Let's not forget that the same strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer have been associated with causing oral cancer. It will be interesting to see if widespread vaccination will reduce that rate as well.
It's a hell of a lot cheaper to make paps available to under served women than it is to vaccinate every woman aged 11-26 -- then every 11 year old every year.
That would be true, assuming that underserved populations actually get yearly checkups. They don't. They're underserved, which means that they often don't have access to healthcare due to a variety of factors including lack of insurance, lack of transportation, or simply lack of availability. After working in a free clinic for a while, I realized that it's not uncommon for them to go to the doctor once every ten or twenty years, and often it's in the emergency room. Getting your children to the doctor 3 times to get a shot is much easier, especially when they're required to get other vaccinations by the state.
I just heard a lecture on this subject today, so I can assure you that there has *NEVER* been any reputable study that showed a link between autism and childhood vaccinations. The entire argument is based on a post-hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: children get their vaccinations while around 1 years old, and the first signs of autism are noticeable about 6 months later, therefore the vaccinations cause autism.
Regardless, this has generated so much controversy that thimerosal has been removed from nearly all vaccines. Don't get me wrong: vaccines do have a risk associated with them. But as far as the best science shows, autism is not one of them.
I have Charter, and this annoys me to no end. I simply added www11.charter.net (the website they're currently redirecting me to) to my hosts file, so I get an "Unable to connect" message. It's not perfect, but it at least gives me a somewhat meaningful error.
The fact that they were electronic photos is one of the core arguments used by the majority opinion:
In addition, the two defendants placed the photos on a computer and then, using the internet, transferred them to another computer. Not only can the two computers be hacked, but by transferring the photos using the net, the photos may have been and perhaps still are accessible to the provider and/or other individuals. Computers also allow for long-term storage of information which may then be disseminated at some later date. The State has a compelling interest in seeing that material which will have such negative consequences is never produced.
But this argument is really irrelevant to the Court's logic. The court essentially argues that minors have no expectation of privacy because they're too immature to establish adult relationships or keep secrets. Moreover, they argue that since minors cannot legally consent to having pornographic photos of themselves, they are being exploited, and the State has an interest in preventing this. This very much parallels the arguments for prosecuting two minors for statutory rape.
I recently finished designing a website to be used heavily by several hundred graduate students each day. I initially thought that looking a websites that won awards would be a good way to brainstorm. I was really wrong. Nearly all award-winning websites are terrible designs. Sure, they looked pretty and used all sorts of fancy Web 2.0 designs, but in terms of usability, they were horrific.
Websites need to be functional and easy to use before they're pretty. I agree that art classes would really help you turn a boring website into a nice one, but you have to focus on usability first.
Instead, this is what I did:
Pick a company or large organization that you do business with (IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, UPS, MIT, etc). Go to their websites and look for commonly used features. If you can't find them in 2-3 seconds, the website is bad and move on. If you can, study what they did.
I can understand the issues with the Stanford Prison Experiment, but neither this experiment nor the original Milgram experiment harmed any of the subjects. Can someone please explain why these experiments are unethical? The subjects might feel guilty for "hurting" someone else, but that's about it.
Weight gain and loss isn't really mediated by insulin. Although insulin acts as a growth factor during prenatal development, it is generally thought that growth later in life is mediated by levels of growth hormone. This is why babies born to mothers who were uncontrolled diabetics during pregnancy tend to be large for gestational age. However, after birth, insulin doesn't seem to play a large role in growth.
What you're thinking of is type 2 diabetes, which is probably *caused* by excess weight leading to insulin resistance. Unlike type I diabetics (who are insulin deficient), type II diabetes have normal insulin levels but don't respond to insulin*. This treatment restores production of insulin in type I, but probably won't have an effect on type II, which sadly makes up 90% of all diabetic cases.
Still, the discovery could improve the lives of thousands of type I diabetics, if it translates into humans.
*It's a little more complicated than that. They later lose insulin secretion ability late in the disease for some reason, but insulin resistance is usually considered the primary event.
Zero day: At the time the details of the exploit are published (or the patch is released), there already is an active exploit being circulated. I guess if you don't know exactly when the exploit was released it's a technically "less than or equal to zero-day" exploit, but that doesn't sound as sexy.
