Here is the best publically available intro on the subject I could find, although it's briefer than I'd like. Plenty of references, which you can trace through if you want to learn more. Also note the "Related articles in PubMed" link in the sidebar.
One problem, I admit, is that a lot of journal articles are locked up behind subscriber-only interfaces. (On PubMed, those that are freely available have a special icon, which is helpful.) If you have access to a university library, you can always try to find more information there. Also, any reasonably modern microbiology textbook (mid-1990's or later) should have a chapter on this -- actually, that might be a better place to gain a layman's understanding than combing through journals.
Go here, search on "antibiotic resistance" or similar phrases, and start reading. I don't want to sound like a prick, but I really don't have either the time or the interest to summarize the thousands of papers that have been published on this subject any further than I already have, in my original post. Nothing I said was particularly controversial, or would come as any surprise to anyone well-versed in the subject; the only reason I made the post at all was because the post to which I was replying displayed near-total ignorance.
The problem is that resistance isn't either/or -- that is, it's not as simple as saying a particular strain of bacteria is resistant or it's not. All strains have greater or lesser degrees of resistance; more precisely, individual bacteria within the population have greater or lesser degrees. When you're on antibiotics, the bacteria tend to die off in, pretty much, an exponential decay curve. Once the curve drops below a certain level, the remaining bacterial population is insufficient to maintain the infection; your immune system is fighting the infection too, of course, and it can take care of the remaining bacteria, which are the more resistant ones, one the less resistant ones are killed off by the antibiotics.
So what happens when you stop taking the course of antibiotics halfway through? Well, where you previously had a bacterial population consisting of some bacteria with weak resistance, some with moderate resistance, and some with strong resistance, now you only have the latter two categories. And these are going to continue breeding, and your immune system is going to spend its resources fighting them equally, without preference as to which is more or less antibiotic-resistant -- which means more of the bacteria with greater resistance will survive and grow. OTOH, if you'd finished the antibiotics, only the most resistant bacteria would be left, and your immune system could probably finish them off on its own.
To top it off, resistance requires an expenditure of energy on the part of the bacteria -- you're quite right that many such critters have non-expressed resistance genes already in their genomes; the reason these genes aren't usually expressed is because doing so takes energy the bacteria would usually prefer to devote to feeding and reproducing. So in a patient who doesn't take antibiotics at all, the percentage of resistant individual bacteria is going to be very low. This means that taking half a course on antibiotics is the worst possible course of action: if you take the whole thing, you'll probably end up killing off the entire infection; if you take no antibiotics, you'll either get better or you won't, but either way you won't encourage the formation of a resistant strain.
And the reason that shorter courses of antibiotics are being prescribed is that, quite simply, many newer antibiotics work more quickly. That's the only reason. It has nothing to do with some magical discovery that the traditional ten-day course was longer than it needed to be.
During my ~9 years in patient care, I dealt with many, many patients who failed to take their full course of antibiotics. Basically, they'd take the pills until they felt better and "save the rest in case it comes back." Which, of course, it usually did, because they hadn't finished the full course! Then they'd take the rest (often spaced out over a longer period than they should) which would, of course, again temporarily suppress the infection without killing it off. A few cycles of this behavior is pretty much a recipe for breeding a powerfully resistant strain.
Well, think about what's happened in the last 15 years... and consider that while we certainly have lots of cool stuff now that we didn't have in 1990, the fact is that the outlines of the modern computing world were well in place at that point. If anything, as much as I appreciate the power of modern computers, I'm disappointed that we haven't seen more revolutionary stuff come down the pike.
Be careful not to confuse science with technology -- or technology with business. Amazon is basically just catalogue sales transfered to an electronic medium; it's certainly successful, and I'm glad it's there, but IMO it doesn't represent any grand technological innovation, much less a scientific discovery.
