone patent it now? All good questions. The next thing to do was to make a copy of this gene, by itself, in a test tube. This would be preliminary work for all sorts of biochemical analysis. The act of copying a gene off of a chromosome onto a separate loop of DNA in a test tube is called "cloning". Cloning is still pretty hard even today, especially for long genes like BRCA1. It can take months, especially since you usually need to copy it in bits and then glue those bits together.

What Myriad understood, and perhaps Dr. King did not, is that a cloned gene (that loop in a test tube) is patentable because it's considered "artificial", even if it's a perfect copy of a natural sequence of DNA. Myriad jumped in at this point, threw their whole company into cloning the gene and then patenting it, and did it before Dr. King or anyone else realized they were in a race. Ironically, Dr. King's lab had probably already cloned it in pieces (usually a prerequisite to sequencing) but hadn't made a complete intact copy yet, and certainly hadn't filed any patents. Myriad did none of the prior work on BRCA1. They did not come up with the idea of hereditary breast cancer. They did not do the laborious work of mapping where BRCA1 might be. They did not pinpoint the gene that was BRCA1. They did not sequence

There is a rather large difference between letting market forces have their way with oil prices, and actively banning marijuana or profanity. The first requires only that government not do something (disburse the enormous corporate welfare payments which the oil companies have been getting for so long they now regard it as their rightful due) while the second requires the government do something (fund the ever-growing War on Drugs industry, or censor communication.) As for your claim that "people driving a lot ... has very very very little short term effect on your health, and most likely you won't be alive for the long term effects of it," that's simply not true; living in a heavy-traffic area has a major effect on your respiratory health, comparable to that of regular smoking. See here for a decent open-access summary of the effects of particulate pollution on respiratory health, and here for an article (not open-access, but the major results are given in the abstract) specifically about the effect of automotive pollution on respiratory health in children.

Forcing NIH funded research to publish in specific journals would undermine the entire established hierarchy. Big name journals, large impact factor, etc...

The NIH public access policy currently requires any journal article resulting from funded research, regardless of the journal, to be made freely available.

And she did not want to sue McDonalds for punitive damages, only to have them pay for the costs of her medical treatments.

This'll probably get me modded troll, but here goes...

I've heard this term, "Ambulance chaser". And there's this Liebeck vs. McHotCoffe case.

The concept of an ambulance chaser is very foreign to me. Why would you need a lawyer when you're taking a hospital cab ride?

But then again, my taxes pay my medical bills, so I don't have to worry about financial ruin whenever I break a leg or have severe sunburn from crossing the street (this being /.) or whatever.

Might US lawyers have a little less business if you had tax-paid medicine? I know, it's socialism, and socialism is bad because it's socialism, but consider this: "health is less good in societies where income differences are bigger" (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/16226363).

Others have studied the rats gaseous emissions directly.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/845703

Interesting rumour. I'm slightly interested to know what your basis for this assertion is

Half a dozen of my friends figured this out the hard way. Their doctors all traced it back to drug interactions between antibiotics in the -cycline family (minocycline, tetracycline, etc.) and their low-dose oral contraceptive pills. But since anecdotes aren't proof, I spent about five minutes Googling:

Reference 1
Reference 2
Reference 3 (about 3/4 down the page)
Reference 4
Reference 5

Many sources I found note that it is difficult to conduct formal research in this area because women don't want to take antibiotics as part of a study and risk getting pregnant. It is difficult to prove what happens, but my friends have traced it back and told me what their doctors said. I hope sexually active readers hear this and protect themselves.

I was merely pointing out that condoms are less effective as birth control than this injection, not stating that they result in pregnancy 2 out of every 100 times they're used.

