Rosalind Franklin [wikipedia.org] was the one who actually made and interpreted the x-ray diffraction images of DNA. Then her work was shown to Watson and Crick, behind her back, who published their model of the double helix and got famous.
This is basically correct, but I think that both the contribution of the diffraction images, and the degree to which Watson and Crick behaved unethically, tends to be somewhat overstated. Franklin actually published her results in the same issue of Nature as the double helix model. The main reason why this affair is remembered is because Watson published a rather uncomplimentary account of Franklin in his book The Double Helix (short summary: he thought she was a good scientist, but a raging feminist bitch). Franklin was at that point long since dead and could not defend herself. Watson also has a long history of pissing people off.
If nothing else, the real reason Franklin isn't more famous isn't that Watson screwed her: she died of ovarian cancer at age 37, four years before Watson and Crick won the Nobel prize (along with Maurice Wilkins, who really didn't deserve it).
The answer to the question "if intelligent life is out there, where are they" will be "not here because we're boring and common"
I find most bacteria boring and common, but there are plenty of scientists who enjoy studying them, and continue to learn new things from them. If nothing else, they want to sample the diversity of life and find what crazy mechanisms have evolved in microbes we've never seen before. Why wouldn't an advanced space-faring species be the same?
There are too many other reasons to count why we haven't seen any signs of intelligent life. The most obvious is that everyone else is stuck on their planet because they hit a hard upper limit to what their indigenous technology is capable of (or what their global economy is capable of supporting - same thing, really). Extinction is also very likely; keep in mind that the available evidence indicates at one point there were only a few tens of thousands of humans alive. Some may develop industrial civilization and orbital spaceflight, only to discover that the nearest solid object is a Neptune-like object several AU distant (instead of a conveniently placed moon, and a solid planet that might have once had liquid water at a manageable distance).
My guess is the galaxy is full of Voyager-like probes, drifting aimlessly and quietly beeping until they run out of batteries or (inevitably) run into something solid. Throw in a handful of sleeper ships on autopilot fleeing planetary disaster, or a few insane trillionaires looking for adventure - most of these will end up the same way. Probably once every few millennia civilizations actually make contact, only to realize that the distances between them are so large as to make actual travel effectively impossible.
It depends on the sub-field of bio. Genetics of yeast or E. coli: easy and (comparatively). Structures of human neuroreceptors: difficult and expensive (particle accelerator required). Do-it-yourself will only take you so far: you can build your own thermocycler without too much struggle, but what about a system for purifying proteins? It may be tempting to do a half-assed job inexpensively, but the pros use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars. (We have to - it would waste too much time otherwise, not just in the time lost by doing manually what a machine can do for us, but later when we discover that our exciting result was actually an artifact caused by a contaminating protein.) You can find some of this equipment used if you know where to look (and know how to detect junk), but it still requires a significant amount of disposable income.
The one field where amateurs really do have a chance is computational biology/bioinformatics. However, "amateur" in this case means someone with a sophisticated knowledge of math and statistics, which generally implies an advanced degree (and/or extensive professional experience) in a technical field.
at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day
I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in the life sciences and a desire for independent learning. This was how I became interested in biology, and after more than a decade of higher education and professional research, I have done very few things that were as fulfilling as watching rotifers and protists feeding, and seeing how many species I could count in a drop of pond water. Even a cheap child's microscope is sufficient to get started, and you can buy higher-quality equipment (the kind that gets used in introductory bio lab in college) used for under $1000.
The problem, unfortunately, is that it's very difficult to do truly original and significant research like this. For the pure learning experience it can't be beat, and I suspect one could make some truly spectacular YouTube videos, but it's no substitute for doing science the messy way, with a real lab and real funding.
Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
This is the part that makes me call B.S. The fuel pellets contain tritium, which as far as I know requires a fission reactor to produce. Right now the fuel pellets aren't even the primary target of the NIF's lasers - instead, they encapsulate it in a little shell called a hohlraum, which I believe is currently made from gold, although other materials are possible too. So this is quite incredibly expensive fuel, and they're going to be blasting them at a rate of 15 per second. Considering the NIF cost $3.5 billion to do one shot at a time, I'm not sure where the $4 billion figure is coming from. On the bright side, they don't need hundreds of thousands of miles of superconducting wire like ITER does.
On the bright side, if they can get something like this to work it's potentially useful for interstellar travel.
My money's on ITER.
I'm sure ITER could be made to work. The problem is twofold: first, it's not actually an optimal design for a production power plant; the current plans are significantly scaled down from what was originally intended. Second, the capital costs for one of these are simply extraordinary. Of course ITER is going way over budget in part due to the fact that it's uniquely massive and there is some politics involved (for instance, because every country contributing gets rights to all of the technology developed, manufacturing is being spread out in very inefficient ways), but devices like this are probably never going to be easy or cheap to build.
While I am not advocating for the "old school" business model, publishing trustworthy, referable papers is not cheap. Try an "Open Access" journal to see their rates.
The rates aren't actually that unreasonable. PLoS ONE is less than $1500 - quite affordable if you're an academic group used to paying $900 for a tiny vial of polymerase or $40,000 for a protein purification system, and they'll waive it for people who couldn't otherwise afford to publish there. Several other considerations:
1. Publishing open-access with a commercial publisher is insanely expensive by comparison. I think I read something like $7000 per article for Nature, which hardly anyone bothers with. (I wouldn't - since I'm funded by the NIH, everything I do will end up being open-access after a year whether I pay Nature for the privilege or not. Of course, I'm very unlikely to be publishing in Nature for other reasons.)
