This is precisely the situation in the European Union, where any one of 25 nations can (at least at the moment) veto almost any decision. And you're right, nothing ever gets done, although IMO this is no bad thing.
Agreed. This kind of thing scares me, especially if I've been listening to radio phone-in shows. The idea of democracy is that we elect the kind of government that we want, who roughly agree with our principles and ideals. Democracy is not about the 'people' making every single decision. The only people that will vote in each case here are people who are either (a) bored and unemployed (b) fanatic about a particular issue (c) generally believe they are right about everything. These are not the people who should be making decisions. I work hard at my job, and there's no way I have the time or resources to get all the information and insight I need in order to make major policy decisions.
Our democracies (I'm from the UK) aren't perfect, but its better than handing the lunatics the keys to the asylum.
Um... TFA does quote the false positive rate, as does the original article in Nature Medicine. From the sfgate summary:
It also classified as non-Alzheimer's disease 34 out of 39 who did not have the illness, but nevertheless suffered from other dementias or mild cognitive impairments - 87 percent accuracy.
Also, remember that their test is also designed to detect people at risk of developing AD years in the future, so, as is also pointed out in the article false positive rates can not be fully determined for some years.
Maybe, and that's what I thought at first, but if you read the full text at Nature Medicine (subscriber only I'm afraid), they've got some good results using their method to predict AD status by analysing samples from two large test sets. I'd like to see it replicated again though, and I'm sure it will be, since blood samples are comparatively easy to get.
Who cares about this, all it can do is tell you you might have a disease that we can't cure. At most it would just make the person more depressed into thinking he/she actualy has the disease.
One of the most important benefits of this research is that they've managed to identify some biological changes that occur before clinical symptoms. That means they can start to identify the processes leading to the disease, which might lead to treatments. If this is real then it's a huge step in understanding Alzheimer's disease.
You're right though in a way, there's not a lot you can medically do (at the moment) if you know you're going to get AD in the near future, but it might help you to prepare you or your family in other ways.
Maybe. But I want to live forever. One of the things that troubles me the most is that I'll not get to see the scientific discoveries that are made after my death. I want to know whether there's life on other planets, and talk to artificial brains, and understand the universe. I always think it's unfair that I know more about the world than most of the greatest scientists who ever lived. So 80? Not enough I think. Not for me anyway.
a) Rare diseases. Many people die in poor countries because there is no proper health care. Why fund research with possibly far reaching ethical dilemmas that might one day cure some rare disease when there are millions to be saved?
That argument doesn't hold a lot of water. The reasons people die in poor countries are economic, not due to a lack medical knowledge, so by your logic, all medical research should stop until we've solved third world economics?
b) Common causes of death. We now reach an average age of around 80. That's enough. There is no point in following Faust's example with the risk of getting us in troubled waters.
This one makes a bit more sense, but most of this sort of research is about improving quality of life, that is in extending 'disability-free life', rather than extending lifespan itself.
What is it people abhor so much about a child or a new species created on purpose?
There are lots of good reasons to be worried about this. First, there's no way of knowing what the long term medical, biological, psychological etc outcomes would be for the child. There's clearly no medical need at the individual level for this sort of thing (there might be at the social level, but that doesn't count in medical ethics). There's also no notion of consent, you couldn't retrospectivly ask the child whether they agree to be an experiment. So ethically, at the moment at least, it's a non-starter, even within the existing rules of medical ethics.
I agree though that the "ewww" reaction and the 'abhorrence' is a bit irrational and is not a good basis for policy.
Having said all this, medical and biological sciences will advance, and one day we're going to have to deal with this sort of thing as a real possibility. We should be starting to get the ethics sorted out now.
I don't like abortion at all, but as far as I understand there's no suggestion that these embryos will even be implanted or allowed to get past a few cell divisions.
It seems like, we never ask that question with every medical breakthrough. Should we really be more inclined to wait for "the mass produced heart corset with McDonald's like installation service"
Right now I promise there are a million insurers and healthcare providers trying to work out if this thing will save them more money in adverse events or gain in disability adjusted life years than it'll cost them they offer it. There's also another group somehwere else working on a cheaper one.
I don't quite get your McDonald's analogy, but now I'm hungry for a Big Mac.
I suppose it depends on where they think TVBoxSet's customers will go if they manage to shut it down. Or maybe they think if it's a scam then it'll blow itself out when word gets around.
Presumably its good for web applications like those Google Apps or whatever they're called so if you use them to work then you've got all the functionality you need.
Its still pretty easy to think of things you couldn't replicate. Original historical artifacts, for example, will always be worth more than even indistinguishable replicas. People will still want to commission art or music from the best artists. Or get the best education from the best teachers for their kids (lets assume its unethical to replicate people, otherwise all our logic goes out the window.)