We should ignore for a moment the security and technological issues here. Instead focus on the interaction of technology, culture, and society. What Citi is doing is adding a high-tech, complex device in a abysmally poor and illiterate culture. There are a few major issues with this.
It is very unlikely that illiterate farmers will understand how exactly these ATMs work or for that matter, the banking system itself (which is so complex that most Americans don't understand all the fees and restrictions involved). This can inevitably lead to Citi, knowingly or unknowingly, taking advantage of these people who do not have the education, finances, and political power to protect themselves.
Although the farmers will hopefully be earning interest on these accounts, that interest really doesn't benefit the community. Think about it this way: you run to your local Citi branch and they lend out your money. The interest earned on those loans pays shareholders, the clerks at the desk, and the loan officers. All of these benefactors are members of your community. Do you really think these poor Indian farmers are going to work at the bank, either being a teller or repairing the ATM's? No, it will benefit the wealthier Indians and the international shareholders.
While it's great that Citi is trying to tap this market, they could've gone about it much better. They could've set up a physical branch, employed the more ambitious farmers, and helped pull these people out of poverty. Muhammad Yunus showed that simple systems such as micropayments could be profitable and beneficial for the community. I think he also showed that the poor doesn't need to be just another marker share; instead, you can simultaneously invest in people and reap a dual reward.
Calm down people. They haven't cured diabetes; in fact, this cure for diabetes (in mice) isn't new at all. This isn't a phase I clinical trial. They haven't tried it on people, and I really doubt the FDA will approve any such trials in the next few years.
The controversy is over the role of stem cells. No one disputes that adding Freund's adjuvant to the NOD mice can cure their diabetes, and it seems to work through a hazily-understood modulation of the immune system. That has been established for 15 years. The question is whether adding spleen stem cells to the adjuvant facilitates the process.
When Faustman first published the paper stating the spleen cells were crucial, the NIH quietly contracted three independent labs to confirm the result. No one could could show that the transplanted spleen cells were actually doing anything. Now, it seems that Faustman's group has responded to some of the criticisms, repeated the experiments, and can reproduce their own data. But as long as another lab cannot reproduce it, the role of stem cells will remain very controversial.
Why hasn't there been more of a push to use this in people? The problem in people is that you have to inject the adjuvant fairly early in the disease, and most people with type I diabetes are diagnosed pretty late when most of their beta cells have died. Additionally, no one really knows how exactly the adjuvant works (it's just a bunch of dead bacteria) and whether it will elicit nasty reactions in people that are worse than diabetes itself.
For those technical, you can read the actual papers for free online.
Here is the best explanation my roommates and I could come up with.
In order for this to work, you need to slice the grape in half, but leave a small piece of skin between each side. If you don't leave the skin or just use a whole grape, it doesn't work and the grape just explodes due to heat expansion. The more sections of grape you have, the more dramatic the spark.
When you irradiate the grape, we think you ionize something in each side. Since the grape is inevitably unevenly sliced, you get a charge imbalance between the sides. The skin has low moisture and high resistance compared to the two juicy halves. The charge can't dissipate across the grape skin because it's a fairly effective dielectric. The grape, is in essence a capacitor. Eventually the charge difference builds up so much that it discharges through the air, much like a capacitor would.
I work in medicine, and I can tell you that these databases are commonly used in practice. Doctors probably don't like being forced to use them because there's a tremendous amount of clinical intuition involved in diagnosis, and these databases don't take into account things like age, IV drug abuse, recent trips to South America, etc. There's also a saying that "common diseases happen commonly," so doctors often avoid costly tests to rule out obscure diseases unless initial treatment fails.
Example databases are UpToDate, Isabel, and MD Consult. If you're interested, you should go down to your local medical school library and look at their resources. Since they're written by experts and often evidence-based, they're far better than anything Google can provide.
