It is very hard. For most experiments, you're not trying to detect a few molecules of DNA. You can set up your detection sensitivity so that a tiny bit of contamination won't be detected. For something like this, were you are trying to detect very small amounts of DNA, it becomes much, much harder.
Firstly, you use very purified reagents. All the reagents need to be aliquoted individually in a location physically separate from where the DNA is. This is typically done in a specialized clean hood that can be sterilized with UV radiation. The reagents are combined in a similar hood and then transferred to where the tube with the DNA is. All of this needs to be done using gloves that are changed frequently. Next, you have to be very careful about what pipettes you use. The pipettes from each step need to be thoroughly cleaned, possibly DNAse treated to remove DNA. Again, each part of the experiment should use different sets of pipettes. To ensure that things are not contaminated, you have to use various controls such as leaving out the polymerase, dNTPs, etc. I'm sure if you got some other biologists together, they could brainstorm about a dozen precautions.
It's not impossible to do, but it can be hard. I personally have lost months of research time because I accidentally contaminated something. Replacing all my reagents to clean ones did nothing, so I figured it was my pipettes, but the problem didn't go away when I thoroughly cleaned them. Eventually, I switched to using different sets of pipettes for each step, and the problem resolved. You may say that I'm not a careful scientist, but while talking to people to resolve my problem, pretty much everyone said they've experienced something similar. None of use proposed and published any crazy theory to justify it.
Yeah, they did the proper controls on the DNA generation of frequency. I think that could, within the confines of current science, be a reasonable claim. They did not do those same controls on the transmissible assembly of DNA through these water nanostructures. That claim is the one I think is unbelievable.
If I were writing this paper, I would make it explicit that these controls were performed for both experiments. The fact that they did not do this leads me to conclude they were trying to trick the reader into assuming they did.
I take back my assertion that this is a hoax. Apparently, this Nobel Prize laureate has a history of producing very tenuous science on this topic. I think he's actually serious, which is pretty sad.
I am a biologist by trade, and I can say that this paper is very, very poorly done. If it was submitted to any major journal in the field, the peer reviewers would tear it to shreds.
Here is the big experiment:
1) Take DNA and place it in tube #1 diluted around 1 million fold
2) Separate it from tube #2 containing all the building blocks of DNA, but not properly assembled
3) In between tube #1 and tube #2 is a special piece of metal
4) Subject the entire thing to low frequency magnetic field
5) There is an induction of the DNA to emit oscillatory radiation
6) DNA replicate magically appears in tube #2 from the building blocks
I can buy the assertion that DNA at certain dilution transmits some strange radiation. It's step 5 to 6 that I think is complete and utter garbage.
They don't do the proper controls for step 4 to 5. What happens when no DNA is present in tube #1? What happens when there is no inducing field? What happens when the building blocks are present in tube #2? They clearly know that this is an issue because they do the exact controls from steps 4 to 5. The "synthesis" of new DNA can easily be explained by one explanation: contamination. DNA sequencing techniques are sensitive enough to detect one or two copies of that sequence. If any of their reagents, tools, or lab members got even a single molecule of DNA on them and transferred it to tube #2, they would see that result. This is a basic fact that pretty much all molecular biologist learns (usually the hard way, by accidentally contaminating something of importance).
To give the authors the benefit of the doubt, I'll go ahead and say they have successfully duped Slashdot with a hoax spoofing the claims of homeopathy.
The prestigious science journal Nature recently had an article on the best cities for science. They have some really cool interactive graphs showing scientific productivity of different parts of the world and how many citations each place gets. What struck me was how quickly China grew in terms of volume of publications, but how poorly their articles were cited. Whether that is due to papers being published in primarily Chinese language journals, the papers of being of poor quality, or the scientific community ignoring important papers coming from China for whatever reason is unclear, but I think it shows that other countries have a while to go before achieving scientific dominance.
Typically, DNA is thought to be transcribed into RNA in an exact copy of the DNA minus random errors that occur due to poor fidelity of the polymerase that makes it. However, it's been well known for more than 10 years that RNA can be altered systematically through (still mostly mysterious) mechanisms called RNA editing. This is a well known phenomenon that is pretty much universally believed by all biologists. However, RNA editing was thought to be a mostly rare process that only affected a handful of genes. This group used new technology called deep sequencing that allows for high throughput, quantitative sequencing of millions of RNA molecules at once, and their results suggest that RNA editing isn't as rare as once thought.
