I read an extensive article about an ocean-floor submarine cable connector design which was effectively stolen by the government. A quick google search didn't turn it up, but maybe you will have better luck.
Lots of people have been recommending proxies. Why not put it with the equipment, and control physical access there? If they want to plug it in, they're plugging into your tiny micro computer which is now integrated into the equipment.
It's not literally true, but many (most?) places will ask if you've been arrested, convicted of a crime (sometimes just felony), etc. There may be no effective way to enforce consequences immediately, but it's certainly grounds for dismissal if they learn about it through some outside channel later.
The capsid doesn't enter the cell, but it is produced there.
There are many possible lines of defense against viruses. Ignoring natural innate/adaptive immunity, you can block viral binding to cells (target receptors). You can interfere with replication of viral genomes (reverse transcription inhibitors, a big one for HIV). You can prevent assembly of new viruses (capsid inhibitors: http://jvi.asm.org/content/82/20/10262.full, note the way they used structure to guide their work). Or you can prevent viral capsid maturation (protease inhibitors, also big with HIV).
So while you can't target live (enveloped) virus with a capsid inhibitor (at least easily), you can prevent the formation of new virus. Here's a picture of what actually happens: http://jvi.asm.org/content/82/20/10262/F6.expansion.html. There should be nice tidy spheres of new capsids, and instead you get blobs of virally-useless junk.
First, you got the mass wrong. For that formula, the monoisotopic mass should be about 285.1365. Second, if you want the answer to the differentiation between morphine and peperine, check the fragmentation spectra in this link (http://metlin.scripps.edu/metabo_info.php?molid=499) vs this link (http://metlin.scripps.edu/metabo_info.php?molid=43568). That was covered in the article.
The last time I saw a presentation on brain interface technology was almost a year ago, so I'm not 100% current either, but the current state of the art isn't that great.
The fundamental problem is that the brain/hardware interface breaks down with time. In simple terms, it looks like the extremely soft brain tissue doesn't stand up to being in hard contact with the rigid electrodes (there's a nice picture in the article: they look like meat tenderizers). In the long run, there is formation of a buffer zone of unusable tissue between viable brain matter and the electrodes which blocks the signal. This is an area of substantial research: trying to build nanomaterials that serve as a good physical buffer between the brain and electrode, which is a non-trivial problem. Success in this goal can directly lead to longer-lived devices.
So when they say
no evidence has emerged of any fundamental incompatibility between the sensor and the brain
that's not entirely honest. Yes, their sensor still works fine but they still need to adapt it to be more brain-compatible. My personal guess is that this one patient just happens to have a lucky brain composition/response.
Do you mention FTs just for reference, or are you implying that they are typically used in deconvolutions? In my experience, signals with any amount of noise are much better handled with iterative algorithms.
Well, if that's the question at hand, then I prefer "5" and "2" to be integers. Perhaps this is naive, but my assumption is that standard will cause mistaken use of the wrong type to be catastrophically wrong, and hence easier to detect. An accidental float will happily churn through your calculations through many steps before you run into a situation where it causes a problem, but 5/2=2 gives you dramatic errors very quickly if you're thinking floats.
Graphics: Matlab has the most feature-rich and usable graphical environment of any of its would-be competitors, none of which do 3D well.
I'm interpreting that to say that Matlab does a better job at 3D than the competitors, which is exactly the opposite of my experiences.
I work 100% in Python/Scipy/etc, and my brother does 100% Matlab. He had to come to me for suggestions when Matlab failed to handle visualization of his extremely large 3D datasets (I can't comment on whether he really had exhausted Matlab's functionality for that purpose). Although it's true that Matplotlib has pretty poor 3D support, Python gives you many more avenues: Blender+Python actually gave incredibly good performance for an interactive data environment, although it certainly wasn't designed for it. And VTK will give you anything you want, if you're prepared to put in the time.
Isn't it fair to say that if you're worried about roundoff noise in repeated calculations, you've passed the point from being just a scientist to a someone who should be concerned with general programming theory and conventions, and hence at least familiar and comfortable with notation that denotes type?
My introduction to IEEE 754 was brought about via Python, when my chemistry kinetic simulations weren't running right (many millions of iterations, scaling factors with huge and tiny exponents). Understanding and fixing that problem took an hour or two, which far overshadowed the minute-long pause when I first found that 5/2 = 2.