Elevated estrogen and estrogen mimicking substances have made it into our rivers and streams, causing signs of hermaphroditism in fish. Scientists have discovered a wide range of other drugs in our drinking water, from pain killers to birth control pills to antidepressants. High levels of rocket fuel toxins have been found in mothers' milk. My city still uses lead piping to transfer most of its water, and they alkalinize the water to reduce lead levels to "acceptable" levels, even though scientists have pretty much shown that the only acceptable lead level is no lead at all.
It's not entirely clear what, if any, effects these substances have on developing children. Personally, I'd rather be safe than sorry and remove these contaminants from my water.
It doesn't say that any of the rats developed tumors in the article. It merely acknowledges the possibility that they could:
But there could be alarming side effects. Each stem-cell transplant also contained cells that had failed to become neurons, and which remained undifferentiated. These cells keep dividing, and can turn into tumours, says Goldman. (The rats in the study were killed before any such tumours developed.)
This is certainly a possibility, but as other have mentioned, we should be more excited that they cured Parkinson's. Later and more long-term studies will show whether or not the cancer risk is real or not.
Using polymers to close up wounds isn't exactly new. Run-of-the mill superglue was commonly used during the Vietnam War to seal life-threatening wounds on the battlefield, but it was never FDA approved. Because it can be a severe irritant, you shouldn't be using superglue you buy at Home Depot unless you're bleeding to death in the middle of nowhere. You can, however, buy special medical superglues. Some of them are even over-the-counter.
This is just the mainstream press overhyping an interesting discovery. I doubt any of the scientists involved really want suspended animation, like you see in movies.
However, there are real medical problems that could benefit greatly from drugs that reduce metabolism. For example, people who go into sudden cardiac arrest and are revived can often have irreversible brain damage due to lack of bloodflow to their brains. Essentially, without blood flow, nutrients in the brain are consumed more than they are delivered, and this results in brain damage. Some studies have suggested that packing the head in ice can greatly reduce the risk of brain damage by decreasing the brain's demand for nutrients. However, most ambulances aren't equipped with ice packs specifically for your head, so this isn't used much in the US.
This technique is probably more useful in open surgeries. Sometimes surgeons accidentally or purposefully cut off the blood flow to an organ. If you could reduce that organ's blood needs, perhaps you could avoid life-threatening complications such as acute renal failure after surgery.
From the comments here, it's pretty clear that very few people on Slashdot have any clue what RNAi is.
Ever since the 1920's, scientists knew that DNA was the inheritable component that held the genes. They also knew that protein was the actual workhorse, the microscopic machines that accomplished cellular processes. Eventually, they elucidated that DNA copies itself into RNA, which is then converted into protein. Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA, and proposed the mechanism for conversion of DNA to RNA.
Since Watson and Crick's time, we have been using the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology:
DNA -> RNA -> protein
Increase the amount of DNA? That means more protein. Increase the amount of RNA? That means more protein.
The big question in biology is now: given that there is usually just one gene for each protein, why do you have drastically different amounts of protein?
What these guys show is that the Dogma really isn't entirely true. Sometimes you can add certain RNAs and make *less* protein. Moreover, they showed that this mechanism was conserved in organisms ranging from yeast to microscopic worms, to humans. In other words, small RNA molecules not only directed the synthesis of protein, they actually could be used to suppress it. An entirely new level of cellular regulation was elucidated.
But to be quite honest, that wasn't the reason they won the Nobel Prize. It is for the experimental implications. Back before RNAi, if I were studying My Favorite Gene, the classical way to do it would be either to find a small molecule inhibitor (very difficult and expensive to find one) or to genetically modify cells to stop making it (also very time consuming and difficult). Now, with RNAi, I have a third, very fast method. Simply construct RNAi using a pretty standardized cookbook, order it online for around $100, and stick it in the cells. See what happens. Experiments that used to take months to years and cost thousands of dollars could now be done in a few days for a few hundred dollars.
I'll put it in terms you guys can probably understand. Research without RNAi is like debugging without a debugger. Yeah, you can do it, but it's often time-consuming and confusing.
The discovery of RNAi is one of science's best stories.
In the 1980's, Dr. Rich Jorgensen was a botanist interesting in making prettier petunias. He identified chalcone synthase, an enzyme needed to manufacture the purple pigment in the flowers. He reasoned that the more chalcone synthase there was, the purpler the flowers would become.