To be fair, this is an abstract submitted to a conference, so it only has undergone the most minimal editorial (not really peer) review based on a paragraph or so of presented data. This may all be an artifact due to some systematic bias of the sequencing platform. There are probably hundreds of other groups using deep sequencing of RNA, so it will be interesting to see if other groups can replicate this.
That's simply not true. I'll reference you this article which says that between 1997 and 2002, there were around 2700 patients in Canada admitted to the ER for acetaminophen overdose and 69% of them overdosed intentionally. That's about 370 people a year intentionally overdosing themselves with acetaminophen a year. In the US, 26,000 people overdosed on the drug over around 10 years. If the rate of intentional overdose is similar in the US and Canada, that's about 1800 people intentionally overdosing on the drug each year in the US. I personally know at least one person who attempted (and failed) to overdose on the drug. Dying of liver failure is a pretty nasty way to go compared to firearms, but anyone who has worked in any urban ER knows that intentional overdose is pretty common.
The Atlantic magazine just published a really eye-opening article on Steven Hatfill, the FBI's first suspect. It is very clear from the article that the FBI was hell-bent on finding a perpetrator of the crime even in the absence of any solid evidence. It's an interesting and frightening read about how the FBI could completely destroy your job, your friends, your day-to-day life, and your family if they falsely accuse you of a crime.
From reading the projects on the DNA Initiative's website, it seems that they need mitochondrial DNA samples as test samples to develop various forensic techniques.
Cheap: it used to cost millions of dollars to sequence a genome but new technologies are greatly driving down the price. The sequencing guru I mentioned above predicts it will cost about $10,000 some time in the next 10 years
Fast: it probably will take a week to sequence. However, the analysis tools are very complicated and will probably take much longer
Good: as far as I can tell, this technology is pretty accurate. A good run will sequence every piece of DNA 20 times so sequencing errors tend to get washed out.
So I work in biological sciences, and I have the special privilege of having the guy who sequenced the first cancer genome working down the hall from me (he's also my thesis committee).
There is now technology to sequence entire genomes very quickly using massive parallel sequencing. Ideally, if you were sequencing a tumor from a single person, you would get tissue from the tumor and also from the non-tumor (usually skin) and sequence them at the same time. Then you compare the two to distinguish what is simply variation in each person's genetics and what is acquired by the tumor. In my opinion, that's the best way to do things and probably the most informative because you're looking a tumor in a real person that is subject to all the selective evolutionary pressures that occur in people.
These groups didn't take that approach for reasons unclear to me. Instead, they sequenced cancer cell lines. If you cut out a person's tumor and stick it in a test tube with various growth factors, it will almost certainly die within a week or so. However, you occasionally get some cells that can grow in this situation because they've acquired some mutation that lets them grow in tissue culture. You then expand and passage these cells until they grow rapidly in culture. The problem here is that you're no longer dealing with a normal human tumor; you're selecting for tumor cells that grow in the artificial tissue culture environment. The second problem is that you're not sure what to compare the tumor sequence with. Due to privacy concerns, you almost never know who actually gave the tumor that was made into a cell line (as an aside, look up the HeLa cell line and its sordid history) so you have to compare to the human genome project. The problem here is that there are differences between people and you can't tell whether the "mutation" you see is just a normal variation or actually something in the tumor.
These are the important limitations you have to consider when evaluating these papers.
Now, on to your question. They have 30,000 changes in the DNA compared to their reference "normal" genome. Nearly all of those are in "junk" DNA: as far as we know, they don't code any genes or anything else that regulates genes. Of the ones that are in interesting regions, the vast majority of them are called synonymous mutations which means the DNA is changed but due to the way it is interpreted, the protein that it makes is identical (to use a computer analogy, imagine that an the opcode for JMP was changed from 01 to 02 but both 01 and 02 are translated by the computer as JMP).
Now, a certain number of mutations aren't like that. They either lead to truncated proteins, alter the amino acid sequence of proteins, alter mRNA splicing, etc. There are also other genetic changes such as duplications where the gene sequence is unchanged but may be copied several times to increase the gene dose. These are really the interesting things because they alter protein function or gene dose. From a brief reading, it looks like there are around 100 of these.