Although, there's this study which suggests that there is something like a 2% rate of exposure to semen (which one could fairly consider a form of failure, for a barrier type contraceptive) for every act of intercourse when using a condom:

PSA was detected in 100% (24/24) of vaginal samples collected immediately after unprotected intercourse and in none of the vaginal samples collected more than 24 h after intercourse (0/90). PSA was also present in 98% (83/85) of the samples collected from the inside of the condom that had failed during intercourse. Excluding uses where the condom failed during intercourse, PSA was detected in 2% (1/47) of the postcoital vaginal samples collected after use of intact condoms and in 41% (14/34) of the samples collected after use of condoms with known 1-mm punctures.

And I guess doctors should be allowed to sell whatever treatments they want without any government interference. The Dalkon Shield, thalidomide, etc. should have all been allowed without any government regulation. Yay! Doctor knows best. Government is ineffective and useless, etc.

I don't know, maybe doctors do know best because according to the government, the Dalkon shield is safe.

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/picrender.fcgi?artid=1492461&blobtype=pdf

Thalidomide, again, according to the government is safe (from wikipedia):

On July 16, 1998, the FDA approved the use of thalidomide for the treatment of lesions associated with Erythema Nodosum Leprosum (ENL).

On May 26, 2006, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration granted accelerated approval for thalidomide (Thalomid, Celgene Corporation) in combination with dexamethasone for the treatment of newly diagnosed multiple myeloma (MM) patients.

Prolonged exposure (living or going to school) at 200 meters raised the chance of getting leukemia by 70%. 200 meters to 500 meters raised it by 20%. [...] And for those asking for citations, search Google for "power lines leukemia" .

I did. Half of the results I got were of the "study finds no link between power lines, leukemia" type. The rest seemed to be written by internet nuts with no clue what they were talking about. Assuming then you meant to search without the quotes, I repeated the search. This time I found more that substantiate what you said, but realising that half of them didn't know what they were talking about I repeated it on google scholar (as should anyone interested in what actual scientific research on a subject says).

Results: "no relationship was found between leukemia and electric power line configurations", "Residence near high-voltage lines did not increase risk", [test subjects who lived] within 300 metres [of a power line showed a] relative risk [with] 95% confidence interval [of one kind of leukemia of] 0.8-3.5 [, or for another] 0.7-3.8 [, or if exposure was prolonged] 1.0-4.6 [or] 0.9-4.7" (i.e., for those who don't understand how to interpret that last one, no statistically significant effects -- note that this is the study that's usually cited _in favour_ of arguments about power lines causing leukemia). "the risk was not significantly associated with either residential magnetic-field levels ", "The study provides [...] no support for an association between leukemia and [magnetic field exposure]", "the results suggest that typical magnetic fields of high-voltage power lines are not an important cause of leukemia in adults", "These results provide little support for a relation between power-frequency EMF exposure and risk of childhood leukemia", "For residential exposure >= 0.2 uT, the relative risk for leukemia was estimated at .. 95% confidence interval 0.8-2.2" (i.e. not statistically significant). That's the first page of results finished with; I don't see any evidence fdor your assertion of a 70% increase in risk, and I would be cautious at claiming even that there's a link. Google scholar selects widely cited papers first, and papers with the most provocative results are likely to be the most widely cited. Given the number of studies that have been conducted on this subject, we'd expect at least some to come up with postive results based on random variation. That none of the ones I've looked at have even had statistically significant results suggests there's nothing to this, and it really is just random variation we're seeing.

A case study tells you nothing about prevalence in the community.

Your "1/4000" prevalence estimate dates back to 1960. You're going to have to do better than that. Especially because the prevalence of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disease in the community is around 1/100.

Vardy et al say The findings supported a model of LSD psychosis as a drug-induced schizophreniform reaction in persons vulnerable to both substance abuse and psychosis.. That is to say, among a vulnerable segment of the population, with disorders of GABA metabolism, many drugs can induce an above-average pseudo-delerium, and that these delerious states are indistinguishable from each other, and from schizophreniform disorders.

Soyka et al illustrate a high concordance between high dosages of alcohol and schizophrenia. Do we then assume, naively, that alcohol induces schizophrenia?