Normally, the cell DNA for an enzyme is copied into RNA, which is made into protein. It seemed logical that increasing the RNA would lead to more protein.
In fact, the statement
DNA -> RNA -> Protein
is often called the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.
Because single stranded RNA was so hard to synthesize, Jorgensen injected massive amounts of double stranded RNA for chalcone synthase into the petunias. Much to his surprise, the petunias didn't become more purple: they became white. Somehow, increasing the enzyme RNA number actually suppressed the protein.
This Nobel Prize is well-deserved. By elucidating the mechanism of this paradoxical response, they challenged the Central Dogma. Moreover, by allowing scientists to "knock-down" genes, RNAi can be used to study the loss a single gene quickly and cheaply. It is very difficult to find a published biology paper today that doesn't use this technique.
Of course the students' essays were horribly written. The prompt was terrible:
Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?
That is an incredibly difficult question that philosophers could spend a lifetime thinking about. In fact, I've found that many philosophers addressing these difficult issues often have glaring logical holes, unfounded assumptions, and most strikingly, atrocious writing.
For some reason, the SAT believes that ambiguous, poorly crafted prompts somehow judge a student's writing abilities. If they want to judge a student's writing skills, this would be a much better prompt:
Your friend is contemplating cheating on the SAT. Write a letter to dissuade him/her from doing so.
At least there are concrete and fairly obvious reasons here, and I wager that you'd very quickly be able to see which students can write well and which can barely craft coherent sentences.
Why don't they just do what doctors do when testing out a new, but potentially dangerous, treatment?
Simply pay a bunch of people to be hit with these weapons under various scenarios and with varying intensity of weapon. Evaluate the medical consequences. This is precisely what doctors do in phase I clinical trials: increase the dose to determine toxicity.
That would be the ethical way to do it, with informed consent and all. I guess such moral standards only apply when you're trying to help people, not when you're trying to hurt someone (but not too much).
Slashdot Mirror
Let's not forget that the same strains of HPV that cause cervical cancer have been associated with causing oral cancer. It will be interesting to see if widespread vaccination will reduce that rate as well.
I just heard a lecture on this subject today, so I can assure you that there has *NEVER* been any reputable study that showed a link between autism and childhood vaccinations. The entire argument is based on a post-hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy: children get their vaccinations while around 1 years old, and the first signs of autism are noticeable about 6 months later, therefore the vaccinations cause autism.
What have the studies shown?
1) There is no difference in the rates of autism between vaccinated and un-vaccinated children.
2) Rates of autism have increased even though thimerosal was removed from the vaccines.
3) The increased rate of autism diagnosis is due to better identification and broader criteria, not due to a new cause.
Regardless, this has generated so much controversy that thimerosal has been removed from nearly all vaccines.
Don't get me wrong: vaccines do have a risk associated with them. But as far as the best science shows, autism is not one of them.
I have Charter, and this annoys me to no end. I simply added www11.charter.net (the website they're currently redirecting me to) to my hosts file, so I get an "Unable to connect" message. It's not perfect, but it at least gives me a somewhat meaningful error.
The fact that they were electronic photos is one of the core arguments used by the majority opinion:
In addition, the two defendants placed the photos on a computer and then, using the internet, transferred them to another computer. Not only can the two computers be hacked, but by transferring the photos using the net, the photos may have been and perhaps still are accessible to the provider and/or other individuals. Computers also allow for long-term storage of information which may then be disseminated at some later date. The State has a compelling interest in seeing that material which will have such negative consequences is never produced.
But this argument is really irrelevant to the Court's logic. The court essentially argues that minors have no expectation of privacy because they're too immature to establish adult relationships or keep secrets. Moreover, they argue that since minors cannot legally consent to having pornographic photos of themselves, they are being exploited, and the State has an interest in preventing this. This very much parallels the arguments for prosecuting two minors for statutory rape.
Actually, this website instructs you how to visualize the ten dimensions of string theory. Has anyone read the book that it's advertising?