Now, it's really difficult to tell whether these mutations are really relevant to cancer progression. Some of them might just happen due to tumors just mutating really fast and not really affect the cancer progression one way or another; they are so called "passenger" mutations that just come along for the ride. You can introduce these mutations into cells in lab to see if they do anything, but the real test is to sequence a bunch of human cancers and see if certain mutations are recurrent. This work is currently underway and will prove very informative about how genetically heterogeneous tumors really are.
So, in short, there are about 100 haystacks. Further sequencing of other tumors will show if these are relevant to cancer in general. In my personal opinion, I think that further sequencing will identify very few common mutations and everyone's cancer will be essentially unique in the mutations it acquires. That will force us to completely rethink how we view cancer on a broader scale as not a single disease but a collection of highly related diseases that need to be treated individually.
I am not a professional in mental health, but I do have some education on this. As others have mentioned, the best thing you could do would be to talk to a professional yourself, especially a professional who has experience with treating people with substance abuse disorders. Unfortunately, it is unlikely you will find a therapist who well-trained in treating other addictions, although they do exist. Often, therapists include friends and family in the therapy, and sometimes, they give therapy to just the friends and family if the person with the problem is unwilling to come.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of really bad advice on this thread. Do not hack his account, disconnect his computer, or any other majorly confrontational thing to take away the source. Do not get a bunch of his friends together and have a movie style intervention. He's addicted to the game; you will just piss him off and he'll never talk to you again and most likely find another way to play. Don't let others tell you that you shouldn't bother helping him because it's too much trouble; the very fact that it got this bad is a testament to how many people decided that it was someone else's problem, and the worst thing that can happen is that your friendship with him dies, and it doesn't seem to be doing so well in its current state anyhow.
Secondly, people only change when they're willing to change, which means that it's ultimately his responsibility, but that does not mean that you can't do anything to help him become more willing. Sit him down and quietly and politely express your concerns but try to engage him in the conversation. Here would be an example script, which I've adapted from the CAGE questions for screening for alcohol abuse:
"John, I've noticed that you've been playing a lot of that game lately, and I'm worried that it's not healthy for you. How do you feel about that game? Do you think that you should play less? Have other people told you that you should play less? Do you ever feel bad or guilty about playing so much?"
From that, you could determine if he's in the pre-contemplative stage (he thinks there's no problem) or the contemplative stage (he realizes there's a problem but isn't sure if he wants to change or doesn't know how). If he's in the contemplating stage, try to get him to verbally state the negative impact of his playing:
"It seems that you recognize that you are playing too much game. Do you think this is hurting your grades? Your social life? Your relationships with your parents? Your ability to date? Do you think cutting down on playing would help you in these areas?"
Once you've gotten him to admit that there are negative impacts of what he's doing, you've done a lot. From there, you should guide him into professional help:
"Well, it relieves me to know that you recognize that you have a problem. I'd just like you to know that as your friend, I'm concerned about you, and if you want help, I can help you get that help (i.e. refer to student health)."
That's really all you have to do. Even if he completely rejects you, you've at least planted some seeds of doubt in his mind. When he reaches rock bottom, those seeds will sprout, and you will have done the best you can as a friend for him.
I work in biology, and we use Spotfire DecisionSite to visualize and analyze a lot of our massive genetic data. It's a very powerful program that I barely know how to use. It seems to have packages able to analyze pretty much anything you want, and you can even write your own scripts to help things along.
This post is tremendously over-simplistic to the point of being nothing but Israeli propaganda. Please read the Wikipedia article about the Palestinian exodus to understand what really happened. It is not entirely clear why the majority of the Palestinians left, but there was a lot more going on than the Mufti.
You actually don't have to do rural practice for loan forgiveness. You just have to work in an undeserved community, which can include rural areas, Indian reservations, or the inner city. Most decently sized cities have clinics that serve such a community. If you live frugally and have a competitive application, you could theoretically live in NYC for a few years and leave with no debt.
A variation in the CCR5 gene, called CCR5 delta32, confers immunity if you have two copies of the gene (remember, you get one copy from each of your parents). It's been known for a while that this is associated with AIDS resistance, so there have been many large cross-sectional studies to look at the population frequency. Although it is possible that the gene is more widespread in certain populations, it's still rare (10% in white of European descent, 2% in Asians); remember you must have *both* copies of the gene to be resistant to AIDS only ~1% of Europeans have that.