Oh, I agree with you; my point is that "the basics" cover a very large amount of information these days, and generally require a solid undergraduate education plus roughly the first half of a graduate program to master. You can read journals and talk to scientists all you want, but unless you have the coursework under your belt, you're probably not going to understand it, at least not well enough to be able to do research that will lead to significant new knowledge in the field.
If you want to be a writer, say, just about the only thing a formal education can give you is an understanding of grammar and spelling. (/.ers, take note.) You do need this. After that, though, the way to learn to be a writer is by writing; also by reading, because editors (and readers) can always spot a manuscript written by someone who hasn't read very much. They tend to be cliche-ridden, among other flaws, because if you haven't read a lot, you won't know what everyone else has done before you. Writing, in short, is learned by watching and by doing. I suspect that this generalizes to other arts.
On the other extreme, if you want to be a scientist, well, if you think you're going to learn enough about any scientific field to make a meaningful contribution to the human body of knowledge in that area without a formal education, you're insane. This has generally been the case throughout history (contrary to legend, both Newton and Einstein had rigorous formal educations) but it's even more true now, for the simple reason that most of the science that can be done by gifted amateurs has already been done. We know a lot about the way the universe works, and you have to know what we already know before you can add new knowledge into the mix. The romantic image of the lone amateur working away on some brilliant new conception of the universe that has so far eluded all those smart-ass PhD's with their books and fancy papers may be appealing, but the truth of the matter is, if that's the mold you try to fit, you're most likely to end up like theseguys.
Most other fields are somewhere in between. There are a lot of successful businessmen with lots of formal education, and others without. Skilled trades, as mentioned by the GP poster, are largely learned on the job -- but they also have a rigorous and largely formalized system of education within the trade; "apprentice", "journeyman", and "master" are words with well-understood meanings, and if you want to make your living as a plumber or electrician or carpenter you'd best understand them. Programming (to bring the discussion home) is also in between. There are a few self-taught genius hackers out there, but there are a lot more self-taught people who think they're genius hackers but whose code is absolute garbage. Etc.
Remember that you said that the next time you're in the ER. I'm sure you'll righteously refuse medical care because you wouldn't want to do anything that might "feed on fear of the inevitable,... increase suffering needlessly, [or be] a bottomless financial pit." Right? Of course you will.
The greats of any given generation only become great when those before them have exited the stage.
That's simply not true. Look at the lives of the greats in the sciences, the arts, politics, etc. and you'll see that at the point when their greatness was recognized, their mentors of the previous generation were usually alive and kicking.
The same overtone of moral disapproval you express has greeted every major medical advance. And it may take a while for people to hash out, but the overwhelming response in the end is always, "Hell yes, we should!"
I'd suggest that there are two main reasons why old people want to die: first, the pain and disability that almost always come with old age, and second, the feeling of being out of place in the world when almost everyone you knew when you were younger is dead. If we could, in fact, stop the aging clock, both of those problems would disappear. (Assuming that it would be a treatment that everybody, or at least a large majority of people, would respond to, of course.) And under those circumstances -- being young and healthy for a thousand years, or a million, or until the last stars flicker out, for that matter, and with good company all the while -- I don't see any reason not to keep going as long as I possibly can.
By posting what you've posted, you've proven that there is no/. groupthink. Lots of people, perhaps a solid majority, may hold a certain position on a certain issue; that doesn't mean everyone here thinks exactly alike. If you believe yours is a minority viewpoint, please, by all means, post something cogent in support of it.
Viruses: maybe, maybe not, but close enough for legal purposes.
Bacteria: clearly yes.
Prions (self-reproducing proteins, such as the presumed causative agent for CJD): um, er... let me think about that one for a while.
Pint of beer, plastic, etc.: no, and I don't have any problem with anyone patenting a specific formulation of beer or plastic or anything else. It's the yeast, bacteria, or even individual genes used in the process that IMO should be off limits for patents. Kind of like, if you use a screwdriver to build a new widget, you should be able to patent the widget -- but not the "tool for tightening of helically threaded metal attachment units" you used to build the thing.