In the end, the benefits of having the power of a real programming environment far outstrip the very small entry barrier. I personally feel that in the modern world you have no business calling yourself a scientist of any kind unless you can write a basic data manipulation script (parse and write a flatfile csv/tabs/CRLF etc) in some language of your choice. Massive quantities of data and meta-analyses are now the norm, making manual transcription or even copy/paste a thing of the past, and it is not acceptable to be hobbled by the feature set of existing software.
Citation needed? I don't have any hard numbers in front on me, but I cannot imagine that the government is just an intermediary between pharma and the researchers.
If I remember correctly, the Celera data was also more incomplete than the public data. Both projects announced "completion" long before the sequencing was truly complete: genetics has a long tail of data that is more and more difficult to collect, and this long tail was ignored when they said "done". I'm not even sure if it's 100% finished today, but just from memory I think that the public project had a better coverage of the difficult regions compared to Celera.
I have a bad feeling that this ruling will just shift the focus of patents, without changing their effective targets.
If a kit for diagnosis etc can be patented, the net result is unchanged: the knowledge remains locked-down under the control of the patent-holder. While this wouldn't be a huge problem if the generation of a detection kit was a novel work worthy of protection, the reality is that genetics as a field is a rigorously predictable, formulaic, and mathematical study.
The techniques for working with genetics are very well-understood, and it will likely be a computer algorithm (and not a new one) that designs the tools (DNA primers etc) for performing a particular diagnostic test. Why should that be patentable? At best, it certainly isn't non-obvious, and I would argue that when a machine (which you didn't invent) is designing your invention, you certainly shouldn't be able to claim it as your own!
Of course, there should be room for patenting truly new genetic tools, such as a new type of DNA-binding fluorescent probe, but such inventions come around once or twice a year. The hundreds or thousands of unique gene-detection methods developed per year which use that new tool should not be patentable.
With just a few modifications, that would be perfect for feeding my cat.
She tends to eat so rapidly that she makes herself sick, but the Food Lift could drop the food a little at a time into a bowl over the course of a few hours.
If it weren't $100 CAD, I'd have ordered one already.
That's not really universal, and the Met is often removed, duplicated in repeats, or modified. As a functioning amino acid, it doesn't mean much with respect to the being the first residue of a protein.
If they have paid their dues, and they are fully rehabilitated, then why does it matter if they are mentioned by name? After all, they're just normal citizens again.
Clearly there is a disconnect between the theory of rehabilitation and what the public considers to be sufficient stigma for past offenders
The angular accuracy is very poor. It's not designed to pick out just one vehicle from a group.
The ones with which I have some familiarity are designed to report back multiple signals: the fastest signal detected within the spread of the radar, and the largest. So theoretically they can get a signal off one vehicle traveling very fast through traffic, but if you are always traveling slower than people around you, your car will never be reported to the officer.
Chemically, that "equation" just doesn't balance without an input of energy. It doesn't matter what kind of "ion bridges" they put into place between the brine and salt water reservoirs, or what the concentration of salt exists in the brine or salt water, it will require some energy to offset the entropy increase.
It's possible that they have some active system in place in the bridges, but it's going to take some kind of energy input which is missing from their explanation.
It did cost a lot of money to do this research, and the taxpayers of the US are likely the ones who funded most of it, a long time ago. The researchers in question here made their living by receiving governments grants.
You could say that since Bayh-Dole basically gives universities the rights to the discoveries, the universities just end up as caretakers of public-held intellectual knowledge, but I don't think they always act in the best interests of the public.
When considering things like biotech, the vast majority of funding is coming from the government, especially for the more pure research.
In practice, that rule has been bent to the point where it no longer has any meaning. You can't patent a DNA sequence, but you can patent the DNA sequence in purified form. Want to check to see if you're the carrier of a particular, naturally-occurring, patented DNA sequence? You had better not purify your own DNA, or you will be violating the patent.
Here's an analogy for you: honey is a naturally-occurring substance, which is usually found mixed in with undesirable materials like wax and live bees. If you applied the same criteria as biological patents, you could patent bottled honey since that's an artificial creation.
Technically you could patent the process of warming honeycomb and letting the honey drip out, just to prove that you invented honey, but it wouldn't be necessary. Just the honey in the bottle would be enough.