2. The economics of dealing with commercial publishers only make sense if you create an artificial wall between university libraries and university research labs. The libraries are paying so much to the publishers for journal access that any savings the labs might get by not paying to publish open-access are lost. Of course the overhead paid out of grant money to the university probably goes in part towards funding the library's access, but the scientists never have to bother with details like this - they only see the university skimming a certain percent off the top of their funds.
3. Going the commercial, non-open-access route can be expensive too. Ever hear of charges per-page, or color fees? These are standard practice at many journals and can easily amount to more than the cost of publishing with PLoS ONE, and the article will still be paywalled. The color fees in particular are absolutely fucking insane in a world where most researchers never even see the print copy of any journal other than Science or Nature. (I don't even print out the PDFs any more - either I read the online version or I download the PDF to my iPad. The last time I saw one of my own articles in dead tree form was 2007.)
4. Dealing with commercial publishers often sucks for other reasons. All of that fabled private-sector efficiency is meaningless when you're dealing with an entity whose review process is dependent on workaholic volunteers. I have a rule of thumb when dealing with Elsevier journals: don't send anything there unless you're willing to wait three months for reviews. The professors (or their postdocs, or sometimes even their students) who receive your manuscript don't give a shit. Why should they? They're not getting a share of Elsevier's 30%-plus profit margin.
I'm not arguing that the open-access journals are the perfect alternative - they're still based on the same rules and regulations, minus the evil, and there is still too much bureaucracy and politicking involved. I don't think that preprint servers like arXiv are the solution either, for that matter, due to the lack of quality control and any form of peer review. These issues are largely a distraction anyway, however. We could certainly do a lot better than the current paradigm of scientific publishing, but even that wouldn't be so bad if not for the parasites which feed upon it. Fuck Elsevier.
Lots of interesting research happens on ISS. The problem is that it's all boring sciency stuff
Actually, I work in one of the fields that was studied on the ISS (protein crystallography), and being familiar with the results that came out of there, I can attest to the spectacular inefficiency of that endeavor too. I don't have the expertise to comment on any of the other experiments, but the fact that protein crystallization research was a major justification for building the ISS is a red flag. I love boring science-y stuff, but when playing with other people's money it behooves us to spend it as efficiently as possible, not just buy a lot of cool toys with it.
Only since Columbia, and only because we've grown so weak that we as a nation have become afraid of our own shadows that we only accept a 0% risk in any endeavor now. That's why China, Russia, and India will beat us back to the moon and beat us to Mars by decades.
The shuttle wasn't retired because the US is too risk-averse - there were plenty of other good reasons:
- it was a complete failure with regard to its original purpose, making orbital travel routine and inexpensive
- it was a spectacularly inefficient tool for what it was actually used for
- what it was actually used for wasn't very interesting either: the ISS has not been a good investment compared to the unmanned programs
- it was incapable of going anywhere more interesting than low orbit, let alone the moon or Mars
- it was sucking the life out of the manned space program anyway, and often crippling the unmanned programs because they were designed around the shuttle
In the meantime, no other nation has come anywhere close to the US's success in planetary exploration, including some potentially risky missions (Mars rovers, for example) which so far have had a relatively good failure rate and zero deaths. If China beats us to Mars by decades it won't be because the US is too risk-averse, but because their government can get away with spending a large fraction of their GDP on a propaganda exercise, and we're currently crippled by a colossal national debt and a democratically accountable government. I would be utterly shocked if Russia or India were to make it there at all, certainly not before the US does.
All of the "next-generation" sequencing technology has a relatively high error rate compared to traditional Sanger sequencing (used on the original human genome sequences, and still the gold standard for truly novel genomes). The massive redundancy typically compensates for this, although some technology is clearly pretty marginal no matter how much data you have. If my memory is accurate, the Human Genome Project was collecting somewhere between 6x and 10x redundant data; projects using the newer tech shoot for more like 30x.
What I don't get is what this device is intended to be useful for if it's only able to sequence 150 million b.p. before wearing out. The article mentions that this is smaller than some human chromosomes, but unless they factored the necessary redundancy into that figure, it's not going to go very far. It'll be enough to sequence most bacterial genomes, and probably enough to sequence human cellular RNA transcripts, or something else targeted, but I just can't see it being useful for whole-genome analysis of the sort that tries to answer deep questions like "am I likely to get Alzheimers in twenty years?"
I feel bad for the poor deluded kids that are being suck(er)ed into the SpaceX vortex.
Actually, I have no problem with this. If Elon Musk wants to sink his own money into space flight and is willing to pay underlings a fair salary to help, good for him and good for them. Let NASA focus on pure R&D (especially propulsion research) and unmanned exploration, and let the idealistic billionaires bet on the long shots. If something useful comes out of the endeavor, terrific, we'll all benefit. If not, at least it wasn't the taxpayers' money being spent on a science-fiction fantasy.
No one wants to pay for anything. Especially things they can't see immediate benefit from.. such as R&D, exploration (space, maritime and other) and pure research.
Basic research has never been especially unpopular, because it usually doesn't cost a boatload of money compared to other federal programs, and the ROI is considered fairly good. You won't find many people complaining about unmanned space exploration, because it's still not insanely expensive has generally been very productive scientifically, as the Mars rovers or Hubble repeatedly remind us. The problem with the manned space program is that the return has never been very good, and the original motivation was at least as much military as scientific.