Soyka et plus al further indicate that schizophrenia and schizphreniform disease is associated with multifactorial drug use. LSD is not a primary or singular etiological agent here.

Goswami et al present a large body of evidence that people with schizophrenia or even family members with latent schizphreniform tendencies self medicate" in a manner usually considered polydrug abuse. Again, do you really think that the polydrugs are causing the GABA disarray in their cortexes?

To date, the only drugs that have been proven to induce schizophrenia in humans, and schizphrenia-like symptoms in lab animals, and to increase the symptoms of schizophrenia in people already afflicted with it are the NMDA receptor antagonists such as ketamine or PCP. These probably induce their chronic effects through an oxidative cascade. No similar mechanism has been presented, much less demonstrated, for any specific, putative effects of LSD on neural development.

A case study tells you nothing about prevalence in the community.

Your "1/4000" prevalence estimate dates back to 1960. You're going to have to do better than that. Especially because the prevalence of schizophrenia and schizophreniform disease in the community is around 1/100.

Vardy et al say The findings supported a model of LSD psychosis as a drug-induced schizophreniform reaction in persons vulnerable to both substance abuse and psychosis.. That is to say, among a vulnerable segment of the population, with disorders of GABA metabolism, many drugs can induce an above-average pseudo-delerium, and that these delerious states are indistinguishable from each other, and from schizophreniform disorders.

Soyka et al illustrate a high concordance between high dosages of alcohol and schizophrenia. Do we then assume, naively, that alcohol induces schizophrenia?

Soyka et plus al further indicate that schizophrenia and schizphreniform disease is associated with multifactorial drug use. LSD is not a primary or singular etiological agent here.

Goswami et al present a large body of evidence that people with schizophrenia or even family members with latent schizphreniform tendencies self medicate" in a manner usually considered polydrug abuse. Again, do you really think that the polydrugs are causing the GABA disarray in their cortexes?

To date, the only drugs that have been proven to induce schizophrenia in humans, and schizphrenia-like symptoms in lab animals, and to increase the symptoms of schizophrenia in people already afflicted with it are the NMDA receptor antagonists such as ketamine or PCP. These probably induce their chronic effects through an oxidative cascade. No similar mechanism has been presented, much less demonstrated, for any specific, putative effects of LSD on neural development.

The reason it's thought to be swine influenza is that when its genome was examined and compared with other flu genomes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/SwineFlu.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/Database/select.cgi

the various segments were most closely related to sequences previously (and recently) detected in pig viruses, though the particular strain had not been found before in any animal:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/swineflu/biofacts/swinefluoverview.html

It's actually quite possible, however, that pigs originally picked up a distant ancestor of the current strain from humans. Pig flu was first described in 1918, coinciding with the last human H1N1 pandemic, and when the virus was isolated from pigs in the 1930s, it was also found to have the H1N1 serotype.

The reason it's thought to be swine influenza is that when its genome was examined and compared with other flu genomes:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/SwineFlu.html

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/genomes/FLU/Database/select.cgi

the various segments were most closely related to sequences previously (and recently) detected in pig viruses, though the particular strain had not been found before in any animal:

http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/cidrap/content/influenza/swineflu/biofacts/swinefluoverview.html

It's actually quite possible, however, that pigs originally picked up a distant ancestor of the current strain from humans. Pig flu was first described in 1918, coinciding with the last human H1N1 pandemic, and when the virus was isolated from pigs in the 1930s, it was also found to have the H1N1 serotype.

... and here we have just a single anecdote about how the system did not work in one instance. If we are playing the anecdote game, I'm sure I can find a similar example where non-computerized health records lead to bad care. Of course, while the anecdote game is very effective at playing at human emotional response (we tend to assign more weight to a story that we can associate with a single person versus aggregate statistics), it's useless as an actual policy question.