Genetically engineering desire out of our brains is a more interesting idea. But once you take out the desire, you take away the motivation, what have you got left?
The presence of currency means the scarcity problem hasn't been solved by the civilisation, which means they are poor primitives not worth the bother of Contacting.
The scarcity problem can never be solved so long as one person has or can create something unique that another person or more than one preson wants.
I think evolutionary intertia is a good term. I reckon though that the inertia probably comes from large animals generally having fewer offspring, so the cost of birth defects in offspring is much higher. Small animals have lots more offspring, so they can afford mutation rates to be higher. Although this is also evidence-free speculation.
I'll get troll modded again for speaking the voice of reason against someone spouting the usual "live healthy" line but someone needs to say it.
I'm sorry, I know it's boring and not fashionable and certainly not profitable but it really is the answer. Live healthy and you'll more likely be healthy. I can understand why the message is annoying, since is seems to be repeated so often and is usually delivered by a middle class prof sounding smug.
You are right that most studies focus on older people, but that's to be expected because they're far easier to do than the long term ones. You are also right that the studies based in midlife are more equiviocal. However there have been good quality studies that look specifically at social networks and social activity in midlife and that have shown benefits. We don't have any direct preventive evidence, but then there is no direct preventive evidence for any long term and difficult to administer factors like these, and it's doubtful that the studies that are needed will ever be conducted, which I think is a real shame.
I think the authors of the current study were claiming something different - that the way in which the pathology of AD leads to clinical symptoms is by essentially causing a new brain specific type of diabetes.
This is a slightly confusing issue in dementia. The early stages of dementia, even the pre-clinical stages, lead to weight loss for various reasons. So rapid weight loss is associated with increased dementia risk over a couple of years, which is the finding of the short follow-up studies you have quoted.
Slashdot Mirror
This is precisely the situation in the European Union, where any one of 25 nations can (at least at the moment) veto almost any decision. And you're right, nothing ever gets done, although IMO this is no bad thing.
Agreed. This kind of thing scares me, especially if I've been listening to radio phone-in shows. The idea of democracy is that we elect the kind of government that we want, who roughly agree with our principles and ideals. Democracy is not about the 'people' making every single decision. The only people that will vote in each case here are people who are either (a) bored and unemployed (b) fanatic about a particular issue (c) generally believe they are right about everything. These are not the people who should be making decisions. I work hard at my job, and there's no way I have the time or resources to get all the information and insight I need in order to make major policy decisions.
Our democracies (I'm from the UK) aren't perfect, but its better than handing the lunatics the keys to the asylum.
Um... TFA does quote the false positive rate, as does the original article in Nature Medicine. From the sfgate summary:
It also classified as non-Alzheimer's disease 34 out of 39 who did not have the illness, but nevertheless suffered from other dementias or mild cognitive impairments - 87 percent accuracy.
Also, remember that their test is also designed to detect people at risk of developing AD years in the future, so, as is also pointed out in the article false positive rates can not be fully determined for some years.
Maybe, and that's what I thought at first, but if you read the full text at Nature Medicine (subscriber only I'm afraid), they've got some good results using their method to predict AD status by analysing samples from two large test sets. I'd like to see it replicated again though, and I'm sure it will be, since blood samples are comparatively easy to get.
Can we require candidates for public office to take the test?
More to the point - can your medical insurer make you take it.
Who cares about this, all it can do is tell you you might have a disease that we can't cure. At most it would just make the person more depressed into thinking he/she actualy has the disease.
One of the most important benefits of this research is that they've managed to identify some biological changes that occur before clinical symptoms. That means they can start to identify the processes leading to the disease, which might lead to treatments. If this is real then it's a huge step in understanding Alzheimer's disease.
You're right though in a way, there's not a lot you can medically do (at the moment) if you know you're going to get AD in the near future, but it might help you to prepare you or your family in other ways.
If you could do that I'd happily rewrite the rules. Mind you, if you could do that there'd be no need for experimentation of any kind ever again.
Furthermore, I don't expect any great insights from research where the basic target is mixing up genes just for the heck of it and see what comes out.
Um.. That's bascially all that conventional plant breeders do, and you benefit from that every single day.
Maybe. But I want to live forever. One of the things that troubles me the most is that I'll not get to see the scientific discoveries that are made after my death. I want to know whether there's life on other planets, and talk to artificial brains, and understand the universe. I always think it's unfair that I know more about the world than most of the greatest scientists who ever lived. So 80? Not enough I think. Not for me anyway.
a) Rare diseases. Many people die in poor countries because there is no proper health care. Why fund research with possibly far reaching ethical dilemmas that might one day cure some rare disease when there are millions to be saved?