Well, to me, this pretty much proves my point. My field is comp. bio., so I'm a little closer to the direct money flow than you are -- but honestly, neither of us should have to justify our work by next quarter's returns. Fundamentally, I believe that scientific research is a public good, like roads and national defense: it may or may not produce an immediate, quantifiable profit, but the nation as a whole (including the economy) is clearly better off when it is properly funded. In other words, yes, damn it, they should just pay us for being brilliant.;)
Exclude living systems and their components (e.g., genes) from the patent system. Period. End of story.
For those who whine, "But then there won't be any incentive to innovate!"... GMAFB. Innovation in biotech (and in pretty much every technical field) is done by scientists, not moneymen. And the scientists will continue to do their jobs, whether for prestige or a desire to aid their fellow man or just out of sheer intellectual curiosity. Most of them will do it, BTW, in university labs, not corporate "R&D" shops, just the way they always have.
If the suits want to make a profit, they'll have to work a little harder to figure out how. Watch me weep in sympathy.
I think you're missing the point: he's saying (and I agree) that software patents harm the industry as a whole. Anything that benefits a few monolithic closed-source software providers like Oracle over many open-source providers like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. -- and please no "my DB can beat up your DB" flames, okay? -- is bad for the industry in general, no matter how many MiGs they enable Larry Ellison to buy.
I knew about Thatcher's humble origins; I had thought Major was old money all the way.
I was stationed about half a mile down the road from his house, and he was there to shake our hands when we got back from Desert Storm. He was the only person I've ever met who managed in person to come across as a fuzzy image on a black-and-white TV.
Slashdot Mirror
The last time I worked on that code, which was a while ago, we were using ~20 digits after the decimal. It may be more now.
Our microscopic image processing software uses pi to considerable precision. This is, I admit, a pretty specialized application.
Here is the best publically available intro on the subject I could find, although it's briefer than I'd like. Plenty of references, which you can trace through if you want to learn more. Also note the "Related articles in PubMed" link in the sidebar.
One problem, I admit, is that a lot of journal articles are locked up behind subscriber-only interfaces. (On PubMed, those that are freely available have a special icon, which is helpful.) If you have access to a university library, you can always try to find more information there. Also, any reasonably modern microbiology textbook (mid-1990's or later) should have a chapter on this -- actually, that might be a better place to gain a layman's understanding than combing through journals.
Go here, search on "antibiotic resistance" or similar phrases, and start reading. I don't want to sound like a prick, but I really don't have either the time or the interest to summarize the thousands of papers that have been published on this subject any further than I already have, in my original post. Nothing I said was particularly controversial, or would come as any surprise to anyone well-versed in the subject; the only reason I made the post at all was because the post to which I was replying displayed near-total ignorance.
Here's a very simplified explanation:
The problem is that resistance isn't either/or -- that is, it's not as simple as saying a particular strain of bacteria is resistant or it's not. All strains have greater or lesser degrees of resistance; more precisely, individual bacteria within the population have greater or lesser degrees. When you're on antibiotics, the bacteria tend to die off in, pretty much, an exponential decay curve. Once the curve drops below a certain level, the remaining bacterial population is insufficient to maintain the infection; your immune system is fighting the infection too, of course, and it can take care of the remaining bacteria, which are the more resistant ones, one the less resistant ones are killed off by the antibiotics.
So what happens when you stop taking the course of antibiotics halfway through? Well, where you previously had a bacterial population consisting of some bacteria with weak resistance, some with moderate resistance, and some with strong resistance, now you only have the latter two categories. And these are going to continue breeding, and your immune system is going to spend its resources fighting them equally, without preference as to which is more or less antibiotic-resistant -- which means more of the bacteria with greater resistance will survive and grow. OTOH, if you'd finished the antibiotics, only the most resistant bacteria would be left, and your immune system could probably finish them off on its own.