Since every complicated system has failures, even the critical ones like hospitals and air traffic control, the important policy question is not whether it works in all instances, it's whether it produces overall better care than the system it's replacing and whether that improvement is worth the difference in price. If the new system actually reduces costs, then it's a good idea so long as it doesn't degrade care (since, ultimately, reduced cost means either more health care or more dollars to satisfy other wants).

I'm not going to comment on the data myself, since you should read the studies for yourself and draw your own conclusions.

http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract;jsessionid=7C274D08947B0625B3B540BEF2E70367.tomcat1?fromPage=online&aid=416400
http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/abstract/348/22/2218
(PDF)
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pmcentrez&artid=1421388

PS. Of course there's no panacea for our medical problem. The question is whether EHR are better than the system we've got, not whether they represent the best possible system. The perfect is not the enemy of the good.

PPS. I have a sneaking suspicion, reading my post (yeah, some /.ers actually read their own posts before hitting submit :-P) that I will be accused of not having the proper sympathy for the guy in TFA. That's not true. I have sympathy for him as an individual, but I'm not going to let that sympathy for him cloud my judgment on the merits of a system.

For example, suppose there was a highway by you that had no center divider, just a grassy median. Suppose also, for the sake of argument, that installing a jersey barrier (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jersey_barrier will lower the injury/fatality rate in accidents by a statistically significant amount by preventing out-of-control cars from going into oncoming traffic. Now, hypothetically, someone could be in an accident where the jersey barrier caused him serious injury or death (say, by flipping his car even though they are designed to minimize that chance) where the old system would have been just fine (say, because there was no oncoming traffic at the time of the accident). Does someone that still says we have jersey barriers not have sympathy for that guy? No. His death is regrettable but because we can't make a perfect road, we have to settle for the best road we can make.

The problem is that you can point to someone that's injured (and provoke an emotional response related to his regrettable accident) but the only thing the jersey barrier proponent can do is point to the statistics that say there are fewer serious injuries since they've been installed. There's no emotional resonance to the thousands of people that travel without incident each day because they don't make a good story. "Man drives to work safely" isn't news, but because it happens much more often that "Man killed in car wreck", it's actually much more important in the grand scheme of things.

We aren't privy to all the stories where EHR made things smoother, cheaper or helped prevent calamity. Largely, these will be small victories, unsung

So because you don't see it on the first page of a google search it doesn't exist?

Do you have any evidence that the doctors did not say it?

Now common sense dictates that when you use a particle cannon to destroy parts of the brain it will have an effect on the brain. A quick search and you'll see that radiation therapy has an effect on the pituitary gland, which is in charge of among other things growth hormones. Children are especially affected by this because the brain is not fully developed.

See for example:
http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?PG=thera-brain#part_four

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15518596 (Fifty percent to 80% of children treated with craniospinal radiation for brain tumors will experience growth failure)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1727109?ordinalpos=1 (2400 cGy patients had deficiencies in IQ and academic performance)

So because you don't see it on the first page of a google search it doesn't exist?

Do you have any evidence that the doctors did not say it?

Now common sense dictates that when you use a particle cannon to destroy parts of the brain it will have an effect on the brain. A quick search and you'll see that radiation therapy has an effect on the pituitary gland, which is in charge of among other things growth hormones. Children are especially affected by this because the brain is not fully developed.

See for example:
http://www.radiologyinfo.org/en/info.cfm?PG=thera-brain#part_four

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15518596 (Fifty percent to 80% of children treated with craniospinal radiation for brain tumors will experience growth failure)

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1727109?ordinalpos=1 (2400 cGy patients had deficiencies in IQ and academic performance)

One scary thought: if the current working theory is correct---if the fatality rate is higher than normal due to cytokine storms in otherwise healthy individuals---then a lot of common flu treatments (e.g. elderberry extracts) have the potential to make things worse instead of better. Of course, until this particular strain is isolated and somebody does (at minimum) tests in lab mice with this strain and such an extract, no one can really say for certain. This is more speculation than anything else.