Here's an example I'm very familiar with: protein crystals in space. Protein crystallization is hard, more art and luck than science, but it's one of the best ways to dissect the mechanistic details of many systems, and very valuable for understanding how drugs work. Crystals appear to grow much better in microgravity, so the thought was that protein samples could be shipped into space, and larger, better ordered crystals grown up there. Then we'd be able to solve the structures of proteins that were intractable on Earth. This was cited as one of the justifications for the ISS.
The problem, of course, is that it's an extraordinarily inefficient way to solve protein structures. Main problem: once you grow the crystals, what can you do with them? You need a high-intensity X-ray source - none of those on the ISS. In fact, the type of X-ray sources we normally use for this job tend to require at least an acre and far more electricity than the ISS's solar panels will provide. So you have to land them first - but protein crystals don't like shock or vibration. Then you're faced with the problem that high-intensity X-rays tend to cause severe radiation damage, so we freeze the crystals in liquid nitrogen first to preserve them. This also reduces the quality, typically to the same extent that microgravity improves them. By this point you've also spent about as much money as it takes to build a modern high-intensity X-ray source, and more of those would be much more helpful than space crystals. (The ISS has already cost more money than every high-intensity X-ray source ever built put together, probably several times over.) More obviously, for the price of a single shuttle launch you could probably hire a dozen additional lab technicians, a roomful of liquid-handling robots, and synthetic DNA for as many modifications as you need to help crystallize the protein - and you'd still have at least 90% of the money left.
Are there other legitimate and economically practical benefits from the manned space program, aside from keeping the aerospace contractors in business? Possibly - I'm not an expert. But I do know that the cited justification that I'm professionally qualified to judge is complete horseshit, and it doesn't make me very favorably disposed towards the other arguments.
Got it, targeted ads you don't want are detestable, targeted ads you do are not. Great reasoning.
The American Express ads aren't targeted - they know absolutely nothing about me or my shopping habits from my credit rating, only that I have used a credit card in the past. What's offensive is that I have no pre-existing business relationship with them and have given them no indication that I want to start one. I consider this an invasion of my privacy. It's like if I suddenly start getting book offers from Barnes and Noble on the basis of my Amazon purchases - even if they're books I might buy, my response to B&N would be "fuck off". And yeah, I'm not happy that any company can look up my credit rating without my prior authorization either.
Why is this detestable? "Detestable" is Comcast sending me mail at least once a week for the last three years, despite the fact that I don't watch TV, have no use for their services, and have never responded to anything they sent. Or American Express checking my credit rating nearly ten times in the space of a few years, and bombarding me with credit card offers. I already have two cards, assholes, and that's at least one more than I need. If I call a girl twice and she doesn't call me back, I get the hint and move on, but you people just keep on trying.
I hate shopping, and untargeted advertising rarely appeals to me; I'd much rather have companies with whom I have an existing customer relationship tell me about deals that I can actually use. Safeway lets me know when they have sales on frozen chicken breasts or nonfat milk; Amazon suggests books on history and programming that I might enjoy. None of this bothers me, because I don't buy anything from these stores that I'd feel uncomfortable about. (That said, if I buy birth control I'll pay cash and not use any customer loyalty cards. Private is private.) I don't want them sharing my shopping history with anyone - and I fully support laws that limit their ability to do so - but why shouldn't they try to cater to my habits? The fact is, they'd be idiots not to, and I'd be doing exactly the same thing if I were in their position. This isn't creepy or weird, it's how to run a profitable business without exploiting your workers or screwing your competitors.
Really, the only thing that bothers me is how private this data stays. As long as it's strictly internal and automated, I have no problem with them mining it for every useful correlation. But there is incredible potential for abuse, and not just selling this data to other companies: what if state governments start suing Amazon demanding to know the shopping records of everyone in their state so they can charge use taxes? (I'm not making that up - it really has happened, only it was an online vendor of cigarettes.) The data need not necessarily leave the company; I could imagine unscrupulous employees looking into the data for their neighbors, and wondering why the married man down the street was suddenly spending a lot of money on condoms and flowers.
What, like the part where you said "NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals"?
Perhaps you have a bone to pick with the NIH?
No, they pay my salary.
The NIH provided tools for the publishers so they could easily comply. I have yet to find a publisher who outright declined, they realized quickly it was not in their own best interest to do so.
And they've been kicking and screaming ever since. Some journals (including most of the ones I publish in, fortunately) will take care of depositing the final paper in PMC, but in many cases the author has to take specific action. But it doesn't matter how easy the NIH makes it: the major publishers don't want to give up exclusivity, which is why Elsevier and friends bribed some Congressmen/women to reverse the NIH policy.
all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication
It says nothing about the type of journal they can publish in, only that the manuscript has to be made publicly available within a year. The guidelines do include the rather vague stipulation that:
Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this Policy
But in practice, what really happened was that the NIH told the publishers, "fuck you, we're paying for these papers, so we're putting them online whether you like it or not." Basically the journals had to accept that they would lose exclusivity after a year, or lose all NIH-funded work (which is a huge fraction of their output). I think the 12-month delay was a compromise to avoid completely screwing the publishers.
NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals.
