I could definitely see the FDA approving a drug that really offers little effect. It must be easy to pad numbers when your test is essentially "Scale of one to ten, how happy are you today?"
I'm just thankful that the efficiency of most drugs aren't measured that way. "On a scale of one to ten, ten being about to die of cancer and one being cancer free, how do you feel?"
While we can definitely spot a phony in our own fields, our policing is somewhat toothless in the public sphere.
If Dr. Smith from Bob Jones university gets on Fox news and says "Stem cells are made of ground up newborn babies and have absolutely no scientific merit, they just like killing babies," I can write angry letters but I can't actually arrest him (legally). There's no recourse there.
The poisonous lies are already out there, readily absorbed by anyone who is inclined to be opposed to stem cells because their pastor says they're wrong, cementing their opinion into place. Even if someone competent were to appear on that same show and immediately point out the flaws with that, people would walk away with what they wanted, which is not always the correct rebuttal. They'll remember "Stem cells are babies! That's terrible! Ought to be a crime!" And they'll vote.
Also, I think saying "anyone claiming 'the debate is over' on an area of active scientific dispute should be ignored" is pretty circular. Furthermore, debates are often over on a serious academic level while to non-academics the shouting match has just begun. Evolution is a good example of that. The debate is over, but the fundamentalists though will continue to argue for years to come.
As for consensus, most of the public won't spend more than 5 minutes thinking about something. It would be great if we could get them to realize the truth in scientific facts through education, but if you try to teach someone about the fundamentals of natural selection, walk them through the proof, they're going to change the channel rapidly and still be swayed the other way. If you point out that 99.999% of scientists agree on natural selection, they're going to be resistant to that.001% and christian fundamentalists.
You've made a very good point here: videogames have only been around for 30 years wheras other art forms have been around for much much longer.
How old is the oldest song you have on your MP3 player right now? I'm willing to bet it's not caveman music. The oldest book most people read these days is the bible, which they're not reading because it's good literature. Aside from charlie chaplain, I've heard of very few silent movies that have withstood the test of time. The oldest paintings that are in museums for their artistic quality (as opposed to anthropological significance) are still a good thousand years younger than the idea of painting.
In all art forms, the early stuff is rarely any good when looking back. There are no classics really from the infancy of any art form. In all those cases above, there was a period while the art form was developing from a concept into a refined art. Silent movies may have had a lot of effort put into them, but until you could add sound the form wasn't mature. There were literary devices and basic concepts to work out beffore literature could be worth remembering. Much the same, videogaming is still evolving at a fundamental technical level. It's premature to judge it right now as an art form. Of course it's going to be lacking, it's like judging a teenager and saying he's never going to amount to anything as an adult.
If anything you have to admit that videogames have developed exponentially faster than other art forms and is still going. The gap between caveman painings and Renoir is appreciable, but the difference between pong and half life 2 is pretty staggering.
Of course, that's a technological development, and you could make the argument that it's more computer development tying in visual art. The real heart of videogaming, what makes it a unique art form is the conceptual level. The gaming experience. Tools for that can't simply be co-opted from other art forms as easily. You could make it a lot like a movie, with cutscenes, but that's a cheap trick. Concepts like FPS and platforming are still developing. We've seen some amazing concepts introduced recently, may of which are far more fndamental than the differences between cavemen beating on drums and mozart. It's way too early to judge videogaming.
Telomerase, for those of you who don't know, is an enzyme that seems to extend the telomere, one step in making the cell capable of indefinite proliferation. I belive there is normal telomerase activity in stem cells, definitely in germ cells, and unfortunately cancer cells.
I also have to point out that I think all the papers on iPS (induced pluripotent cells, the reprogrammed cells they're talking about) specifically measure and report telomerase activity in the cells. It's just one of the many suprising things cells do when you get them to express these factors.
From the abstract it seems they have only figured out the events to reprogramming. The abstract says nothing about figuring out how to re-differentiate these cells. The end product is the same. This is a step towards solving that, but it's not there yet. These cells will still produce teratomas if you were to inject them into SCID mice or people.