The only way you'd know is to have the test for that specific mutation, and as far as I know, it's not really widely used clinically.
Like I said, the main problem is that the bone marrow registries are quite small, and you can't find suitable matches for people based on their MHC matching. The chance of finding one of those isn't particularly good. You have to multiple that times the probability of having the right CCR5 type and we're talking pretty rare.
Well, there are two problems with this. Firstly, hematopoietic stem cells don't last very long in culture. Lots of people are trying to figure out why, but I'm not optimistic that this problem will be solved any time soon since the cells normally exist in a complex microenvironment in the marrow that we don't really understand yet.
But more importantly is the issue of MHC typing. While you need someone who has the CCR5 mutation (which is pretty rare), you also need to have someone who matches your MHC type. Think of MHC as the molecules that allow your body to identify self from non-self. The more MHC matches you have with the donor, the less chance you have of developing a life-threatening disorder called graft vs. host disease. Ideally, doctors want someone related to you, but if those people don't match, you have to do an unrelated donor search. Generally, finding a MHC match requires a large registry search that takes weeks to months to carry out, and many people, especially non-whites (due to the lack of representation of those elasticities in the bank), do not have a match.
I think the end goal is to use this method for autologous stem cell transplant (when the donor is the same as the recipient) rather than allogeneic (when the donor is different). Currently, there are technologies such as small interfering RNA (siRNA) that let you suppress a specific gene through genetic engineering. They are widely used in research, although there are many hurdles before they make the transition to clinical use. It would go something like this:
Draw out someone's own stem cells
Permanently express the CCR5 siRNA in their stem cells by culturing them with a virus
Wipe the person's bone marrow out by total body irradiation
Reinfuse the altered stem cells
The advantage of this method is that, since the stem cells are coming from your own body, there is no graft vs host disease (which is essentially like standard organ rejection, but instead the organ rejected is your entire body being rejected by the graft... you can imagine that this is very bad). Of course, you still have the problem of developing leukemia later from the total body irradiation and viral integration into an important gene. You also have a high risk of death upfront when you spend several weeks without a functional immune system when the transplant is taking. But nevertheless, it's exciting.
For most of the work I do, that's not entirely correct. I work with a laminar flow hood similar to this one. You may have cells growing in an incubator in a sterile dish. You have to take out those cells and manipulate them some way and then keep them growing, while not contaminating the culture. The simplest thing to do is to spray down the hood with ethanol and spray anything that goes into the hood with ethanol as well. Any liquids you use needs to be passed through a sterile filter to remove any contaminating organisms.
The problem is that doing all of this with a computer nearby is awkward. You sit there with dozens of tubes inside the hood, all sorts of liquids and measuring equipment outside the hood, and you have to carefully add or remove a precise amount of specific entity to the culture. The simplest way to do this is to take a piece of paper that tells you what to do and tape it to the glass. Unless you're working with an organism that can infect people, you don't need to destroy the paper afterwards because you're not trying to keep the paper sterile; you're trying to keep your tissue culture dish and the cells inside sterile.
I work in a biological lab and have a similar problem. I find that paper is much simpler for most things. I have a notebook containing only printouts of protocols with little tabs denoting where each one is. I remove whatever protocol I'm using and carry it over to wherever I'm working. Anything else I need from my notes, I write on paper and carry. Yes, it's a bit wasteful, but I've found that in the preparation of gathering all the relevant pieces of paper, it really forces you to adequately prepare for an experiment instead of trying to figure it out on the fly.
This study is leaving out very important details. How big are these households? I bet they are not single parents with four children. They are most likely young singles or couples just out of college, which is the likely to demographic to enjoy tech toys anyhow. Most of my engineer friends made within that income bracket just out of college. If you live in a city with decent housing costs (where I live, you can buy a house for $800 / month), you can easily afford an iPhone, a mortgage, a car payment, health insurance and still save for retirement.
Actually, I've noticed that even among scientists, this phenomenon applies. Every week, we meet for lunch and discuss interesting papers relevant to our field. It is not uncommon for a very intelligent and experienced professor to dismiss a paper by making a statement such as, "This paper can't be true. No one can get data that looks that good."