And that should be a sickening thought for anyone.
It looks like this whole topic is littered with information, so here are some translations for you all.
We claim:
1. A method of growing a crystal of a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui comprising:
(a) isolating a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui;
(b) precipitating the 50S ribosomal subunit;
(c) back-extracting or resuspending the precipitated 50S ribosomal subunit to obtain a solution;
(d) seeding the back-extracted or resuspended solution of step (c);
(e) growing a crystal of the 50S ribosomal subunit from the seeded solution of step (d) by vapor diffusion at room temperature;
(f) harvesting the crystal from step (e);
(g) stabilizing the harvested crystal by gradual transfer of said crystal into a series of solution containing high salt concentration of from about 1.2 M to 1.7 M; and
(h) maintaining the crystal under high salt concentration, wherein the crystal (i) is untwinned, (ii) has an average thickness greater than about 15.mu.m, and (iii) diffracts X-rays to a resolution of at least 2.7.ANG..
2. The method of claim 1 further comprising: (i) flash freezing the crystal of step (h).
This is definitely a process patent, but not much of it is patentable.
Step (a) uses a centrifugation process that every biochemist knows, and they cite a 1985 paper.
Step (b) is another basic purification step based on selective precipitation, and again is a standard technique.
Step (c) means that they re-dissolved the protein, pretty special...
Steps (d,e) could be unique if they did anything really extraordinary. It's been too many years since I've been a practicing crystallographer, so I can't say if anything in those steps is very unusual. I doubt it: vapor diffusion etc is pretty typical as an overall technique.
Steps (f-h) and (2i) are also just basic crystallography procedures.
In this patent, there's just nothing but crystals and structures, period.
Slashdot Mirror
I read an extensive article about an ocean-floor submarine cable connector design which was effectively stolen by the government. A quick google search didn't turn it up, but maybe you will have better luck.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2013/05/06/wildling_egalitarianism_why_bad_weather_leads_to_more_economic_equality.html
You are incorrect about the burden of proof and an affirmative defense: the standard vary by offense and state.
In Florida, the Standard Jury Instructions clearly specify that an affirmative defense has the benefit of any reasonable doubt.
Lots of people have been recommending proxies. Why not put it with the equipment, and control physical access there? If they want to plug it in, they're plugging into your tiny micro computer which is now integrated into the equipment.
It's not literally true, but many (most?) places will ask if you've been arrested, convicted of a crime (sometimes just felony), etc. There may be no effective way to enforce consequences immediately, but it's certainly grounds for dismissal if they learn about it through some outside channel later.
The capsid doesn't enter the cell, but it is produced there.
There are many possible lines of defense against viruses. Ignoring natural innate/adaptive immunity, you can block viral binding to cells (target receptors). You can interfere with replication of viral genomes (reverse transcription inhibitors, a big one for HIV). You can prevent assembly of new viruses (capsid inhibitors: http://jvi.asm.org/content/82/20/10262.full, note the way they used structure to guide their work). Or you can prevent viral capsid maturation (protease inhibitors, also big with HIV).
So while you can't target live (enveloped) virus with a capsid inhibitor (at least easily), you can prevent the formation of new virus. Here's a picture of what actually happens: http://jvi.asm.org/content/82/20/10262/F6.expansion.html. There should be nice tidy spheres of new capsids, and instead you get blobs of virally-useless junk.
First, you got the mass wrong. For that formula, the monoisotopic mass should be about 285.1365. Second, if you want the answer to the differentiation between morphine and peperine, check the fragmentation spectra in this link (http://metlin.scripps.edu/metabo_info.php?molid=499) vs this link (http://metlin.scripps.edu/metabo_info.php?molid=43568). That was covered in the article.
The last time I saw a presentation on brain interface technology was almost a year ago, so I'm not 100% current either, but the current state of the art isn't that great.
The fundamental problem is that the brain/hardware interface breaks down with time. In simple terms, it looks like the extremely soft brain tissue doesn't stand up to being in hard contact with the rigid electrodes (there's a nice picture in the article: they look like meat tenderizers). In the long run, there is formation of a buffer zone of unusable tissue between viable brain matter and the electrodes which blocks the signal. This is an area of substantial research: trying to build nanomaterials that serve as a good physical buffer between the brain and electrode, which is a non-trivial problem. Success in this goal can directly lead to longer-lived devices.