I'm afraid I don't catch you point. I don't have time right now to read the article, but both embryonic fibroblasts and adult fibroblasts will work about the same for the feeder cells. The cells they're actually culturing though, you'd be more interested in the adult fibroblasts since those are easier to obtain in humans and would be more of a direct correlation.
In other words, I would assume they're talking about fibroblasts that they reprogrammed, not fibroblasts they used as feeder cells.
I realize that's a big assumption and I will read the paper later.
When presented with a major advance in health and biology, with impacts that could range from curing paralysis to curing cancer, most slashdotters will be dissapointed you aren't talking about a failing videogame console.
There are more "holy grails" in nanoscience than you can shake a stick at. Carbon nanotubes that you can build a space elevator out of, making crystals on DNA, molecular assembler, caged medicines deliverable right to the needed site, nanobots that can do anything, self replicating nanostructures....
PICK ONE DAMN "HOLY GRAIL" AND STICK WITH IT. -- Note to all nanoscientists
It reminds me of that scene from last crusade.
I guess it might not be researcher's fault. Lord knows there's plenty of "holy grails" in other fields.
Eventually we're going to see the headline "Anthropologist uncovers the "Holy grail" of Anthropology: a cup Jesus drank out of at the last supper." And then my head is going to explode.
What's new about this? The Nacre line does not develop pigmentation. People have been using this fish for quite a while. It's a mutation in a different gene?
You, sir, have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
I'm an experimental embryologist. Would you like to volunteer your baby for me to experiment on and section? No? See, that's why animal model are good. We can investigate the causes of diseases like spinal bifida without horrible ethical violations.
Someone thinking carefully expresses thoughts carefully. A careful-thinking person would never say "decide to", because that communicates the idea that the cancer cells are thinking. Who said anything about thinking? "Decision" is a word that is often used in cellular biology to describe cellular events in response to molecular mechanisms that don't involve thoughts. It's a simple, time saving term that is easy for the general public to understand and is not too technical. As this was not a technical report it's actually a good thing to make it generally accessible. If you use jargon, people without a background in what you're talking about often feel offended, like you're trying to make them feel dumb. It's stupid, but it's not anyone's fault.
Saying something like "we don't understand the signaling events, molecular cascades, or gene expression changes that cause cancer cells to metastisize" is less concise, easy to make a mistake saying, takes the focus off of the point, and will actually make the general audience care less.
Some of the concern is based on justified anger over past atrocities committed by people who called themselves 'scientists' (e.g. infecting blacks with Syphilis).
Just so we're clear, the Tuskegee expiriments did not involve infecting black men with syphilis. I know it was a minor point in your post, but it was inaccurate, is a common mistake, and I think given it's historical significance it's important to get it right. The men already had syphilis, and when the study began there was no known cure for it. 15 years into the study penicillin was known to cure it, so there was no reason to continue the study other than to watch poor uneducated black men die, which they did, and furthermore the men were lied to to keep them from getting cured.
But the study did NOT involve infecting them men with the disease directly. In some ways that's worse, because the study seems to have started off as a good study by good scientists and then morphed somehow into preventing patients from getting cured entirely because of their race. An evil study like "let's infect black men with syphillis" is something only comic book villians will waste time doing. A good study eventually turning into evil, I don't know how that happens or how we would prevent that today.
As this study once again proves, sometimes you'll find answers to questions other than the one you're working on when doing biomedical research.
I also think you're able to dismiss alzheimers and memory diseases as trivial because you have no clue what you're talking about.
And, lastly, the wiki article points out that a lot of those diseases have cheap cures available already. In other words, we scientists have done our job, whine to the politicians who can't get their act together to buy and distribute the 20 cent cures.
They put the electodes in, eventually he became permanently murderous. I didn't think I needed to go into that much detail, considering the electrodes, the patient, and the whole story are fictitious.
Also, I think it's worth it to ruin a book no one's reading any more so that it doesn't happen in real life. As I always say, those who don't learn from Jurrasic Park get eaten by velociraptors.
So, this is reminding me a lot of "Terminal Man" which was written back in the 80s. Basically, they put electrodes into a guy's head to stop him from having psychotic episodes, or maybe just violent epilepsy (it was a long time ago). Some of the electrodes brought back memories. Was Crichton just writing that based on theories in the field that hadn't been tested, or has this been around for a while?