I recently finished designing a website to be used heavily by several hundred graduate students each day. I initially thought that looking a websites that won awards would be a good way to brainstorm. I was really wrong. Nearly all award-winning websites are terrible designs. Sure, they looked pretty and used all sorts of fancy Web 2.0 designs, but in terms of usability, they were horrific.
Websites need to be functional and easy to use before they're pretty. I agree that art classes would really help you turn a boring website into a nice one, but you have to focus on usability first.
Instead, this is what I did:
Pick a company or large organization that you do business with (IBM, Microsoft, Red Hat, UPS, MIT, etc). Go to their websites and look for commonly used features. If you can't find them in 2-3 seconds, the website is bad and move on. If you can, study what they did.
Good luck.
Just click "Print." That takes you to one page views.
I can understand the issues with the Stanford Prison Experiment, but neither this experiment nor the original Milgram experiment harmed any of the subjects. Can someone please explain why these experiments are unethical? The subjects might feel guilty for "hurting" someone else, but that's about it.
People don't seem to agree that we should be person of the year. It disappoints me that no one is suggesting an alternative. Who would you pick?
Donald Rumsfeld? Al Gore? Kim Jong-il?
Discuss.
Weight gain and loss isn't really mediated by insulin. Although insulin acts as a growth factor during prenatal development, it is generally thought that growth later in life is mediated by levels of growth hormone. This is why babies born to mothers who were uncontrolled diabetics during pregnancy tend to be large for gestational age. However, after birth, insulin doesn't seem to play a large role in growth.
What you're thinking of is type 2 diabetes, which is probably *caused* by excess weight leading to insulin resistance. Unlike type I diabetics (who are insulin deficient), type II diabetes have normal insulin levels but don't respond to insulin*. This treatment restores production of insulin in type I, but probably won't have an effect on type II, which sadly makes up 90% of all diabetic cases.
Still, the discovery could improve the lives of thousands of type I diabetics, if it translates into humans.
*It's a little more complicated than that. They later lose insulin secretion ability late in the disease for some reason, but insulin resistance is usually considered the primary event.
That's a pretty scary thought. First they OSsue Lindows, now they're OSsuing the world. Next thing you know, they'll be Officesuing OO.org.
Zero day: At the time the details of the exploit are published (or the patch is released), there already is an active exploit being circulated. I guess if you don't know exactly when the exploit was released it's a technically "less than or equal to zero-day" exploit, but that doesn't sound as sexy.
We should ignore for a moment the security and technological issues here. Instead focus on the interaction of technology, culture, and society. What Citi is doing is adding a high-tech, complex device in a abysmally poor and illiterate culture. There are a few major issues with this.
It is very unlikely that illiterate farmers will understand how exactly these ATMs work or for that matter, the banking system itself (which is so complex that most Americans don't understand all the fees and restrictions involved). This can inevitably lead to Citi, knowingly or unknowingly, taking advantage of these people who do not have the education, finances, and political power to protect themselves.
Although the farmers will hopefully be earning interest on these accounts, that interest really doesn't benefit the community. Think about it this way: you run to your local Citi branch and they lend out your money. The interest earned on those loans pays shareholders, the clerks at the desk, and the loan officers. All of these benefactors are members of your community. Do you really think these poor Indian farmers are going to work at the bank, either being a teller or repairing the ATM's? No, it will benefit the wealthier Indians and the international shareholders.
While it's great that Citi is trying to tap this market, they could've gone about it much better. They could've set up a physical branch, employed the more ambitious farmers, and helped pull these people out of poverty. Muhammad Yunus showed that simple systems such as micropayments could be profitable and beneficial for the community. I think he also showed that the poor doesn't need to be just another marker share; instead, you can simultaneously invest in people and reap a dual reward.
Calm down people. They haven't cured diabetes; in fact, this cure for diabetes (in mice) isn't new at all. This isn't a phase I clinical trial. They haven't tried it on people, and I really doubt the FDA will approve any such trials in the next few years.
The controversy is over the role of stem cells. No one disputes that adding Freund's adjuvant to the NOD mice can cure their diabetes, and it seems to work through a hazily-understood modulation of the immune system. That has been established for 15 years. The question is whether adding spleen stem cells to the adjuvant facilitates the process.