So when they say
no evidence has emerged of any fundamental incompatibility between the sensor and the brain
that's not entirely honest. Yes, their sensor still works fine but they still need to adapt it to be more brain-compatible. My personal guess is that this one patient just happens to have a lucky brain composition/response.
Do you mention FTs just for reference, or are you implying that they are typically used in deconvolutions? In my experience, signals with any amount of noise are much better handled with iterative algorithms.
Well, if that's the question at hand, then I prefer "5" and "2" to be integers. Perhaps this is naive, but my assumption is that standard will cause mistaken use of the wrong type to be catastrophically wrong, and hence easier to detect. An accidental float will happily churn through your calculations through many steps before you run into a situation where it causes a problem, but 5/2=2 gives you dramatic errors very quickly if you're thinking floats.
Graphics: Matlab has the most feature-rich and usable graphical environment of any of its would-be competitors, none of which do 3D well.
I'm interpreting that to say that Matlab does a better job at 3D than the competitors, which is exactly the opposite of my experiences.
I work 100% in Python/Scipy/etc, and my brother does 100% Matlab. He had to come to me for suggestions when Matlab failed to handle visualization of his extremely large 3D datasets (I can't comment on whether he really had exhausted Matlab's functionality for that purpose). Although it's true that Matplotlib has pretty poor 3D support, Python gives you many more avenues: Blender+Python actually gave incredibly good performance for an interactive data environment, although it certainly wasn't designed for it. And VTK will give you anything you want, if you're prepared to put in the time.
Isn't it fair to say that if you're worried about roundoff noise in repeated calculations, you've passed the point from being just a scientist to a someone who should be concerned with general programming theory and conventions, and hence at least familiar and comfortable with notation that denotes type?
My introduction to IEEE 754 was brought about via Python, when my chemistry kinetic simulations weren't running right (many millions of iterations, scaling factors with huge and tiny exponents). Understanding and fixing that problem took an hour or two, which far overshadowed the minute-long pause when I first found that 5/2 = 2.
In the end, the benefits of having the power of a real programming environment far outstrip the very small entry barrier. I personally feel that in the modern world you have no business calling yourself a scientist of any kind unless you can write a basic data manipulation script (parse and write a flatfile csv/tabs/CRLF etc) in some language of your choice. Massive quantities of data and meta-analyses are now the norm, making manual transcription or even copy/paste a thing of the past, and it is not acceptable to be hobbled by the feature set of existing software.
Citation needed? I don't have any hard numbers in front on me, but I cannot imagine that the government is just an intermediary between pharma and the researchers.
If I remember correctly, the Celera data was also more incomplete than the public data. Both projects announced "completion" long before the sequencing was truly complete: genetics has a long tail of data that is more and more difficult to collect, and this long tail was ignored when they said "done". I'm not even sure if it's 100% finished today, but just from memory I think that the public project had a better coverage of the difficult regions compared to Celera.
I have a bad feeling that this ruling will just shift the focus of patents, without changing their effective targets.
If a kit for diagnosis etc can be patented, the net result is unchanged: the knowledge remains locked-down under the control of the patent-holder. While this wouldn't be a huge problem if the generation of a detection kit was a novel work worthy of protection, the reality is that genetics as a field is a rigorously predictable, formulaic, and mathematical study.
The techniques for working with genetics are very well-understood, and it will likely be a computer algorithm (and not a new one) that designs the tools (DNA primers etc) for performing a particular diagnostic test. Why should that be patentable? At best, it certainly isn't non-obvious, and I would argue that when a machine (which you didn't invent) is designing your invention, you certainly shouldn't be able to claim it as your own!
Of course, there should be room for patenting truly new genetic tools, such as a new type of DNA-binding fluorescent probe, but such inventions come around once or twice a year. The hundreds or thousands of unique gene-detection methods developed per year which use that new tool should not be patentable.
With just a few modifications, that would be perfect for feeding my cat.
She tends to eat so rapidly that she makes herself sick, but the Food Lift could drop the food a little at a time into a bowl over the course of a few hours.
If it weren't $100 CAD, I'd have ordered one already.
That's not really universal, and the Met is often removed, duplicated in repeats, or modified. As a functioning amino acid, it doesn't mean much with respect to the being the first residue of a protein.