Anyway, in the end, the shocks made the guy become murderous permanently, and he killed a bunch of people, so I think we should watch out for that, although if we keep on just doing it to obese 50 year olds, that might be less of a problem.
That would have been my guess too, except first the article specifically mentions these things were unique in that they would be duplicated (unlike the other analogues).
Second "'We now have an unnatural base pair that's efficiently replicated and doesn't need an unnatural polymerase,' says Romesberg. 'It's staring to behave like a real base pair.'"
The first artificial base pairs with the second to make a unique base pair copied efficiently by at least one normal polymerase. It wouldn't make a mis-match, it's a complete pair. It would seem that in vivo, the pair could continue to persist in the genome and be replicated as long as each synthetic base was provided.
If the pair is recognized by a proofreading mechanism as an error though, it might be cut out, that might limit it's use, but it should not be making a mismatch.
I've never heard of them being used for anti-viral applications. I've always heard of them being used in anti-cancer drugs.
DNA has existed for a very long time, the reason it uses the same 5 nucleotides exclusively is because of stability issues. Obviously, you're going to want your genome to not fall apart, or rather to fall apart as little as possible while still being able to be replicated and read off of. The double helix and diploidy are additional ways to ensure stability and error correcting abilities, but even with all that, you still get lots of DNA breaks each day. I can't remember the order of magnitude right now, but it's quite a bit. The 4 usual nucleotides for genomic DNA (ACGT) are the most stable without gumming up the process.
I've heard of several artificial nucleotides though that will incorporate into cells synthesizing new DNA (which cancer cells do) but they decrease genomic stability. Cancer cells DNA is often even more fragile than our DNA, so adding things like BrdU (I think it stands for bromodeoxyuridine, which cells mistake for thymidine) will selectively be taken up by cancer cells and will hopefully push their genomes over the edge to falling apart.
BrdU can also be used as a way to specifically identify proliferating cells within organisms. Fully differentiated cells don't synthesize new DNA, so if you add in BrdU, it will only show up in cells that are still cycling (like adult stem cells). There are antibodies that specifically recognize BrdU, and you can detect those antibodies using secondary fluorescent antibodies. The result is that in tissue cross sections, proliferating cells will glow.
Its unfortunate that the article is so blurby. I'm thinking though that the researchers don't know exactly how this DNA will be translated or will affect genomic stability. The real difference is that these bases will be copied, wheras BrdU and others won't. I'm very interested to know if these base pairs will copy as themselves (IE, the artificial base pair will be maintained in progeny cells) or if they will be paired with a normal base and the artifical one will be lost in progeny cells. If it's maintained, that would be very useful.
I was watching "Heroes" and they were able to identify individuals with super powers based on their participation in the human genome project. It helps that they identified the "codon" that was responsible for the super powers.
I wonder which three nucleotides give you super powers...
But I digress, everyone who has ever signed anything with the words "human genome progect" already has had their genome sequenced.
Do you think by then we'll be able to make a black hole and shoot it in the direction of the cloud to suck it up before it hits us?
I realize there are probably other ways to keep it from hitting our solar system, but I'd like us all to agree right here and now that a black hole cannon is how we are going to deal with this, just so we're all on the same page and can get our act together in time.
Well, it's easy to play armchair CEO in hindsight and say they should have charged more so they could have gotten that theoretical 1 billion. Of course, it's hard for me to understand the criticism when 1. if they had done that, it might be they're losing a billion in unsold consoles, which would be a much bigger problem than having a billion dollars more to expand, and 2. you're talking about raising the price of the wii. That would be nice for nintendo's investors and stock holders, but is anyone here either of those? No? Then let's be happy the price is too low than too high and hope that "marketing scheme" catches on.
Phil
There is still value in a hierarchy of publications. Getting published on "Bob's online science blog" is not going to look as impresive on a CV as getting published in Nature. That's one way to quickly judge the value of a study you might not have a strong background in.