To top it off, resistance requires an expenditure of energy on the part of the bacteria -- you're quite right that many such critters have non-expressed resistance genes already in their genomes; the reason these genes aren't usually expressed is because doing so takes energy the bacteria would usually prefer to devote to feeding and reproducing. So in a patient who doesn't take antibiotics at all, the percentage of resistant individual bacteria is going to be very low. This means that taking half a course on antibiotics is the worst possible course of action: if you take the whole thing, you'll probably end up killing off the entire infection; if you take no antibiotics, you'll either get better or you won't, but either way you won't encourage the formation of a resistant strain.
And the reason that shorter courses of antibiotics are being prescribed is that, quite simply, many newer antibiotics work more quickly. That's the only reason. It has nothing to do with some magical discovery that the traditional ten-day course was longer than it needed to be.
During my ~9 years in patient care, I dealt with many, many patients who failed to take their full course of antibiotics. Basically, they'd take the pills until they felt better and "save the rest in case it comes back." Which, of course, it usually did, because they hadn't finished the full course! Then they'd take the rest (often spaced out over a longer period than they should) which would, of course, again temporarily suppress the infection without killing it off. A few cycles of this behavior is pretty much a recipe for breeding a powerfully resistant strain.
Well, think about what's happened in the last 15 years ... and consider that while we certainly have lots of cool stuff now that we didn't have in 1990, the fact is that the outlines of the modern computing world were well in place at that point. If anything, as much as I appreciate the power of modern computers, I'm disappointed that we haven't seen more revolutionary stuff come down the pike.
*snort*
Be careful not to confuse science with technology -- or technology with business. Amazon is basically just catalogue sales transfered to an electronic medium; it's certainly successful, and I'm glad it's there, but IMO it doesn't represent any grand technological innovation, much less a scientific discovery.
Oh, I agree with you; my point is that "the basics" cover a very large amount of information these days, and generally require a solid undergraduate education plus roughly the first half of a graduate program to master. You can read journals and talk to scientists all you want, but unless you have the coursework under your belt, you're probably not going to understand it, at least not well enough to be able to do research that will lead to significant new knowledge in the field.
It really depends on what you want to do.
If you want to be a writer, say, just about the only thing a formal education can give you is an understanding of grammar and spelling. (/.ers, take note.) You do need this. After that, though, the way to learn to be a writer is by writing; also by reading, because editors (and readers) can always spot a manuscript written by someone who hasn't read very much. They tend to be cliche-ridden, among other flaws, because if you haven't read a lot, you won't know what everyone else has done before you. Writing, in short, is learned by watching and by doing. I suspect that this generalizes to other arts.
On the other extreme, if you want to be a scientist, well, if you think you're going to learn enough about any scientific field to make a meaningful contribution to the human body of knowledge in that area without a formal education, you're insane. This has generally been the case throughout history (contrary to legend, both Newton and Einstein had rigorous formal educations) but it's even more true now, for the simple reason that most of the science that can be done by gifted amateurs has already been done. We know a lot about the way the universe works, and you have to know what we already know before you can add new knowledge into the mix. The romantic image of the lone amateur working away on some brilliant new conception of the universe that has so far eluded all those smart-ass PhD's with their books and fancy papers may be appealing, but the truth of the matter is, if that's the mold you try to fit, you're most likely to end up like these guys.
Most other fields are somewhere in between. There are a lot of successful businessmen with lots of formal education, and others without. Skilled trades, as mentioned by the GP poster, are largely learned on the job -- but they also have a rigorous and largely formalized system of education within the trade; "apprentice", "journeyman", and "master" are words with well-understood meanings, and if you want to make your living as a plumber or electrician or carpenter you'd best understand them. Programming (to bring the discussion home) is also in between. There are a few self-taught genius hackers out there, but there are a lot more self-taught people who think they're genius hackers but whose code is absolute garbage. Etc.
Remember that you said that the next time you're in the ER. I'm sure you'll righteously refuse medical care because you wouldn't want to do anything that might "feed on fear of the inevitable, ... increase suffering needlessly, [or be] a bottomless financial pit." Right? Of course you will.