If your take-home pay is >$42,000 a month (very conservative estimate for 1M/year gross), do you really need a car loan?
And if you're in that situation, and you do need a loan, that doesn't speak well for your money management skills. I wouldn't want to loan it to you.
If they have paid their dues, and they are fully rehabilitated, then why does it matter if they are mentioned by name? After all, they're just normal citizens again.
Clearly there is a disconnect between the theory of rehabilitation and what the public considers to be sufficient stigma for past offenders
The angular accuracy is very poor. It's not designed to pick out just one vehicle from a group.
The ones with which I have some familiarity are designed to report back multiple signals: the fastest signal detected within the spread of the radar, and the largest. So theoretically they can get a signal off one vehicle traveling very fast through traffic, but if you are always traveling slower than people around you, your car will never be reported to the officer.
More important than the cost is the question of effectiveness.
In their diagram, they have this schematic in the critical location:
[Salt water]<----(+)----[Brine]----(-)----->[Salt water]
Chemically, that "equation" just doesn't balance without an input of energy. It doesn't matter what kind of "ion bridges" they put into place between the brine and salt water reservoirs, or what the concentration of salt exists in the brine or salt water, it will require some energy to offset the entropy increase.
It's possible that they have some active system in place in the bridges, but it's going to take some kind of energy input which is missing from their explanation.
It did cost a lot of money to do this research, and the taxpayers of the US are likely the ones who funded most of it, a long time ago. The researchers in question here made their living by receiving governments grants.
You could say that since Bayh-Dole basically gives universities the rights to the discoveries, the universities just end up as caretakers of public-held intellectual knowledge, but I don't think they always act in the best interests of the public.
When considering things like biotech, the vast majority of funding is coming from the government, especially for the more pure research.
In practice, that rule has been bent to the point where it no longer has any meaning. You can't patent a DNA sequence, but you can patent the DNA sequence in purified form. Want to check to see if you're the carrier of a particular, naturally-occurring, patented DNA sequence? You had better not purify your own DNA, or you will be violating the patent.
Here's an analogy for you: honey is a naturally-occurring substance, which is usually found mixed in with undesirable materials like wax and live bees. If you applied the same criteria as biological patents, you could patent bottled honey since that's an artificial creation.
Technically you could patent the process of warming honeycomb and letting the honey drip out, just to prove that you invented honey, but it wouldn't be necessary. Just the honey in the bottle would be enough.
And that should be a sickening thought for anyone.
I am truly sorry on several levels, but you are incorrect that the molecules themselves were not patented. They were, and that is the travesty.
Perhaps this is one of the few occasions when the righteous indignation is right on the money.
It looks like this whole topic is littered with information, so here are some translations for you all.
We claim: .mu.m, and (iii) diffracts X-rays to a resolution of at least 2.7 .ANG..
1. A method of growing a crystal of a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui comprising:
(a) isolating a 50S ribosomal subunit from Haloarcula marismortui;
(b) precipitating the 50S ribosomal subunit;
(c) back-extracting or resuspending the precipitated 50S ribosomal subunit to obtain a solution;
(d) seeding the back-extracted or resuspended solution of step (c);
(e) growing a crystal of the 50S ribosomal subunit from the seeded solution of step (d) by vapor diffusion at room temperature;
(f) harvesting the crystal from step (e);
(g) stabilizing the harvested crystal by gradual transfer of said crystal into a series of solution containing high salt concentration of from about 1.2 M to 1.7 M; and
(h) maintaining the crystal under high salt concentration, wherein the crystal (i) is untwinned, (ii) has an average thickness greater than about 15
2. The method of claim 1 further comprising: (i) flash freezing the crystal of step (h).
This is definitely a process patent, but not much of it is patentable.
Step (a) uses a centrifugation process that every biochemist knows, and they cite a 1985 paper.
Step (b) is another basic purification step based on selective precipitation, and again is a standard technique.
Step (c) means that they re-dissolved the protein, pretty special...
Steps (d,e) could be unique if they did anything really extraordinary. It's been too many years since I've been a practicing crystallographer, so I can't say if anything in those steps is very unusual. I doubt it: vapor diffusion etc is pretty typical as an overall technique.
Steps (f-h) and (2i) are also just basic crystallography procedures.
In this patent, there's just nothing but crystals and structures, period.