I'm pretty sure this is not true - NIH-funded researches still publish in Nature or Elsevier journals all the time, without paying extra to make their work open-access. (I know this because I get c**kblocked by the paywall every time I'm browsing the literature on a weekend.) The requirement is actually that they deposit the manuscript in PubMed Central within either 6 months or a year (I forget which) after publication, regardless of what other arrangement may have been made with the journal. So everything funded by the NIH should, in theory, become open-access eventually, just not immediately. It's an imperfect solution, but still a huge improvement on what we had before.
It's not enough for progressives to call a smaller increase from year to year a "cut"
It's not just progressives who do this. When Obama proposed raising the defense budget by a smaller amount than previously proposed, he was immediately attacked for "cutting" defense spending.
a person who drooled while he watched these actors play super humans as part of a unique American culture (The rest of the world does not have super-hero style comics)
It may be unique American culture, but the rest of the world consumes it ferociously - Terminator 3 (the last movie starring Ahnuld, just before he became governor) made twice as much outside the US as domestically.
As far as indigenous culture goes, the Chinese have their share of cartoonish super-hero antics and over-the-top violence. Watch Jet Li's version of "Fist of Legend" (where the bad guys are Japanese, of course) and tell me he doesn't have super powers in that film. (It's actually a very enjoyable movie.) Or some of the old John Woo films: "Hard Boiled" makes the typical American badass cop movie look like "Terms of Endearment."
Just so no one gets confused, this molecule goes by 3 common names VX-770 and Ivacaftor and Kalydeco
I asked a scientist I know at a Big Pharma company why there are always multiple names. His response was (paraphrased): "There's an entire department at our company full of people who come up with names for drug candidates - one name that's recognizable and easily pronounced which becomes the trademarked brand name, and another that's hard to pronounce or remember that becomes the official compound name, which is what the generics will eventually use." (I think he was exaggerating about it being an entire department, but I could be wrong.)
If you pay any attention to biomedical literature, they always use the compound name - thus "Prozac" will always be referred to as "fluoxetine", "Gleevec" is "imatinib", and so on.
The anthropogenic global warming clique phrased their argument in such a way that it could only appeal to people who don't have any moral qualms against creating policies to modify the behavior of their fellow citizens.
You'll have a hard time finding anyone who genuinely does have moral qualms against creating policies to modify the behavior of their fellow citizens - aside from the furthest fringes of the Libertarian Party and the outright anarchists, just about every political group (and certainly every politician of note in the US, even Ron Paul) endorses some degree of coercion in the interests of the general welfare. Where they disagree is on the degree of coercion permissible, and what types of behavior are subject to this kind of small-scale social engineering - be it sexual activities, drug use, dumping used motor oil down storm drains, or running your AC in the parking lot. As a general rule, however, you will find that most people, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, agree that activities which have the potential to damage the lives or property of others should either be prohibited, or strongly discouraged through economic sanctions. Which is why laws regulating the disposal of toxic wastes (especially radioactive or carcinogenic) are not considered especially controversial.
So, from a libertarian or conservative perspective, there is nothing inherently "socialist" about penalizing CO2 emissions if they can be shown to negatively impact the rest of human civilization. In fact, their mantra of taking personal responsibility for the costs of one's behavior demands it. Which is largely why the backlash against global warming research tends to be framed in explicitly right-wing terms: if the entire thing is just some socialist plot to remake the global economy, then driving the Escalade to work doesn't conflict with their principles. No one wants to admit that their self-indulgent lifestyles might lead to someone's coastal home being flooded, let alone be held accountable for it.
The last and most subjective objection I have is that the people screaming loudest for decarbonization tend to do so in a way that makes it hard for me to distinguish what they are saying from "blah blah blah Socialism Is Great blah blah blah I get to ride in private jets but you have to ride a bike to work and turn down your thermostat in the winter blah blah blah"
Funny, I have the exact same subjective response to the "skeptics": it's hard to take their arguments seriously when they keep claiming that global warming research is actually a massive conspiracy of socialists bent on world domination, and suggest that a cap-and-trade regime to reduce CO2 emissions would effectively revert us to a pre-industrial economy. (I've even seen a few claim that we should be increasing CO2 emissions because it will improve agricultural productivity.) You do realize that most of the actual climatologists doing real research (as opposed to, say, Al Gore) don't own private jets, right?
The best sources I can come up with (things like this [wsj.com] and this [transworldnews.com]) suggest that hundreds of millions are spent on one side, and billions on the other.
The big difference here is that those billions are mostly spent on scientific research, while the oil company money is mostly being spent on PR and lobbying.
If we were the individualists you think we are, we would have died out as a species fifty thousand years ago.
We certainly are individualists compared to ants and bees, and you are confusing "social" with "collectivist". Although relatively few societies in human history have considered the rights of the individual to be paramount, even fewer were genuinely collectivist - European welfare states do not count.
The reason we find compulsory eithanasia abhorrent is because we ARE a social species. If we were individualist we wouldn't give a damn.
Um, no, because we as a society respect the rights of the individual, and will not put someone to death simply because the collective finds him or her a burden. (Ignoring the US's broken system of "health care" for the moment.) In a truly collectivist society, the rights and needs of the individual are completely dispensable, and forced labor, compulsory euthanasia, and thought control would be the natural order of things. To such a species, our willingness to subsidize the weak and elderly, and our ability to choose our own occupation/religion/spouse, would seem like suicidal weaknesses.