In contrast, most of the graduate students, who are not committed to any particular dogma, are rolling their eyes and quietly eating their sandwiches and then fuming about the comment later.
Slashdot Mirror
It is very hard. For most experiments, you're not trying to detect a few molecules of DNA. You can set up your detection sensitivity so that a tiny bit of contamination won't be detected. For something like this, were you are trying to detect very small amounts of DNA, it becomes much, much harder. Firstly, you use very purified reagents. All the reagents need to be aliquoted individually in a location physically separate from where the DNA is. This is typically done in a specialized clean hood that can be sterilized with UV radiation. The reagents are combined in a similar hood and then transferred to where the tube with the DNA is. All of this needs to be done using gloves that are changed frequently. Next, you have to be very careful about what pipettes you use. The pipettes from each step need to be thoroughly cleaned, possibly DNAse treated to remove DNA. Again, each part of the experiment should use different sets of pipettes. To ensure that things are not contaminated, you have to use various controls such as leaving out the polymerase, dNTPs, etc. I'm sure if you got some other biologists together, they could brainstorm about a dozen precautions. It's not impossible to do, but it can be hard. I personally have lost months of research time because I accidentally contaminated something. Replacing all my reagents to clean ones did nothing, so I figured it was my pipettes, but the problem didn't go away when I thoroughly cleaned them. Eventually, I switched to using different sets of pipettes for each step, and the problem resolved. You may say that I'm not a careful scientist, but while talking to people to resolve my problem, pretty much everyone said they've experienced something similar. None of use proposed and published any crazy theory to justify it.
Yeah, they did the proper controls on the DNA generation of frequency. I think that could, within the confines of current science, be a reasonable claim. They did not do those same controls on the transmissible assembly of DNA through these water nanostructures. That claim is the one I think is unbelievable. If I were writing this paper, I would make it explicit that these controls were performed for both experiments. The fact that they did not do this leads me to conclude they were trying to trick the reader into assuming they did.
I take back my assertion that this is a hoax. Apparently, this Nobel Prize laureate has a history of producing very tenuous science on this topic. I think he's actually serious, which is pretty sad.
I am a biologist by trade, and I can say that this paper is very, very poorly done. If it was submitted to any major journal in the field, the peer reviewers would tear it to shreds. Here is the big experiment: 1) Take DNA and place it in tube #1 diluted around 1 million fold 2) Separate it from tube #2 containing all the building blocks of DNA, but not properly assembled 3) In between tube #1 and tube #2 is a special piece of metal 4) Subject the entire thing to low frequency magnetic field 5) There is an induction of the DNA to emit oscillatory radiation 6) DNA replicate magically appears in tube #2 from the building blocks I can buy the assertion that DNA at certain dilution transmits some strange radiation. It's step 5 to 6 that I think is complete and utter garbage. They don't do the proper controls for step 4 to 5. What happens when no DNA is present in tube #1? What happens when there is no inducing field? What happens when the building blocks are present in tube #2? They clearly know that this is an issue because they do the exact controls from steps 4 to 5. The "synthesis" of new DNA can easily be explained by one explanation: contamination. DNA sequencing techniques are sensitive enough to detect one or two copies of that sequence. If any of their reagents, tools, or lab members got even a single molecule of DNA on them and transferred it to tube #2, they would see that result. This is a basic fact that pretty much all molecular biologist learns (usually the hard way, by accidentally contaminating something of importance). To give the authors the benefit of the doubt, I'll go ahead and say they have successfully duped Slashdot with a hoax spoofing the claims of homeopathy.
The prestigious science journal Nature recently had an article on the best cities for science. They have some really cool interactive graphs showing scientific productivity of different parts of the world and how many citations each place gets. What struck me was how quickly China grew in terms of volume of publications, but how poorly their articles were cited. Whether that is due to papers being published in primarily Chinese language journals, the papers of being of poor quality, or the scientific community ignoring important papers coming from China for whatever reason is unclear, but I think it shows that other countries have a while to go before achieving scientific dominance.