If you don't have any publications in a traditional magazine, grant reviewers aren't going to be as interested. I could see some of the less respected journals falling out of favor of things like PloS online, but I can't imagine many self-respecting scientists submitting their hard work to a non-journal when they could get it published in Nature or Cell.
Slashdot Mirror
I could definitely see the FDA approving a drug that really offers little effect. It must be easy to pad numbers when your test is essentially "Scale of one to ten, how happy are you today?"
I'm just thankful that the efficiency of most drugs aren't measured that way. "On a scale of one to ten, ten being about to die of cancer and one being cancer free, how do you feel?"
While we can definitely spot a phony in our own fields, our policing is somewhat toothless in the public sphere.
.001% and christian fundamentalists.
If Dr. Smith from Bob Jones university gets on Fox news and says "Stem cells are made of ground up newborn babies and have absolutely no scientific merit, they just like killing babies," I can write angry letters but I can't actually arrest him (legally). There's no recourse there.
The poisonous lies are already out there, readily absorbed by anyone who is inclined to be opposed to stem cells because their pastor says they're wrong, cementing their opinion into place. Even if someone competent were to appear on that same show and immediately point out the flaws with that, people would walk away with what they wanted, which is not always the correct rebuttal. They'll remember "Stem cells are babies! That's terrible! Ought to be a crime!" And they'll vote.
Also, I think saying "anyone claiming 'the debate is over' on an area of active scientific dispute should be ignored" is pretty circular. Furthermore, debates are often over on a serious academic level while to non-academics the shouting match has just begun. Evolution is a good example of that. The debate is over, but the fundamentalists though will continue to argue for years to come.
As for consensus, most of the public won't spend more than 5 minutes thinking about something. It would be great if we could get them to realize the truth in scientific facts through education, but if you try to teach someone about the fundamentals of natural selection, walk them through the proof, they're going to change the channel rapidly and still be swayed the other way. If you point out that 99.999% of scientists agree on natural selection, they're going to be resistant to that
You've made a very good point here: videogames have only been around for 30 years wheras other art forms have been around for much much longer.
How old is the oldest song you have on your MP3 player right now? I'm willing to bet it's not caveman music. The oldest book most people read these days is the bible, which they're not reading because it's good literature. Aside from charlie chaplain, I've heard of very few silent movies that have withstood the test of time. The oldest paintings that are in museums for their artistic quality (as opposed to anthropological significance) are still a good thousand years younger than the idea of painting.
In all art forms, the early stuff is rarely any good when looking back. There are no classics really from the infancy of any art form. In all those cases above, there was a period while the art form was developing from a concept into a refined art. Silent movies may have had a lot of effort put into them, but until you could add sound the form wasn't mature. There were literary devices and basic concepts to work out beffore literature could be worth remembering. Much the same, videogaming is still evolving at a fundamental technical level. It's premature to judge it right now as an art form. Of course it's going to be lacking, it's like judging a teenager and saying he's never going to amount to anything as an adult.
If anything you have to admit that videogames have developed exponentially faster than other art forms and is still going. The gap between caveman painings and Renoir is appreciable, but the difference between pong and half life 2 is pretty staggering.
Of course, that's a technological development, and you could make the argument that it's more computer development tying in visual art. The real heart of videogaming, what makes it a unique art form is the conceptual level. The gaming experience. Tools for that can't simply be co-opted from other art forms as easily. You could make it a lot like a movie, with cutscenes, but that's a cheap trick. Concepts like FPS and platforming are still developing. We've seen some amazing concepts introduced recently, may of which are far more fndamental than the differences between cavemen beating on drums and mozart. It's way too early to judge videogaming.
... and slashdotters continue to miss the point.
Cure to human diseases? More like opportunities for console wars.
Telomerase, for those of you who don't know, is an enzyme that seems to extend the telomere, one step in making the cell capable of indefinite proliferation. I belive there is normal telomerase activity in stem cells, definitely in germ cells, and unfortunately cancer cells.
I also have to point out that I think all the papers on iPS (induced pluripotent cells, the reprogrammed cells they're talking about) specifically measure and report telomerase activity in the cells. It's just one of the many suprising things cells do when you get them to express these factors.