This is not a theme I'm pulling out of my ass - there are numerous works of science fiction which explore this concept. ("Ender's Game", "The Forever War", and "A Deepness In The Sky" are the books that immediately spring to mind.)
But you'd have to think that any species at that point where they have left their planet and are exploring space would have strict rules about interfering with species that aren't at their level yet
Sure, but those strict rules wouldn't necessarily be an enlightened policy of non-interference and remote observation - they could just as well be "Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." I guess this is Stephen Hawking's scenario, and it seems at least as probable to me as the sanctimonious higher beings from Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry wasn't much of a realist.
(On that note, I'm eagerly waiting for someone to do the Battlestar Galactica treatment of Star Trek - throw out the absurd elements and technobabble, and make it much more morally ambiguous. The original series did occasionally hint at the darker side of interstellar empire, such as resource wars and frequent interference in planetary civilizations, but I'd like to see this played up, especially the Cold War metaphors.)
We aren't remotely advanced enough to know what ranges of values within what parameters would make for safe vs unsafe contact
I mostly agree - but as with any other discussion of extraterrestrial life, we can make informed guesses based on observation of life here on Earth. At any rate, my comment wasn't so much trying to posit "this is the way things must be" as it was a reaction to the common supposition that any life intelligent and sophisticated enough for interstellar travel would also be ethically more advanced, and would be repelled by our violence and pollution. The history of the 20th century shows that technological achievement and superior ethics, or environmental consciousness, do not necessarily go hand in hand where humans are concerned. Why assume otherwise for aliens?
If there IS intelligent life out there, I have serious doubts that they consider us being under the same umbrella as them
Actually, that's my least favorite Star Trek cliche - the benevolent, highly-evolved, omnipotent alien race that sees humans as mere children, either unworthy of their time, or in need of friendly guidance (and hectoring lectures about killing each other). I would say exactly the opposite is more likely to be true: any alien species aggressive and inventive enough to explore space is guaranteed to have endured warfare and ecological destruction in recent memory. Species that lose their aggression will stay at home smoking pot, eating takeout, and watching cartoons until they all die of boredom and/or congestive heart failure. That doesn't mean that they'll find our behavior at all intelligible; if a space-faring race was highly collectivist (either by evolution or by engineering), they might find our individuality and the violence that it often leads to incomprehensible. But I doubt they'll have managed to avoid strip mining, fossil fuels, or nuclear fission in the course of their technological development, and they'll probably engage in practices that we would find abhorrent, like compulsory euthanasia.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they'll advertise their presence to us - there are a number of good reasons to avoid doing so, which would apply even if we were a pacifistic agrarian species. But I absolutely think they would study us, because they won't even be exploring interstellar space unless they were either exceptionally curious, or exceptionally desperate. I personally find it more likely that intelligent life rarely makes it out of their home solar system in person - although I'd wager that there are a few scattered derelicts full of cryogenically frozen alien colonists drifting for centuries.
Slashdot Mirror
Rosalind Franklin [wikipedia.org] was the one who actually made and interpreted the x-ray diffraction images of DNA. Then her work was shown to Watson and Crick, behind her back, who published their model of the double helix and got famous.
This is basically correct, but I think that both the contribution of the diffraction images, and the degree to which Watson and Crick behaved unethically, tends to be somewhat overstated. Franklin actually published her results in the same issue of Nature as the double helix model. The main reason why this affair is remembered is because Watson published a rather uncomplimentary account of Franklin in his book The Double Helix (short summary: he thought she was a good scientist, but a raging feminist bitch). Franklin was at that point long since dead and could not defend herself. Watson also has a long history of pissing people off.
If nothing else, the real reason Franklin isn't more famous isn't that Watson screwed her: she died of ovarian cancer at age 37, four years before Watson and Crick won the Nobel prize (along with Maurice Wilkins, who really didn't deserve it).
The answer to the question "if intelligent life is out there, where are they" will be "not here because we're boring and common"
I find most bacteria boring and common, but there are plenty of scientists who enjoy studying them, and continue to learn new things from them. If nothing else, they want to sample the diversity of life and find what crazy mechanisms have evolved in microbes we've never seen before. Why wouldn't an advanced space-faring species be the same?
There are too many other reasons to count why we haven't seen any signs of intelligent life. The most obvious is that everyone else is stuck on their planet because they hit a hard upper limit to what their indigenous technology is capable of (or what their global economy is capable of supporting - same thing, really). Extinction is also very likely; keep in mind that the available evidence indicates at one point there were only a few tens of thousands of humans alive. Some may develop industrial civilization and orbital spaceflight, only to discover that the nearest solid object is a Neptune-like object several AU distant (instead of a conveniently placed moon, and a solid planet that might have once had liquid water at a manageable distance).
My guess is the galaxy is full of Voyager-like probes, drifting aimlessly and quietly beeping until they run out of batteries or (inevitably) run into something solid. Throw in a handful of sleeper ships on autopilot fleeing planetary disaster, or a few insane trillionaires looking for adventure - most of these will end up the same way. Probably once every few millennia civilizations actually make contact, only to realize that the distances between them are so large as to make actual travel effectively impossible.
Your best hope for home science is in bio
It depends on the sub-field of bio. Genetics of yeast or E. coli: easy and (comparatively). Structures of human neuroreceptors: difficult and expensive (particle accelerator required). Do-it-yourself will only take you so far: you can build your own thermocycler without too much struggle, but what about a system for purifying proteins? It may be tempting to do a half-assed job inexpensively, but the pros use equipment that costs tens of thousands of dollars. (We have to - it would waste too much time otherwise, not just in the time lost by doing manually what a machine can do for us, but later when we discover that our exciting result was actually an artifact caused by a contaminating protein.) You can find some of this equipment used if you know where to look (and know how to detect junk), but it still requires a significant amount of disposable income.