Typically, DNA is thought to be transcribed into RNA in an exact copy of the DNA minus random errors that occur due to poor fidelity of the polymerase that makes it. However, it's been well known for more than 10 years that RNA can be altered systematically through (still mostly mysterious) mechanisms called RNA editing. This is a well known phenomenon that is pretty much universally believed by all biologists. However, RNA editing was thought to be a mostly rare process that only affected a handful of genes. This group used new technology called deep sequencing that allows for high throughput, quantitative sequencing of millions of RNA molecules at once, and their results suggest that RNA editing isn't as rare as once thought. To be fair, this is an abstract submitted to a conference, so it only has undergone the most minimal editorial (not really peer) review based on a paragraph or so of presented data. This may all be an artifact due to some systematic bias of the sequencing platform. There are probably hundreds of other groups using deep sequencing of RNA, so it will be interesting to see if other groups can replicate this.
That's simply not true. I'll reference you this article which says that between 1997 and 2002, there were around 2700 patients in Canada admitted to the ER for acetaminophen overdose and 69% of them overdosed intentionally. That's about 370 people a year intentionally overdosing themselves with acetaminophen a year. In the US, 26,000 people overdosed on the drug over around 10 years. If the rate of intentional overdose is similar in the US and Canada, that's about 1800 people intentionally overdosing on the drug each year in the US. I personally know at least one person who attempted (and failed) to overdose on the drug. Dying of liver failure is a pretty nasty way to go compared to firearms, but anyone who has worked in any urban ER knows that intentional overdose is pretty common.
The Atlantic magazine just published a really eye-opening article on Steven Hatfill, the FBI's first suspect. It is very clear from the article that the FBI was hell-bent on finding a perpetrator of the crime even in the absence of any solid evidence. It's an interesting and frightening read about how the FBI could completely destroy your job, your friends, your day-to-day life, and your family if they falsely accuse you of a crime.
From reading the projects on the DNA Initiative's website, it seems that they need mitochondrial DNA samples as test samples to develop various forensic techniques.
Cheap: it used to cost millions of dollars to sequence a genome but new technologies are greatly driving down the price. The sequencing guru I mentioned above predicts it will cost about $10,000 some time in the next 10 years Fast: it probably will take a week to sequence. However, the analysis tools are very complicated and will probably take much longer Good: as far as I can tell, this technology is pretty accurate. A good run will sequence every piece of DNA 20 times so sequencing errors tend to get washed out.
So I work in biological sciences, and I have the special privilege of having the guy who sequenced the first cancer genome working down the hall from me (he's also my thesis committee).
There is now technology to sequence entire genomes very quickly using massive parallel sequencing. Ideally, if you were sequencing a tumor from a single person, you would get tissue from the tumor and also from the non-tumor (usually skin) and sequence them at the same time. Then you compare the two to distinguish what is simply variation in each person's genetics and what is acquired by the tumor. In my opinion, that's the best way to do things and probably the most informative because you're looking a tumor in a real person that is subject to all the selective evolutionary pressures that occur in people.
These groups didn't take that approach for reasons unclear to me. Instead, they sequenced cancer cell lines. If you cut out a person's tumor and stick it in a test tube with various growth factors, it will almost certainly die within a week or so. However, you occasionally get some cells that can grow in this situation because they've acquired some mutation that lets them grow in tissue culture. You then expand and passage these cells until they grow rapidly in culture. The problem here is that you're no longer dealing with a normal human tumor; you're selecting for tumor cells that grow in the artificial tissue culture environment. The second problem is that you're not sure what to compare the tumor sequence with. Due to privacy concerns, you almost never know who actually gave the tumor that was made into a cell line (as an aside, look up the HeLa cell line and its sordid history) so you have to compare to the human genome project. The problem here is that there are differences between people and you can't tell whether the "mutation" you see is just a normal variation or actually something in the tumor.
These are the important limitations you have to consider when evaluating these papers.
Now, on to your question. They have 30,000 changes in the DNA compared to their reference "normal" genome. Nearly all of those are in "junk" DNA: as far as we know, they don't code any genes or anything else that regulates genes. Of the ones that are in interesting regions, the vast majority of them are called synonymous mutations which means the DNA is changed but due to the way it is interpreted, the protein that it makes is identical (to use a computer analogy, imagine that an the opcode for JMP was changed from 01 to 02 but both 01 and 02 are translated by the computer as JMP).
Now, a certain number of mutations aren't like that. They either lead to truncated proteins, alter the amino acid sequence of proteins, alter mRNA splicing, etc. There are also other genetic changes such as duplications where the gene sequence is unchanged but may be copied several times to increase the gene dose. These are really the interesting things because they alter protein function or gene dose. From a brief reading, it looks like there are around 100 of these.