From the abstract it seems they have only figured out the events to reprogramming. The abstract says nothing about figuring out how to re-differentiate these cells. The end product is the same. This is a step towards solving that, but it's not there yet. These cells will still produce teratomas if you were to inject them into SCID mice or people.
I'm afraid I don't catch you point. I don't have time right now to read the article, but both embryonic fibroblasts and adult fibroblasts will work about the same for the feeder cells. The cells they're actually culturing though, you'd be more interested in the adult fibroblasts since those are easier to obtain in humans and would be more of a direct correlation.
In other words, I would assume they're talking about fibroblasts that they reprogrammed, not fibroblasts they used as feeder cells.
I realize that's a big assumption and I will read the paper later.
When presented with a major advance in health and biology, with impacts that could range from curing paralysis to curing cancer, most slashdotters will be dissapointed you aren't talking about a failing videogame console.
There are more "holy grails" in nanoscience than you can shake a stick at. Carbon nanotubes that you can build a space elevator out of, making crystals on DNA, molecular assembler, caged medicines deliverable right to the needed site, nanobots that can do anything, self replicating nanostructures....
PICK ONE DAMN "HOLY GRAIL" AND STICK WITH IT. -- Note to all nanoscientists
It reminds me of that scene from last crusade.
I guess it might not be researcher's fault. Lord knows there's plenty of "holy grails" in other fields.
Eventually we're going to see the headline "Anthropologist uncovers the "Holy grail" of Anthropology: a cup Jesus drank out of at the last supper." And then my head is going to explode.
What's new about this? The Nacre line does not develop pigmentation. People have been using this fish for quite a while. It's a mutation in a different gene?
You, sir, have absolutely no clue what you're talking about.
I'm an experimental embryologist. Would you like to volunteer your baby for me to experiment on and section? No? See, that's why animal model are good. We can investigate the causes of diseases like spinal bifida without horrible ethical violations.
Saying something like "we don't understand the signaling events, molecular cascades, or gene expression changes that cause cancer cells to metastisize" is less concise, easy to make a mistake saying, takes the focus off of the point, and will actually make the general audience care less.
Just so we're clear, the Tuskegee expiriments did not involve infecting black men with syphilis. I know it was a minor point in your post, but it was inaccurate, is a common mistake, and I think given it's historical significance it's important to get it right. The men already had syphilis, and when the study began there was no known cure for it. 15 years into the study penicillin was known to cure it, so there was no reason to continue the study other than to watch poor uneducated black men die, which they did, and furthermore the men were lied to to keep them from getting cured.
But the study did NOT involve infecting them men with the disease directly. In some ways that's worse, because the study seems to have started off as a good study by good scientists and then morphed somehow into preventing patients from getting cured entirely because of their race. An evil study like "let's infect black men with syphillis" is something only comic book villians will waste time doing. A good study eventually turning into evil, I don't know how that happens or how we would prevent that today.
You know, that might explain some things, like why so many children with crutches walk into the zoo, but none ever leave.
As this study once again proves, sometimes you'll find answers to questions other than the one you're working on when doing biomedical research.
I also think you're able to dismiss alzheimers and memory diseases as trivial because you have no clue what you're talking about.
And, lastly, the wiki article points out that a lot of those diseases have cheap cures available already. In other words, we scientists have done our job, whine to the politicians who can't get their act together to buy and distribute the 20 cent cures.
They put the electodes in, eventually he became permanently murderous. I didn't think I needed to go into that much detail, considering the electrodes, the patient, and the whole story are fictitious.
Also, I think it's worth it to ruin a book no one's reading any more so that it doesn't happen in real life. As I always say, those who don't learn from Jurrasic Park get eaten by velociraptors.
So, this is reminding me a lot of "Terminal Man" which was written back in the 80s. Basically, they put electrodes into a guy's head to stop him from having psychotic episodes, or maybe just violent epilepsy (it was a long time ago). Some of the electrodes brought back memories. Was Crichton just writing that based on theories in the field that hadn't been tested, or has this been around for a while?
Anyway, in the end, the shocks made the guy become murderous permanently, and he killed a bunch of people, so I think we should watch out for that, although if we keep on just doing it to obese 50 year olds, that might be less of a problem.