That argument doesn't hold a lot of water. The reasons people die in poor countries are economic, not due to a lack medical knowledge, so by your logic, all medical research should stop until we've solved third world economics?
b) Common causes of death. We now reach an average age of around 80. That's enough. There is no point in following Faust's example with the risk of getting us in troubled waters.
This one makes a bit more sense, but most of this sort of research is about improving quality of life, that is in extending 'disability-free life', rather than extending lifespan itself.
What is it people abhor so much about a child or a new species created on purpose?
There are lots of good reasons to be worried about this. First, there's no way of knowing what the long term medical, biological, psychological etc outcomes would be for the child. There's clearly no medical need at the individual level for this sort of thing (there might be at the social level, but that doesn't count in medical ethics). There's also no notion of consent, you couldn't retrospectivly ask the child whether they agree to be an experiment. So ethically, at the moment at least, it's a non-starter, even within the existing rules of medical ethics.
I agree though that the "ewww" reaction and the 'abhorrence' is a bit irrational and is not a good basis for policy.
Having said all this, medical and biological sciences will advance, and one day we're going to have to deal with this sort of thing as a real possibility. We should be starting to get the ethics sorted out now.
I don't like abortion at all, but as far as I understand there's no suggestion that these embryos will even be implanted or allowed to get past a few cell divisions.
It seems like, we never ask that question with every medical breakthrough. Should we really be more inclined to wait for "the mass produced heart corset with McDonald's like installation service"
Right now I promise there are a million insurers and healthcare providers trying to work out if this thing will save them more money in adverse events or gain in disability adjusted life years than it'll cost them they offer it. There's also another group somehwere else working on a cheaper one.
I don't quite get your McDonald's analogy, but now I'm hungry for a Big Mac.
Look harder. Fireballs can be pretty hard to spot sometimes.
I suppose it depends on where they think TVBoxSet's customers will go if they manage to shut it down. Or maybe they think if it's a scam then it'll blow itself out when word gets around.
Presumably its good for web applications like those Google Apps or whatever they're called so if you use them to work then you've got all the functionality you need.
Our whole modern world is an artifically controlled environment that is nothing like what we have evolved for.
The only thing that's dynamic about my experience at the moment is the banner ads.
Wow. I belive that trying to understand the human mind is about the most important thing anybody can be doing.
Its still pretty easy to think of things you couldn't replicate. Original historical artifacts, for example, will always be worth more than even indistinguishable replicas. People will still want to commission art or music from the best artists. Or get the best education from the best teachers for their kids (lets assume its unethical to replicate people, otherwise all our logic goes out the window.)
Genetically engineering desire out of our brains is a more interesting idea. But once you take out the desire, you take away the motivation, what have you got left?
The presence of currency means the scarcity problem hasn't been solved by the civilisation, which means they are poor primitives not worth the bother of Contacting.
The scarcity problem can never be solved so long as one person has or can create something unique that another person or more than one preson wants.
That's more of a sign of culture than of poverty.
Because you'd still have to pay babysitters. Most of a school's function these days is to keep kids busy while their parents are at work.
I think evolutionary intertia is a good term. I reckon though that the inertia probably comes from large animals generally having fewer offspring, so the cost of birth defects in offspring is much higher. Small animals have lots more offspring, so they can afford mutation rates to be higher. Although this is also evidence-free speculation.
I'll get troll modded again for speaking the voice of reason against someone spouting the usual "live healthy" line but someone needs to say it.
I'm sorry, I know it's boring and not fashionable and certainly not profitable but it really is the answer. Live healthy and you'll more likely be healthy. I can understand why the message is annoying, since is seems to be repeated so often and is usually delivered by a middle class prof sounding smug.
You are right that most studies focus on older people, but that's to be expected because they're far easier to do than the long term ones. You are also right that the studies based in midlife are more equiviocal. However there have been good quality studies that look specifically at social networks and social activity in midlife and that have shown benefits. We don't have any direct preventive evidence, but then there is no direct preventive evidence for any long term and difficult to administer factors like these, and it's doubtful that the studies that are needed will ever be conducted, which I think is a real shame.
That's been done a few times see Risk of dementia in diabetes mellitus: a systematic review. for a review.
I think the authors of the current study were claiming something different - that the way in which the pathology of AD leads to clinical symptoms is by essentially causing a new brain specific type of diabetes.
This is a slightly confusing issue in dementia. The early stages of dementia, even the pre-clinical stages, lead to weight loss for various reasons. So rapid weight loss is associated with increased dementia risk over a couple of years, which is the finding of the short follow-up studies you have quoted.
Conversely, being overweight or obese in midlife is strongly associated with and increase in dementia risk in old age. For references and a discussion of the misinterpretation of the kind of studies you have quoted see Obesity in middle age and future risk of dementia: a 27 year longitudinal population based study and The epidemiology of adiposity and dementia.