There are, however, a couple of commonly available OTC products that might well reduce the cytokine storm significantly, and with relatively few/minor side effects and drug interactions. I'd be curious to hear the thoughts of someone with a medical background on this subject after reading the relevant studies. Here are the two that seem the most promising to me:

• Cimetidine (Tagamet) boosts proinflammatory cytokines, so for ordinary flu it would make you get well sooner. More interestingly, it also suppresses the anti-inflammatory cytokines. I'm not completely clear on the details, but I get the impression that a cytokine storm involves excessive levels of both pro- and anti-inflammatory cytokines. I don't know what research has been done in this area, but at least one study seems to corroborate that theory:

  http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3112984

  I have no way to guess whether this would be true for other causes of ARDS, though.

• Curcumin (a Turmeric extract) also inhibits TNF (in large doses) and may have similar benefits in preventing or diminishing a cytokine storm. More info here:

  http://www.flutrackers.com/forum/showthread.php?t=6943

  Ironically, curcumin diminishes the effectiveness of cimetidine (an acid reducer) by increasing stomach acid.... :-)

Thoughts?

According to http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2239906 the incidence of appendicitis is 15 in 10,000 per year for white people.

By my maths that gives me an 0.15% chance of contracting appendicitis over the next 12 months. You can split hairs over what you consider to be high risk, but how do those figures stack up against over life threatening conditions?

No, the fetus mostly makes its own.

It doesn't seem to be that simple. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/17135133?ordinalpos=30&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=2077237

Gravity isn't required only some motion of the string

I'm a burger flipper, a tire guy, a mechanic, a professional, or a housewife and I just want the stuff to work.

Please, seek help.

Actually, a biology geek can use a *ton* of bandwidth downloading freely available DNA data sets. There's also some neurological research data that is going to be available in 30GB chunks (2TB total) This paper defines the method of data capture.

"Quorum Sensing"... I remember that phrase. It sounds strangely like something we considered putting into our signal transduction paper back in 2004 (published 2006). It was Lisa, not I, who did the reading on quorum sensing, so I can't claim to be well-read in the subject.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed&cmd=search&term=cashin+goldsack+hall

I wrote a few articles about this for Law Office Computing magazine
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/txtsrch.htm
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/lawdb.htm
http://www.nasw.org/users/nbauman/discover.htm
It was a long time ago, the software and hardware has changed, but the concepts are still the same, and the costs are a lot less.

Free text search works reasonably well with small databases, but it doesn't work with big databases. If you want precision, you have to develop a set of tags (we called them keywords). A good model is Pubmed http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/entrez?db=pubmed. The New York Times used to have a great text search, but they changed it (eliminated tags) and now it's awfully difficult to get through.

Basically, the researcher has a body of knowledge, and he already has a filing and organizing system (in this case, a looseleaf binder system, which is a pretty good start). You should usually try to replicate his filing and organizing system in the database, for example one field for the looseleaf, another field for the tab, and then some goodies that he couldn't search the looseleafs for, like date, author, journal citation, etc. It would probably be useful to have a controlled vocabulary of a few good keywords, but keywords should be selected carefully so they're unique and don't duplicate.

I assume he doesn't have the PDFs any more. That would have made it a lot easier.

It would be handy to scan every word of (most) every document into full text, but it may not be necessary. Why do you need everything in full digital text? Scanning of unconventional text takes a human proofreading step, and probably isn't worth it.

He'll probably want to keep complete images of the original documents anyway along with the text. You should do a few tests to see how much resolution you need. 600 dpi works for ordinary text like they use in the printed newspaper. But if you want journal articles to come out, with footnotes and superscripts, you might need higher resolution.

Somebody is going to have to enter the fields manually, which is't too bad if you've got a thousand records (looseleaf tabs) to enter (about 20 hours), but can get difficult if you've got an order of magnitude more.