The greats of any given generation only become great when those before them have exited the stage.
That's simply not true. Look at the lives of the greats in the sciences, the arts, politics, etc. and you'll see that at the point when their greatness was recognized, their mentors of the previous generation were usually alive and kicking.
Okay, why shouldn't we?
The same overtone of moral disapproval you express has greeted every major medical advance. And it may take a while for people to hash out, but the overwhelming response in the end is always, "Hell yes, we should!"
I'd suggest that there are two main reasons why old people want to die: first, the pain and disability that almost always come with old age, and second, the feeling of being out of place in the world when almost everyone you knew when you were younger is dead. If we could, in fact, stop the aging clock, both of those problems would disappear. (Assuming that it would be a treatment that everybody, or at least a large majority of people, would respond to, of course.) And under those circumstances -- being young and healthy for a thousand years, or a million, or until the last stars flicker out, for that matter, and with good company all the while -- I don't see any reason not to keep going as long as I possibly can.
By posting what you've posted, you've proven that there is no /. groupthink. Lots of people, perhaps a solid majority, may hold a certain position on a certain issue; that doesn't mean everyone here thinks exactly alike. If you believe yours is a minority viewpoint, please, by all means, post something cogent in support of it.
Good questions. My answers would be, in order:
... let me think about that one for a while.
Viruses: maybe, maybe not, but close enough for legal purposes.
Bacteria: clearly yes.
Prions (self-reproducing proteins, such as the presumed causative agent for CJD): um, er
Pint of beer, plastic, etc.: no, and I don't have any problem with anyone patenting a specific formulation of beer or plastic or anything else. It's the yeast, bacteria, or even individual genes used in the process that IMO should be off limits for patents. Kind of like, if you use a screwdriver to build a new widget, you should be able to patent the widget -- but not the "tool for tightening of helically threaded metal attachment units" you used to build the thing.
Well, to me, this pretty much proves my point. My field is comp. bio., so I'm a little closer to the direct money flow than you are -- but honestly, neither of us should have to justify our work by next quarter's returns. Fundamentally, I believe that scientific research is a public good, like roads and national defense: it may or may not produce an immediate, quantifiable profit, but the nation as a whole (including the economy) is clearly better off when it is properly funded. In other words, yes, damn it, they should just pay us for being brilliant. ;)
Exclude living systems and their components (e.g., genes) from the patent system. Period. End of story.
... GMAFB. Innovation in biotech (and in pretty much every technical field) is done by scientists, not moneymen. And the scientists will continue to do their jobs, whether for prestige or a desire to aid their fellow man or just out of sheer intellectual curiosity. Most of them will do it, BTW, in university labs, not corporate "R&D" shops, just the way they always have.
For those who whine, "But then there won't be any incentive to innovate!"
If the suits want to make a profit, they'll have to work a little harder to figure out how. Watch me weep in sympathy.
I think you're missing the point: he's saying (and I agree) that software patents harm the industry as a whole. Anything that benefits a few monolithic closed-source software providers like Oracle over many open-source providers like MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. -- and please no "my DB can beat up your DB" flames, okay? -- is bad for the industry in general, no matter how many MiGs they enable Larry Ellison to buy.
[sigh] It's more credible than some random dude on /. repeating what smells very much like spurious folk etymology, that's for damn sure.
Oh. Huh. Don't know where I got that idea.
I knew about Thatcher's humble origins; I had thought Major was old money all the way.
I was stationed about half a mile down the road from his house, and he was there to shake our hands when we got back from Desert Storm. He was the only person I've ever met who managed in person to come across as a fuzzy image on a black-and-white TV.
According to the Wikipedia page, that's a UL.
Isn't Blair actually a council school grad?
It's actually an athletic league. The word "Ivy" was chosen to connote the fact that they're among the oldest universities in the country.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_League