When Faustman first published the paper stating the spleen cells were crucial, the NIH quietly contracted three independent labs to confirm the result. No one could could show that the transplanted spleen cells were actually doing anything. Now, it seems that Faustman's group has responded to some of the criticisms, repeated the experiments, and can reproduce their own data. But as long as another lab cannot reproduce it, the role of stem cells will remain very controversial.
Why hasn't there been more of a push to use this in people? The problem in people is that you have to inject the adjuvant fairly early in the disease, and most people with type I diabetes are diagnosed pretty late when most of their beta cells have died. Additionally, no one really knows how exactly the adjuvant works (it's just a bunch of dead bacteria) and whether it will elicit nasty reactions in people that are worse than diabetes itself.
For those technical, you can read the actual papers for free online.
Here is the best explanation my roommates and I could come up with.
In order for this to work, you need to slice the grape in half, but leave a small piece of skin between each side. If you don't leave the skin or just use a whole grape, it doesn't work and the grape just explodes due to heat expansion. The more sections of grape you have, the more dramatic the spark.
When you irradiate the grape, we think you ionize something in each side. Since the grape is inevitably unevenly sliced, you get a charge imbalance between the sides. The skin has low moisture and high resistance compared to the two juicy halves. The charge can't dissipate across the grape skin because it's a fairly effective dielectric. The grape, is in essence a capacitor. Eventually the charge difference builds up so much that it discharges through the air, much like a capacitor would.
I work in medicine, and I can tell you that these databases are commonly used in practice. Doctors probably don't like being forced to use them because there's a tremendous amount of clinical intuition involved in diagnosis, and these databases don't take into account things like age, IV drug abuse, recent trips to South America, etc. There's also a saying that "common diseases happen commonly," so doctors often avoid costly tests to rule out obscure diseases unless initial treatment fails.
Example databases are UpToDate, Isabel, and MD Consult. If you're interested, you should go down to your local medical school library and look at their resources. Since they're written by experts and often evidence-based, they're far better than anything Google can provide.
Elevated estrogen and estrogen mimicking substances have made it into our rivers and streams, causing signs of hermaphroditism in fish. Scientists have discovered a wide range of other drugs in our drinking water, from pain killers to birth control pills to antidepressants. High levels of rocket fuel toxins have been found in mothers' milk. My city still uses lead piping to transfer most of its water, and they alkalinize the water to reduce lead levels to "acceptable" levels, even though scientists have pretty much shown that the only acceptable lead level is no lead at all.
It's not entirely clear what, if any, effects these substances have on developing children. Personally, I'd rather be safe than sorry and remove these contaminants from my water.
It doesn't say that any of the rats developed tumors in the article. It merely acknowledges the possibility that they could:
But there could be alarming side effects. Each stem-cell transplant also contained cells that had failed to become neurons, and which remained undifferentiated. These cells keep dividing, and can turn into tumours, says Goldman. (The rats in the study were killed before any such tumours developed.)
This is certainly a possibility, but as other have mentioned, we should be more excited that they cured Parkinson's. Later and more long-term studies will show whether or not the cancer risk is real or not.
Using polymers to close up wounds isn't exactly new. Run-of-the mill superglue was commonly used during the Vietnam War to seal life-threatening wounds on the battlefield, but it was never FDA approved. Because it can be a severe irritant, you shouldn't be using superglue you buy at Home Depot unless you're bleeding to death in the middle of nowhere. You can, however, buy special medical superglues. Some of them are even over-the-counter.
However, there are real medical problems that could benefit greatly from drugs that reduce metabolism. For example, people who go into sudden cardiac arrest and are revived can often have irreversible brain damage due to lack of bloodflow to their brains. Essentially, without blood flow, nutrients in the brain are consumed more than they are delivered, and this results in brain damage. Some studies have suggested that packing the head in ice can greatly reduce the risk of brain damage by decreasing the brain's demand for nutrients. However, most ambulances aren't equipped with ice packs specifically for your head, so this isn't used much in the US.