Scanning should be straightforward, if everything is neatly filed away in looseleaf books already. There are many cheap consumer-grade scanners on the market that can get 600-2400 dpi (the bundled software is probably more important than the hardware specs) but they can take up to 1 minute a page; there are more expensive scanners in the =>$1,000 range that can go a lot faster. If you're at a university, look around for somebody who already has one. Law firms and libraries do a lot of this.

You might start by estimating the number of pages and documents you have.

But let me suggest an alternative: Instead of scanning everything, just enter everything into a database without scanning it. Does he really need full text search? Or would it be enough to search his looseleaf books by a dozen fields? He doesn't have to print the document out from an image file, it's right there in his looseleaf books.

If anybody knows of up-to-date articles on this subject, I'd love to know the citation.

Mirror? White balance your eyes. :P

Or wean yourself from tube feeding.

This is better news than they even let on. A means to control rejection is the same as a means to control autoimmune disorders. Recent evidence supporting this is at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19199937 There's a partial list of such disorders at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autoimmune_disease

Knowing the mechanism for increasing Treg leads to understanding the mechanism for controlling, thus including suppressing Treg. That would boost the body's immune response. It could control (though not cure) AIDS, and lead to treatments of such as hepatitis B or C without requiring the very side effect laden pegylated alfa interferon 2 + ribavirin treatment. Inducing autoimmnune disease has already been suggested as a cancer treatment http://www.pnas.org/content/96/10/5340.full

As explained in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immune_system an immune system is a very complex system with many components that interact. The more of these we can manipulate the closer we get to the kind of treatments suggested above.

Caffeine reduces the absorption of calcium.

Technically true... but not enough to cause problems. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12204390

It's also a diuretic.

Also technically true... but unless you're taking it in pill form, the amount water in which the caffeine is dissolved is more than the amount it will cause you to lose.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/04/health/nutrition/04real.html

So your claims that caffeine causes kidney stones are totally unfounded.

Every year at Yom Kippur and Tisha B'Av, which are both 25 hour fasts, caffeine addicted jews get withdrawl headaches. A few years back they came up with a solution: caffeine suppositories. It seems eating is more than just putting something in your digestive system.

Continuous, long-term use of Ketamine will result in a loss of the phenotype of a particular subset of your GABAergic inhibitory interneurons. This has a good chance of increasing your risk of progression along the schizophreniform axis. Is that really something you want?

Any thoughts on this? I don't know how "mainstream" the thinking is but it is being proposed as a factor, i.e. could allow other damage to take place (they seem to be concentrating on newborns). There's research being done in the area. Obviously, scientific results tend based on statistics, rather than experiments - although some more ghoulish stuff has been done with monkeys.

The alcohol in bread does not evaporate. According to a report from Cornell College, Iowa (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1709087), the alcohol content in twelve samples varied from 0.04 to 1.9 per cent. The reason that the levels are lower than in beer or wine is that the sugar content is lower.

Huh... how very irresponsible of people to get cancer, right? Oh, you didn't see the number one cause of huge debt is healthcare? Of course looking at what people eat, maybe it is their irresponbility for eating garbage and getting fat (guess which kind of cell is more likely to become maligant?).

http://www.nih.gov/news/research_matters/november2006/11202006fat.htm

Perhaps by having two actors in different courtrooms on the same day, charged with exactly the same crime under the same circumstances, except one is black and the other is white, and repeat the experiment many times to see if they receive different average sentences. For a scientist, the idea is the most natural thing in the world. Forget the fact that the legal system doesn't do this -- why is virtually nobody in the legal profession even suggesting it?

Nobody is suggesting it because the legal system operates on the premise that judges are impartial and unbiased.

The Western system of justice functions because the courts and their decisions are respected. To suggest (God forbid you actually show) otherwise is to damage the court's effectiveness... which is why studies showing that minorities receive harsher sentences are rarely popular.