Now, it's really difficult to tell whether these mutations are really relevant to cancer progression. Some of them might just happen due to tumors just mutating really fast and not really affect the cancer progression one way or another; they are so called "passenger" mutations that just come along for the ride. You can introduce these mutations into cells in lab to see if they do anything, but the real test is to sequence a bunch of human cancers and see if certain mutations are recurrent. This work is currently underway and will prove very informative about how genetically heterogeneous tumors really are.
So, in short, there are about 100 haystacks. Further sequencing of other tumors will show if these are relevant to cancer in general. In my personal opinion, I think that further sequencing will identify very few common mutations and everyone's cancer will be essentially unique in the mutations it acquires. That will force us to completely rethink how we view cancer on a broader scale as not a single disease but a collection of highly related diseases that need to be treated individually.
I am not a professional in mental health, but I do have some education on this. As others have mentioned, the best thing you could do would be to talk to a professional yourself, especially a professional who has experience with treating people with substance abuse disorders. Unfortunately, it is unlikely you will find a therapist who well-trained in treating other addictions, although they do exist. Often, therapists include friends and family in the therapy, and sometimes, they give therapy to just the friends and family if the person with the problem is unwilling to come.
Unfortunately, there is a lot of really bad advice on this thread. Do not hack his account, disconnect his computer, or any other majorly confrontational thing to take away the source. Do not get a bunch of his friends together and have a movie style intervention. He's addicted to the game; you will just piss him off and he'll never talk to you again and most likely find another way to play. Don't let others tell you that you shouldn't bother helping him because it's too much trouble; the very fact that it got this bad is a testament to how many people decided that it was someone else's problem, and the worst thing that can happen is that your friendship with him dies, and it doesn't seem to be doing so well in its current state anyhow.
Secondly, people only change when they're willing to change, which means that it's ultimately his responsibility, but that does not mean that you can't do anything to help him become more willing. Sit him down and quietly and politely express your concerns but try to engage him in the conversation. Here would be an example script, which I've adapted from the CAGE questions for screening for alcohol abuse:
"John, I've noticed that you've been playing a lot of that game lately, and I'm worried that it's not healthy for you. How do you feel about that game? Do you think that you should play less? Have other people told you that you should play less? Do you ever feel bad or guilty about playing so much?"
From that, you could determine if he's in the pre-contemplative stage (he thinks there's no problem) or the contemplative stage (he realizes there's a problem but isn't sure if he wants to change or doesn't know how). If he's in the contemplating stage, try to get him to verbally state the negative impact of his playing:
"It seems that you recognize that you are playing too much game. Do you think this is hurting your grades? Your social life? Your relationships with your parents? Your ability to date? Do you think cutting down on playing would help you in these areas?"
Once you've gotten him to admit that there are negative impacts of what he's doing, you've done a lot. From there, you should guide him into professional help:
"Well, it relieves me to know that you recognize that you have a problem. I'd just like you to know that as your friend, I'm concerned about you, and if you want help, I can help you get that help (i.e. refer to student health)."
That's really all you have to do. Even if he completely rejects you, you've at least planted some seeds of doubt in his mind. When he reaches rock bottom, those seeds will sprout, and you will have done the best you can as a friend for him.
Best of luck.
I work in biology, and we use Spotfire DecisionSite to visualize and analyze a lot of our massive genetic data. It's a very powerful program that I barely know how to use. It seems to have packages able to analyze pretty much anything you want, and you can even write your own scripts to help things along.
This post is tremendously over-simplistic to the point of being nothing but Israeli propaganda. Please read the Wikipedia article about the Palestinian exodus to understand what really happened. It is not entirely clear why the majority of the Palestinians left, but there was a lot more going on than the Mufti.
Because it gives them good publicity with very little cost. There's also a good chance that the purchase of those ads are tax deductible.
You actually don't have to do rural practice for loan forgiveness. You just have to work in an undeserved community, which can include rural areas, Indian reservations, or the inner city. Most decently sized cities have clinics that serve such a community. If you live frugally and have a competitive application, you could theoretically live in NYC for a few years and leave with no debt.