The one field where amateurs really do have a chance is computational biology/bioinformatics. However, "amateur" in this case means someone with a sophisticated knowledge of math and statistics, which generally implies an advanced degree (and/or extensive professional experience) in a technical field.
at home, feel free to scoop up some dirt and look at it under a microscope during the day
I cannot recommend this highly enough to anyone with an interest in the life sciences and a desire for independent learning. This was how I became interested in biology, and after more than a decade of higher education and professional research, I have done very few things that were as fulfilling as watching rotifers and protists feeding, and seeing how many species I could count in a drop of pond water. Even a cheap child's microscope is sufficient to get started, and you can buy higher-quality equipment (the kind that gets used in introductory bio lab in college) used for under $1000.
The problem, unfortunately, is that it's very difficult to do truly original and significant research like this. For the pure learning experience it can't be beat, and I suspect one could make some truly spectacular YouTube videos, but it's no substitute for doing science the messy way, with a real lab and real funding.
Not to mention the awkward little problem of cheaply manufacturing those ultra-precise little fuel targets, and positioning them quickly and accurately enough inside the reactor for it to be practical.
This is the part that makes me call B.S. The fuel pellets contain tritium, which as far as I know requires a fission reactor to produce. Right now the fuel pellets aren't even the primary target of the NIF's lasers - instead, they encapsulate it in a little shell called a hohlraum, which I believe is currently made from gold, although other materials are possible too. So this is quite incredibly expensive fuel, and they're going to be blasting them at a rate of 15 per second. Considering the NIF cost $3.5 billion to do one shot at a time, I'm not sure where the $4 billion figure is coming from. On the bright side, they don't need hundreds of thousands of miles of superconducting wire like ITER does.
On the bright side, if they can get something like this to work it's potentially useful for interstellar travel.
My money's on ITER.
I'm sure ITER could be made to work. The problem is twofold: first, it's not actually an optimal design for a production power plant; the current plans are significantly scaled down from what was originally intended. Second, the capital costs for one of these are simply extraordinary. Of course ITER is going way over budget in part due to the fact that it's uniquely massive and there is some politics involved (for instance, because every country contributing gets rights to all of the technology developed, manufacturing is being spread out in very inefficient ways), but devices like this are probably never going to be easy or cheap to build.
While I am not advocating for the "old school" business model, publishing trustworthy, referable papers is not cheap. Try an "Open Access" journal to see their rates.
The rates aren't actually that unreasonable. PLoS ONE is less than $1500 - quite affordable if you're an academic group used to paying $900 for a tiny vial of polymerase or $40,000 for a protein purification system, and they'll waive it for people who couldn't otherwise afford to publish there. Several other considerations:
1. Publishing open-access with a commercial publisher is insanely expensive by comparison. I think I read something like $7000 per article for Nature, which hardly anyone bothers with. (I wouldn't - since I'm funded by the NIH, everything I do will end up being open-access after a year whether I pay Nature for the privilege or not. Of course, I'm very unlikely to be publishing in Nature for other reasons.)
2. The economics of dealing with commercial publishers only make sense if you create an artificial wall between university libraries and university research labs. The libraries are paying so much to the publishers for journal access that any savings the labs might get by not paying to publish open-access are lost. Of course the overhead paid out of grant money to the university probably goes in part towards funding the library's access, but the scientists never have to bother with details like this - they only see the university skimming a certain percent off the top of their funds.
3. Going the commercial, non-open-access route can be expensive too. Ever hear of charges per-page, or color fees? These are standard practice at many journals and can easily amount to more than the cost of publishing with PLoS ONE, and the article will still be paywalled. The color fees in particular are absolutely fucking insane in a world where most researchers never even see the print copy of any journal other than Science or Nature. (I don't even print out the PDFs any more - either I read the online version or I download the PDF to my iPad. The last time I saw one of my own articles in dead tree form was 2007.)
4. Dealing with commercial publishers often sucks for other reasons. All of that fabled private-sector efficiency is meaningless when you're dealing with an entity whose review process is dependent on workaholic volunteers. I have a rule of thumb when dealing with Elsevier journals: don't send anything there unless you're willing to wait three months for reviews. The professors (or their postdocs, or sometimes even their students) who receive your manuscript don't give a shit. Why should they? They're not getting a share of Elsevier's 30%-plus profit margin.
I'm not arguing that the open-access journals are the perfect alternative - they're still based on the same rules and regulations, minus the evil, and there is still too much bureaucracy and politicking involved. I don't think that preprint servers like arXiv are the solution either, for that matter, due to the lack of quality control and any form of peer review. These issues are largely a distraction anyway, however. We could certainly do a lot better than the current paradigm of scientific publishing, but even that wouldn't be so bad if not for the parasites which feed upon it. Fuck Elsevier.
Lots of interesting research happens on ISS. The problem is that it's all boring sciency stuff
Actually, I work in one of the fields that was studied on the ISS (protein crystallography), and being familiar with the results that came out of there, I can attest to the spectacular inefficiency of that endeavor too. I don't have the expertise to comment on any of the other experiments, but the fact that protein crystallization research was a major justification for building the ISS is a red flag. I love boring science-y stuff, but when playing with other people's money it behooves us to spend it as efficiently as possible, not just buy a lot of cool toys with it.