This technique is probably more useful in open surgeries. Sometimes surgeons accidentally or purposefully cut off the blood flow to an organ. If you could reduce that organ's blood needs, perhaps you could avoid life-threatening complications such as acute renal failure after surgery.
Ever since the 1920's, scientists knew that DNA was the inheritable component that held the genes. They also knew that protein was the actual workhorse, the microscopic machines that accomplished cellular processes. Eventually, they elucidated that DNA copies itself into RNA, which is then converted into protein. Watson and Crick determined the structure of DNA, and proposed the mechanism for conversion of DNA to RNA.
Since Watson and Crick's time, we have been using the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology:
DNA -> RNA -> protein
Increase the amount of DNA? That means more protein. Increase the amount of RNA? That means more protein.
The big question in biology is now: given that there is usually just one gene for each protein, why do you have drastically different amounts of protein?
What these guys show is that the Dogma really isn't entirely true. Sometimes you can add certain RNAs and make *less* protein. Moreover, they showed that this mechanism was conserved in organisms ranging from yeast to microscopic worms, to humans. In other words, small RNA molecules not only directed the synthesis of protein, they actually could be used to suppress it. An entirely new level of cellular regulation was elucidated.
But to be quite honest, that wasn't the reason they won the Nobel Prize. It is for the experimental implications. Back before RNAi, if I were studying My Favorite Gene, the classical way to do it would be either to find a small molecule inhibitor (very difficult and expensive to find one) or to genetically modify cells to stop making it (also very time consuming and difficult). Now, with RNAi, I have a third, very fast method. Simply construct RNAi using a pretty standardized cookbook, order it online for around $100, and stick it in the cells. See what happens. Experiments that used to take months to years and cost thousands of dollars could now be done in a few days for a few hundred dollars.
I'll put it in terms you guys can probably understand. Research without RNAi is like debugging without a debugger. Yeah, you can do it, but it's often time-consuming and confusing.
In the 1980's, Dr. Rich Jorgensen was a botanist interesting in making prettier petunias. He identified chalcone synthase, an enzyme needed to manufacture the purple pigment in the flowers. He reasoned that the more chalcone synthase there was, the purpler the flowers would become.
Normally, the cell DNA for an enzyme is copied into RNA, which is made into protein. It seemed logical that increasing the RNA would lead to more protein.
In fact, the statement
DNA -> RNA -> Protein
is often called the Central Dogma of Molecular Biology.
Because single stranded RNA was so hard to synthesize, Jorgensen injected massive amounts of double stranded RNA for chalcone synthase into the petunias. Much to his surprise, the petunias didn't become more purple: they became white. Somehow, increasing the enzyme RNA number actually suppressed the protein.
This Nobel Prize is well-deserved. By elucidating the mechanism of this paradoxical response, they challenged the Central Dogma. Moreover, by allowing scientists to "knock-down" genes, RNAi can be used to study the loss a single gene quickly and cheaply. It is very difficult to find a published biology paper today that doesn't use this technique.
Of course the students' essays were horribly written. The prompt was terrible:
Do memories hinder or help people in their effort to learn from the past and succeed in the present?
That is an incredibly difficult question that philosophers could spend a lifetime thinking about. In fact, I've found that many philosophers addressing these difficult issues often have glaring logical holes, unfounded assumptions, and most strikingly, atrocious writing.
For some reason, the SAT believes that ambiguous, poorly crafted prompts somehow judge a student's writing abilities. If they want to judge a student's writing skills, this would be a much better prompt:
Your friend is contemplating cheating on the SAT. Write a letter to dissuade him/her from doing so.
At least there are concrete and fairly obvious reasons here, and I wager that you'd very quickly be able to see which students can write well and which can barely craft coherent sentences.
Why don't they just do what doctors do when testing out a new, but potentially dangerous, treatment?
Simply pay a bunch of people to be hit with these weapons under various scenarios and with varying intensity of weapon. Evaluate the medical consequences. This is precisely what doctors do in phase I clinical trials: increase the dose to determine toxicity.
That would be the ethical way to do it, with informed consent and all. I guess such moral standards only apply when you're trying to help people, not when you're trying to hurt someone (but not too much).