There are always 'inconvenient truths' that must either be rhetorically obfuscated or avoided entirely. And with the proliferation of bias *studies, it is harder and harder to make the claim that individuals (Judges, Prosecutors, Police) are unbiased, because studies keep showing that even 'unbiased' individuals have unconscious biases.

Implicit Bias among Physicians ... Black and White Patients
Racial Discrimination Among NBA Referees (3rd one down)
Check your own biases using Harvard's IAT tests

*and corresponding studies looking at ways to practically apply the results of such bias studies

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/14527282 for reference to the smallpox cell-to-cell infection

Yes, that was my thought to. I was thinking more about larger plants though. Would fruit still grow the same shape under lunar gravity? Would you have to ration water to the plants so they don't suck up to much water and collapse? Would they have similar problems with nutrient loss as we do with calcium? Could be a very interesting experiment indeed.

It does appear there have been some preliminary studies done. Including growing Arabidopsis thaliana on the ISS. And rice on the Space Shuttle STS-95 mission. The abstract does mention some elongation in the coleoptile of the rice. I would imagine the bigger the plant, the bigger the changes that would develop. It is, after all, studying the effect of gravity.

Well, the Pennines in England are contaminated by iron-eating bacteria, and there is a particularly nasty form of Strep that actually digests the entire human body within 24 hours.

• Metal-cleanup bacteria found in contaminated regions of the Pennines
• Iron-reducing bacteria
• Really nasty metal-eating bacteria

• Flesh-eating Strep

My car gets about 30 MPG and after a half hour 30 mile drive is thirsty for a gallon of gas. After a multi-hour 30 mile bike ride I am very hungry and can easily eat two pounds of food (and still lose weight, if it's salad and not eight quarter pounders with cheese and bacon). Anyway, that two pounds of food obviously takes twenty pounds of gasoline to grow and process and ship and cook. Now at 6 pounds of aviation gas per gallon (note I am not a pilot, but that is my fuzzy memory from wanting to be a pilot decades ago) that would make a bit over 3 gallons of gas to grow the food to bicycle 30 miles.

Your argument only works if you assume that otherwise you would not have consumed those 2lbs of food. Obesity-associated illness trends, in the USA at least, would indicate otherwise. By biking, you burn calories you would be eating anyway, improve your health, and save gas too.

In programming, if you misspell a variable, the program usually doesn't work.

Usually? Does this mean you've found a programming language where the compiler says 'oh, he's put "conut", but he probably meant "count"' and corrects it for you?

Actually, that sounds like a bit of a nightmare. Autocorrect usually causes as many problems as it solves.

The National Institutes of Health just announced the NIH Challenge Grants that is used for doling out stimulus money to small projects. In it they identified several high-priority topics, which if you look through, you will find includes Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data.

So there certainly is money available for this type of work. And for those not familiar with grant funding by the US government, the NIH is the single largest grant provider for the life science in the US.

The National Institutes of Health just announced the NIH Challenge Grants that is used for doling out stimulus money to small projects. In it they identified several high-priority topics, which if you look through, you will find includes Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data.

So there certainly is money available for this type of work. And for those not familiar with grant funding by the US government, the NIH is the single largest grant provider for the life science in the US.

The National Institutes of Health just announced the NIH Challenge Grants that is used for doling out stimulus money to small projects. In it they identified several high-priority topics, which if you look through, you will find includes Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data.

So there certainly is money available for this type of work. And for those not familiar with grant funding by the US government, the NIH is the single largest grant provider for the life science in the US.

The National Institutes of Health just announced the NIH Challenge Grants that is used for doling out stimulus money to small projects. In it they identified several high-priority topics, which if you look through, you will find includes Information Technology for Processing Health Care Data.

So there certainly is money available for this type of work. And for those not familiar with grant funding by the US government, the NIH is the single largest grant provider for the life science in the US.

Sure there are small differences, and that's the problem, often those small differences aren't good enough for the "1.5 seconds scans".