Only since Columbia, and only because we've grown so weak that we as a nation have become afraid of our own shadows that we only accept a 0% risk in any endeavor now. That's why China, Russia, and India will beat us back to the moon and beat us to Mars by decades.
The shuttle wasn't retired because the US is too risk-averse - there were plenty of other good reasons:
In the meantime, no other nation has come anywhere close to the US's success in planetary exploration, including some potentially risky missions (Mars rovers, for example) which so far have had a relatively good failure rate and zero deaths. If China beats us to Mars by decades it won't be because the US is too risk-averse, but because their government can get away with spending a large fraction of their GDP on a propaganda exercise, and we're currently crippled by a colossal national debt and a democratically accountable government. I would be utterly shocked if Russia or India were to make it there at all, certainly not before the US does.
All of the "next-generation" sequencing technology has a relatively high error rate compared to traditional Sanger sequencing (used on the original human genome sequences, and still the gold standard for truly novel genomes). The massive redundancy typically compensates for this, although some technology is clearly pretty marginal no matter how much data you have. If my memory is accurate, the Human Genome Project was collecting somewhere between 6x and 10x redundant data; projects using the newer tech shoot for more like 30x.
What I don't get is what this device is intended to be useful for if it's only able to sequence 150 million b.p. before wearing out. The article mentions that this is smaller than some human chromosomes, but unless they factored the necessary redundancy into that figure, it's not going to go very far. It'll be enough to sequence most bacterial genomes, and probably enough to sequence human cellular RNA transcripts, or something else targeted, but I just can't see it being useful for whole-genome analysis of the sort that tries to answer deep questions like "am I likely to get Alzheimers in twenty years?"
I feel bad for the poor deluded kids that are being suck(er)ed into the SpaceX vortex.
Actually, I have no problem with this. If Elon Musk wants to sink his own money into space flight and is willing to pay underlings a fair salary to help, good for him and good for them. Let NASA focus on pure R&D (especially propulsion research) and unmanned exploration, and let the idealistic billionaires bet on the long shots. If something useful comes out of the endeavor, terrific, we'll all benefit. If not, at least it wasn't the taxpayers' money being spent on a science-fiction fantasy.
No one wants to pay for anything. Especially things they can't see immediate benefit from.. such as R&D, exploration (space, maritime and other) and pure research.
Basic research has never been especially unpopular, because it usually doesn't cost a boatload of money compared to other federal programs, and the ROI is considered fairly good. You won't find many people complaining about unmanned space exploration, because it's still not insanely expensive has generally been very productive scientifically, as the Mars rovers or Hubble repeatedly remind us. The problem with the manned space program is that the return has never been very good, and the original motivation was at least as much military as scientific.
Here's an example I'm very familiar with: protein crystals in space. Protein crystallization is hard, more art and luck than science, but it's one of the best ways to dissect the mechanistic details of many systems, and very valuable for understanding how drugs work. Crystals appear to grow much better in microgravity, so the thought was that protein samples could be shipped into space, and larger, better ordered crystals grown up there. Then we'd be able to solve the structures of proteins that were intractable on Earth. This was cited as one of the justifications for the ISS.
The problem, of course, is that it's an extraordinarily inefficient way to solve protein structures. Main problem: once you grow the crystals, what can you do with them? You need a high-intensity X-ray source - none of those on the ISS. In fact, the type of X-ray sources we normally use for this job tend to require at least an acre and far more electricity than the ISS's solar panels will provide. So you have to land them first - but protein crystals don't like shock or vibration. Then you're faced with the problem that high-intensity X-rays tend to cause severe radiation damage, so we freeze the crystals in liquid nitrogen first to preserve them. This also reduces the quality, typically to the same extent that microgravity improves them. By this point you've also spent about as much money as it takes to build a modern high-intensity X-ray source, and more of those would be much more helpful than space crystals. (The ISS has already cost more money than every high-intensity X-ray source ever built put together, probably several times over.) More obviously, for the price of a single shuttle launch you could probably hire a dozen additional lab technicians, a roomful of liquid-handling robots, and synthetic DNA for as many modifications as you need to help crystallize the protein - and you'd still have at least 90% of the money left.
Are there other legitimate and economically practical benefits from the manned space program, aside from keeping the aerospace contractors in business? Possibly - I'm not an expert. But I do know that the cited justification that I'm professionally qualified to judge is complete horseshit, and it doesn't make me very favorably disposed towards the other arguments.
Got it, targeted ads you don't want are detestable, targeted ads you do are not. Great reasoning.
The American Express ads aren't targeted - they know absolutely nothing about me or my shopping habits from my credit rating, only that I have used a credit card in the past. What's offensive is that I have no pre-existing business relationship with them and have given them no indication that I want to start one. I consider this an invasion of my privacy. It's like if I suddenly start getting book offers from Barnes and Noble on the basis of my Amazon purchases - even if they're books I might buy, my response to B&N would be "fuck off". And yeah, I'm not happy that any company can look up my credit rating without my prior authorization either.
Absolutely detestable.
Why is this detestable? "Detestable" is Comcast sending me mail at least once a week for the last three years, despite the fact that I don't watch TV, have no use for their services, and have never responded to anything they sent. Or American Express checking my credit rating nearly ten times in the space of a few years, and bombarding me with credit card offers. I already have two cards, assholes, and that's at least one more than I need. If I call a girl twice and she doesn't call me back, I get the hint and move on, but you people just keep on trying.
