Slashdot Mirror
Distributed Computing Attacking SARS
fwc writes "D2OL has added a SARS Target to it's distributed computing project which locates potential drug candidates for several viruses. At this point, I've replaced SETI@Home at least temporarily on all of my Boxen. There are clients available for Linux, Solaris, Mac OS X, and of course Windows."
If everyone stops doing SETI@home and moves to battling the SARS problem then we may miss a vital signal from outer space from an alien race that has a cure to SARS and all the other nasties roaming this planet!
... I guess
I wonder when my United Devices client (ud.com) is gonna add that project... It's currently working on smallpox and cancer...
;)
Should I change projects? Switch UD in favor of D2OL or what? And why?
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Who owns the results once they've been calculated? Who gets paid royalties when a drug is developed from this data? I'm not going to donate my CPU time if SARS sufferers have to pay royalties (either directly or indirectly) to GlaxoSmithcline or the US Government (which IMHO isn't any better than a multinational corporation) for their medication.
Unless the results are released into the public domain or at least licensed under a BSD- or GPL-style license, I'm not touching it.
OLPC Australia
Unfortunately, finding a target binding site for a potential drug is years away from actually having a useful cure...
How do all of you out there feel about contributing your computing cycles to the private sector? Previous iterations of this idea have been through nonprofit/university research institutions, but this new post seems to be private enterprise driven. As noble the goal D2OL is working towards is, i still feel odd about the whole idea. I pose the following question to the general Slashdot community: How do you feel about your computing cycles being used for the research and development of pharmaceuticals (or any other imaginable private sector application) and said company reaping tremendous profits from this show of goodwill?
If they find the correct drug against SARS, will it be free? or will it be patented and only the rich countries will use it??
Here's a question.. Suppose i download this thingummy and run it and jackpot, a miracle cure for SARS unrolls in front of my eyes. Do I have any sort of intellectual property rights over my discovery? And do I have the right to prevent the distributed software Im running from connecting back to the server and giving them the good news?
Does this mean I might win the Nobel Prize???
Not that I'm going to do anything like that. Just wondering if the guys behind the thing have thought through the legal issues.
I have found a truly wonderful proof of Fermat's Last Theorem, but unfortunately this sig is too small to contain it.
I'm not sure that this project (as it is now) will be all that useful. Alot of it appears to be hinging on generous speculation.
I'm not a virologist, but as far as I remember, drug-directed approaches haven't been notably successful with attacking coronaviruses (ever hear that "medicine can't cure the common cold", anyone?) -- and to confuse things more, this one seems to be very atypical.
Also, from what I know about the anti-virals that have shown some efficacy against these type of SS-RNA viruses, they've been directed at nucleic acids, not at product-proteins. Ribavirin, which was initially hoped to be the "magic bullet" to stop SARS is a nucleoside analogue (purine? I don't remember). I haven't heard of an effective intervention that disrupts the protein envelope or synthesis.
Additionally, this group is assuming that the causitive agent of SARS has correctly been isolated and identified in the first place, which isn't certain by any means.
Aiming computing power towards a worthy goal like this can't hurt, but I question how effective it really will be. I guess the computer-types can just tweak the parameters as the biomed-folks find out more on their end.
Download the SARS genetic sequence here.
Not quite. This only works for chronic diseases or conditions, where you give the people afflicted time to move their wealth and power into fixing their problem. SARS is a transient condition - a supercold if you will. Either you get it and die, or you get it and get better. Within a few weeks, you'll know either way - not enough time to bring personal resources to bear to find an actual cure, as opposed to boosting your personal immune system so you can fight the bug off by yourself. Once you're a survivor, you should have immunity, so that removes the immediate threat of re-infection, which then moves SARS to the bottom of your list of global concerns...
This slashdotting of such a site shows the need of a new distributed computing project. I wish to propose that we all sit down and share our cpu cycles to prevent slashdotting. How about we call the project "SARS: Some people Are likely to Risk Slashdotting this project" (Ok, I know that was a lame attempt at a name, but try coming up with a better one instead of complaining :P )
It would in essence work the way that we'd all put aside ~200k disk space and ~5k bandwidth for storing the most recently posted websites and files on our computers, then people could put together impromptu mirrors from this distributed project and behold! No more slashdottings of sites, articles and programs that one actually wants to read or download!
So, who's with me on this trek into the land where no slashdotter has ever ventured before?
Anyone?
If you're already searcing for E.T. and not a cure for cancer, why would you search for a cure for SARS? SARS is scary because it's new not because it's a currently uncontrollable viral disease, we've got loads of them. HIV/AIDS, TB, the common cold. Somwhere between 80% and 95% recover quite nicely from SARS, IIRC 500,000 die each year of the flue, you don't see us jumping around over that.
Disclaimier: I'm not saying SARS shouldn't be fought, all disease should, but let's all get some perspective.
(To back some of this up with a _little_ more reliable resource found through Google, look here)
Look a monkey!