I wouldn't be able to tell which twin was which if one just ran past me.

If the system is that sensitive to small differences in the face, then it is more likely to get confused with normal facial changes. Many girls/women do actually look different over the course of their "monthly cycle"[1].

Also, what happens if the twin with the fatter face slims down a bit or the other twin puts on a bit more weight in a different part?

[1] http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?artid=1560017

I did not see the term embryonic in the article, and since these are derived from adult cells I wouldn't expect to. Embryonic cells are generally easier to replicate and more capable, while adult (somatic) cells have the benefit of not causing rejection. More on the differences at the NIH stem cell info page.

A means to create embryonic stem cells from adult cells would provide pluripotent cells of matching genetic makeup, which seems to be the ultimate starting point for stem cell therapy. The fact that a virus is not used to create these cells seems to reduce the chances of genetic errors or increased cancer cancer risk, a benefit of embryonic stem cells.

Instead of using direct electrical stimulation to stimulate the brain, he uses virally-transcoded neurons to respond to different wavelengths of light....then pipes a fiber optic cable into a mouse brain. To do what? To make it run in circles.

A quick pubmed search led me to this article, which Boyden was an author on http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/articlerender.fcgi?tool=pubmed&pubmedid=17483470

From the intro:

Although the electrode has long been the preferred tool for controlling neuronal electrical activity, this method of stimulation has a number of shortcomings, including mechanical damage inflicted on the target tissue, limited spatial resolution with extracellular electrodes, and a limited population of activated neurons (typically one cell) when using intracellular electrodes. An alternative way to stimulate neurons is to use light as a source of energy.

In other words, the old way damages the cells and could produce artifacts, and the new way additionally allows for better understanding of the circuitry. And that's not all...

From the abstract:

Photostimulation also could evoke synaptic transmission between neurons, and, by scanning with a small laser light spot, we were able to map the spatial distribution of synaptic circuits connecting neurons within living cerebral cortex. We conclude that ChR2 is a genetically based photostimulation technology that permits analysis of neural circuits with high spatial and temporal resolution in transgenic mammals.

Better resolution as well I guess.

You really can't judge research by blurby articles published in non-scientific journals, (which kind of seems to be what you're doing, maybe not). They don't seem to be doing this with the goal of "making the mouse run in circles," that was just what the journalist got out of it and thought would be interesting to his readers. In fact, they may have explained the full relevance of their work to the writer, who didn't understand any of it and instead wrote about what he did understand: mice with freaking lasers in their heads.

Note that having skimmed the paper and working in a somewhat related field, I'm not entirely clear on what's going on with this researcher. Then again, I didn't try to write an article about it...

Doesn't the NIH already do this with Entrez ? Plus there are plenty of data generating institutions that actually chave such infastructure such as Connectivity Map, Chembank and the personal genome project to name a few. From the article I'm having trouble seeing how "Sage" will offer anything unique.

Let me fix those links for you:

Next thing you know you're going to be suggesting that ordinary herbs are perfectly good for helping people sleep or combating migraines too.

Let me fix those links for you:

Next thing you know you're going to be suggesting that ordinary herbs are perfectly good for helping people sleep or combating migraines too.

Right now we know the human genome and that it's about 99% the same for everybody; if we know what the genetic differences are between people with cancer and those without, the differences in which genes are active, what the mRNA and proteins are doing, then we can attack the disease through those differences. Knowing the differences is just a stepping stone to creating safe and effective medicines, big pharmaCos are still going to be able to make money their old fashioned way with this data.

Even now anybody can go and poke around in Genbank over at National Center for Biotechnology Information

HIPAA (not "HIPPA") doesn't have to be a barrier to sharing research data -- take a look at the U. of Pittsburgh's Honest Broker System for a very nicely put-together, largely decentralized method of moving data around while staying well within privacy guidelines. Financial interests are a much bigger obstacle to the free exchange of knowledge than are even the strictest regulations.