A variation in the CCR5 gene, called CCR5 delta32, confers immunity if you have two copies of the gene (remember, you get one copy from each of your parents). It's been known for a while that this is associated with AIDS resistance, so there have been many large cross-sectional studies to look at the population frequency. Although it is possible that the gene is more widespread in certain populations, it's still rare (10% in white of European descent, 2% in Asians); remember you must have *both* copies of the gene to be resistant to AIDS only ~1% of Europeans have that. The only way you'd know is to have the test for that specific mutation, and as far as I know, it's not really widely used clinically. Like I said, the main problem is that the bone marrow registries are quite small, and you can't find suitable matches for people based on their MHC matching. The chance of finding one of those isn't particularly good. You have to multiple that times the probability of having the right CCR5 type and we're talking pretty rare.
Well, there are two problems with this. Firstly, hematopoietic stem cells don't last very long in culture. Lots of people are trying to figure out why, but I'm not optimistic that this problem will be solved any time soon since the cells normally exist in a complex microenvironment in the marrow that we don't really understand yet. But more importantly is the issue of MHC typing. While you need someone who has the CCR5 mutation (which is pretty rare), you also need to have someone who matches your MHC type. Think of MHC as the molecules that allow your body to identify self from non-self. The more MHC matches you have with the donor, the less chance you have of developing a life-threatening disorder called graft vs. host disease. Ideally, doctors want someone related to you, but if those people don't match, you have to do an unrelated donor search. Generally, finding a MHC match requires a large registry search that takes weeks to months to carry out, and many people, especially non-whites (due to the lack of representation of those elasticities in the bank), do not have a match.
The advantage of this method is that, since the stem cells are coming from your own body, there is no graft vs host disease (which is essentially like standard organ rejection, but instead the organ rejected is your entire body being rejected by the graft... you can imagine that this is very bad). Of course, you still have the problem of developing leukemia later from the total body irradiation and viral integration into an important gene. You also have a high risk of death upfront when you spend several weeks without a functional immune system when the transplant is taking. But nevertheless, it's exciting.
For most of the work I do, that's not entirely correct. I work with a laminar flow hood similar to this one. You may have cells growing in an incubator in a sterile dish. You have to take out those cells and manipulate them some way and then keep them growing, while not contaminating the culture. The simplest thing to do is to spray down the hood with ethanol and spray anything that goes into the hood with ethanol as well. Any liquids you use needs to be passed through a sterile filter to remove any contaminating organisms. The problem is that doing all of this with a computer nearby is awkward. You sit there with dozens of tubes inside the hood, all sorts of liquids and measuring equipment outside the hood, and you have to carefully add or remove a precise amount of specific entity to the culture. The simplest way to do this is to take a piece of paper that tells you what to do and tape it to the glass. Unless you're working with an organism that can infect people, you don't need to destroy the paper afterwards because you're not trying to keep the paper sterile; you're trying to keep your tissue culture dish and the cells inside sterile.
I work in a biological lab and have a similar problem. I find that paper is much simpler for most things. I have a notebook containing only printouts of protocols with little tabs denoting where each one is. I remove whatever protocol I'm using and carry it over to wherever I'm working. Anything else I need from my notes, I write on paper and carry. Yes, it's a bit wasteful, but I've found that in the preparation of gathering all the relevant pieces of paper, it really forces you to adequately prepare for an experiment instead of trying to figure it out on the fly.
This study is leaving out very important details. How big are these households? I bet they are not single parents with four children. They are most likely young singles or couples just out of college, which is the likely to demographic to enjoy tech toys anyhow. Most of my engineer friends made within that income bracket just out of college. If you live in a city with decent housing costs (where I live, you can buy a house for $800 / month), you can easily afford an iPhone, a mortgage, a car payment, health insurance and still save for retirement.
Actually, I've noticed that even among scientists, this phenomenon applies. Every week, we meet for lunch and discuss interesting papers relevant to our field. It is not uncommon for a very intelligent and experienced professor to dismiss a paper by making a statement such as, "This paper can't be true. No one can get data that looks that good." In contrast, most of the graduate students, who are not committed to any particular dogma, are rolling their eyes and quietly eating their sandwiches and then fuming about the comment later.
It was probably the butterfly. No one ever suspects the butterfly...
I would much rather read the original article than an oversimplified Newsweek summary.