I saw a report yesterday, either BBC or CNN, that WHO now believes the fatality rate of SARS will be about 10-15%. Much higher than previously believed (this was after China went public with their info)
Je ne parle pas francais.
When it comes to diseases, early overreaction is good. At an early stage there is little information about exactly how dangerous this particular disease might turn out to be. At the same time, containing the disease at this stage is easy. All you might need to do is quarantine half a dozen people.
Of course, as the disease progresses and the actual severity of the epidemic is assessed, we can update our procedures to make it less or more stringent as the need might be.
This is the same reason why firemen overreact to fire alarms by the way. It is so much easier to contain a fire in the first three-five minutes that is worth driving recklessly to the scene of the fire, even though 95% of the time they turn out to be false alarms.
that all these distributed projects are actually doing what they're supposed to?
Would you notice it if my long-lasting-no-results-yet-but-soon-for-sure distributed project for an AIDS vaccine were actually a rendering farm for animated kiddie porn movies?
How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life
The way the world is reacting to SARS is much like the way it would have reacted to the 1918-1919 flu, if we'd had the public health infrastructure then that we do now. And that reaction would have saved millions of lives
The correlation between ignorance of statistics and using "correlation is not causation" as an argument is close to 1.
Ebola usually requires some kind of bodily fluid/tissues swap with an infected person.
There's also a reason why "hemorrhagic fever" bugs like Ebola tend to burn themselves out... they are extraordinarily lethal, and quickly kill their host; Ebola has a 90% mortality (compared to 6-12% for SARS). When a virus is too hard on its host, it lessens the opportunity to spread itself.
AIDS is a good example of a successful high-mortality bug... but you can stay alive and asymptomatic for so very long, that spread is virtually assured if you are uncautious.
SARS looks so much like the common cold, that even experienced clinicians have difficulty differentiating it from other bugs. That is, of course, until it's too late. SARS could be a real problem... significant mortality rate, easy to spread, poorly understood, and, like West Nile, NO treatment (well, some advocate treating West Nile with interferons... but the side effects of those drugs are terribly unpleasant; the treatment is almost worse than the disease).
It's nice that they're taking this thing seriously; any money spent on containment is probably well-spent indeed. If they can determine that this bug has no animal reservoir, it could even be eradicated. Till then, public panic serves no one, but public caution is NOT a bad thing.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
I work in Emergency Services, and have already had to deal with TWO suspected cases of SARS. Speaking as a physician, I'll donate my computing cycles, absolutely. The sooner a treatment is brought out, the better.
Here's how I feel about it: I hate having someone come into my ER when I have nothing to offer them. I feel a powerful ethical and professional obligation to take care of people, and do whatever I can for them. I do my best for each and every single patient I see, even if it's somebody who has been through maximal surgery/chemo for their cancer, and has literally reached the end of what medical science can do for them. For such folks, sometimes all I can do is hold their hand and offer a little reassurance, but at least it's SOMETHING. I hate having someone die right in front of me, and being powerless to prevent it. Call it a God complex if you want... I call it wanting to be able to help people. Having people die, and having nothing to say and no way to say it... well, that bothers me, call me crazy.
I don't particularly mind not having a cure for the common cold... a cold is an annoyance, nothing more. I very much DISLIKE not having a treatment for a lethal condition.
I personally don't care who develops the cure... Pharmcos are often painted as evil opportunists that prey on the illnesses of others... I disagree. I like Pharmcos, because they keep my arsenal full, which makes me MUCH more effective at my job. I don't accept Hawaii trips from them, but I'll accept lunch and a couple of pens if they're going to give me some clinically useful information (and hell, I have to write with something). I resent the AMA (I am NOT a member, BTW, for this reason and others) preaching to me about the "unethical behavior" of having dealings with drug reps. Do they really think I'm going to sell out my ethics, my oaths, and my patients because somebody took me to dinner?? I'm sorry, but that's a fucking insult.
I prescribe what I want, within the standard of care, regardless of what drug reps say. I always use cheap if I can, expensive if cheap won't work... but I like the fact that Pharmcos give me tools to take better care of patients.
The sooner a cure for SARS shows up, the happier I'll be.
Even if a man chops off your hand with a sword, you still have two nice, sharp bones to stick in his eyes.
It's hard to say for sure, but SARS simply doesn't seem that deadly. With worse hygiene and containment certainly far more people would be infected, but it's unlikely such a huge percentage of them would die. Currently fatality rates are in the 2-4% range. Even if that'd double to 4-8% without modern medical care, that's still not near 40%
The Spanish Flu of 1918-1919 had a mortality rate of about 4% which is similar to what we're seeing with SARS. It infected a fifth of the world's population. The U.S. was one of the countries least devastated by the pandemic. But even here 20,000,000 Americans came down with the flu, with 850,000 deaths resulting. Which means that flu killed more Americans than died in all the wars of the twentieth century.
Like SARS, this one originated in China as well. It started as a virus passed from birds to pigs. (They know because in 1997 someone exhumed the body of a soldier who died of it in 1918 and sequenced some of the virus from his lungs.)