Everytime I shock myself I remember fresh why I don't like shocking myself.
They typically do, in this case we don't know yet. Read the above comment of "In regards to 'been done before' "
That would have been my guess too, except first the article specifically mentions these things were unique in that they would be duplicated (unlike the other analogues).
Second "'We now have an unnatural base pair that's efficiently replicated and doesn't need an unnatural polymerase,' says Romesberg. 'It's staring to behave like a real base pair.'"
The first artificial base pairs with the second to make a unique base pair copied efficiently by at least one normal polymerase. It wouldn't make a mis-match, it's a complete pair. It would seem that in vivo, the pair could continue to persist in the genome and be replicated as long as each synthetic base was provided.
If the pair is recognized by a proofreading mechanism as an error though, it might be cut out, that might limit it's use, but it should not be making a mismatch.
I've never heard of them being used for anti-viral applications. I've always heard of them being used in anti-cancer drugs. DNA has existed for a very long time, the reason it uses the same 5 nucleotides exclusively is because of stability issues. Obviously, you're going to want your genome to not fall apart, or rather to fall apart as little as possible while still being able to be replicated and read off of. The double helix and diploidy are additional ways to ensure stability and error correcting abilities, but even with all that, you still get lots of DNA breaks each day. I can't remember the order of magnitude right now, but it's quite a bit. The 4 usual nucleotides for genomic DNA (ACGT) are the most stable without gumming up the process. I've heard of several artificial nucleotides though that will incorporate into cells synthesizing new DNA (which cancer cells do) but they decrease genomic stability. Cancer cells DNA is often even more fragile than our DNA, so adding things like BrdU (I think it stands for bromodeoxyuridine, which cells mistake for thymidine) will selectively be taken up by cancer cells and will hopefully push their genomes over the edge to falling apart. BrdU can also be used as a way to specifically identify proliferating cells within organisms. Fully differentiated cells don't synthesize new DNA, so if you add in BrdU, it will only show up in cells that are still cycling (like adult stem cells). There are antibodies that specifically recognize BrdU, and you can detect those antibodies using secondary fluorescent antibodies. The result is that in tissue cross sections, proliferating cells will glow. Its unfortunate that the article is so blurby. I'm thinking though that the researchers don't know exactly how this DNA will be translated or will affect genomic stability. The real difference is that these bases will be copied, wheras BrdU and others won't. I'm very interested to know if these base pairs will copy as themselves (IE, the artificial base pair will be maintained in progeny cells) or if they will be paired with a normal base and the artifical one will be lost in progeny cells. If it's maintained, that would be very useful.
I was watching "Heroes" and they were able to identify individuals with super powers based on their participation in the human genome project. It helps that they identified the "codon" that was responsible for the super powers. I wonder which three nucleotides give you super powers... But I digress, everyone who has ever signed anything with the words "human genome progect" already has had their genome sequenced.
Do you think by then we'll be able to make a black hole and shoot it in the direction of the cloud to suck it up before it hits us?
I realize there are probably other ways to keep it from hitting our solar system, but I'd like us all to agree right here and now that a black hole cannon is how we are going to deal with this, just so we're all on the same page and can get our act together in time.
Well, it's easy to play armchair CEO in hindsight and say they should have charged more so they could have gotten that theoretical 1 billion. Of course, it's hard for me to understand the criticism when 1. if they had done that, it might be they're losing a billion in unsold consoles, which would be a much bigger problem than having a billion dollars more to expand, and 2. you're talking about raising the price of the wii. That would be nice for nintendo's investors and stock holders, but is anyone here either of those? No? Then let's be happy the price is too low than too high and hope that "marketing scheme" catches on. Phil
There is still value in a hierarchy of publications. Getting published on "Bob's online science blog" is not going to look as impresive on a CV as getting published in Nature. That's one way to quickly judge the value of a study you might not have a strong background in. If you don't have any publications in a traditional magazine, grant reviewers aren't going to be as interested. I could see some of the less respected journals falling out of favor of things like PloS online, but I can't imagine many self-respecting scientists submitting their hard work to a non-journal when they could get it published in Nature or Cell.