I hate shopping, and untargeted advertising rarely appeals to me; I'd much rather have companies with whom I have an existing customer relationship tell me about deals that I can actually use. Safeway lets me know when they have sales on frozen chicken breasts or nonfat milk; Amazon suggests books on history and programming that I might enjoy. None of this bothers me, because I don't buy anything from these stores that I'd feel uncomfortable about. (That said, if I buy birth control I'll pay cash and not use any customer loyalty cards. Private is private.) I don't want them sharing my shopping history with anyone - and I fully support laws that limit their ability to do so - but why shouldn't they try to cater to my habits? The fact is, they'd be idiots not to, and I'd be doing exactly the same thing if I were in their position. This isn't creepy or weird, it's how to run a profitable business without exploiting your workers or screwing your competitors.
Really, the only thing that bothers me is how private this data stays. As long as it's strictly internal and automated, I have no problem with them mining it for every useful correlation. But there is incredible potential for abuse, and not just selling this data to other companies: what if state governments start suing Amazon demanding to know the shopping records of everyone in their state so they can charge use taxes? (I'm not making that up - it really has happened, only it was an online vendor of cigarettes.) The data need not necessarily leave the company; I could imagine unscrupulous employees looking into the data for their neighbors, and wondering why the married man down the street was suddenly spending a lot of money on condoms and flowers.
Feel free to go back and re-read what I wrote.
What, like the part where you said "NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals"?
Perhaps you have a bone to pick with the NIH?
No, they pay my salary.
The NIH provided tools for the publishers so they could easily comply. I have yet to find a publisher who outright declined, they realized quickly it was not in their own best interest to do so.
And they've been kicking and screaming ever since. Some journals (including most of the ones I publish in, fortunately) will take care of depositing the final paper in PMC, but in many cases the author has to take specific action. But it doesn't matter how easy the NIH makes it: the major publishers don't want to give up exclusivity, which is why Elsevier and friends bribed some Congressmen/women to reverse the NIH policy.
You aren't even reading your own link:
all investigators funded by the NIH submit or have submitted for them to the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed Central an electronic version of their final, peer-reviewed manuscripts upon acceptance for publication, to be made publicly available no later than 12 months after the official date of publication
It says nothing about the type of journal they can publish in, only that the manuscript has to be made publicly available within a year. The guidelines do include the rather vague stipulation that:
Institutions and investigators are responsible for ensuring that any publishing or copyright agreements concerning submitted articles fully comply with this Policy
But in practice, what really happened was that the NIH told the publishers, "fuck you, we're paying for these papers, so we're putting them online whether you like it or not." Basically the journals had to accept that they would lose exclusivity after a year, or lose all NIH-funded work (which is a huge fraction of their output). I think the 12-month delay was a compromise to avoid completely screwing the publishers.
NIH is the first funding agency to require publications coming from its work to be put in open-access or publicly-accessible journals.
I'm pretty sure this is not true - NIH-funded researches still publish in Nature or Elsevier journals all the time, without paying extra to make their work open-access. (I know this because I get c**kblocked by the paywall every time I'm browsing the literature on a weekend.) The requirement is actually that they deposit the manuscript in PubMed Central within either 6 months or a year (I forget which) after publication, regardless of what other arrangement may have been made with the journal. So everything funded by the NIH should, in theory, become open-access eventually, just not immediately. It's an imperfect solution, but still a huge improvement on what we had before.
It's not enough for progressives to call a smaller increase from year to year a "cut"
It's not just progressives who do this. When Obama proposed raising the defense budget by a smaller amount than previously proposed, he was immediately attacked for "cutting" defense spending.
Wow, someone's got an axe to grind...
a person who drooled while he watched these actors play super humans as part of a unique American culture (The rest of the world does not have super-hero style comics)
It may be unique American culture, but the rest of the world consumes it ferociously - Terminator 3 (the last movie starring Ahnuld, just before he became governor) made twice as much outside the US as domestically.
As far as indigenous culture goes, the Chinese have their share of cartoonish super-hero antics and over-the-top violence. Watch Jet Li's version of "Fist of Legend" (where the bad guys are Japanese, of course) and tell me he doesn't have super powers in that film. (It's actually a very enjoyable movie.) Or some of the old John Woo films: "Hard Boiled" makes the typical American badass cop movie look like "Terms of Endearment."
Just so no one gets confused, this molecule goes by 3 common names VX-770 and Ivacaftor and Kalydeco
I asked a scientist I know at a Big Pharma company why there are always multiple names. His response was (paraphrased): "There's an entire department at our company full of people who come up with names for drug candidates - one name that's recognizable and easily pronounced which becomes the trademarked brand name, and another that's hard to pronounce or remember that becomes the official compound name, which is what the generics will eventually use." (I think he was exaggerating about it being an entire department, but I could be wrong.)
If you pay any attention to biomedical literature, they always use the compound name - thus "Prozac" will always be referred to as "fluoxetine", "Gleevec" is "imatinib", and so on.
The anthropogenic global warming clique phrased their argument in such a way that it could only appeal to people who don't have any moral qualms against creating policies to modify the behavior of their fellow citizens.
You'll have a hard time finding anyone who genuinely does have moral qualms against creating policies to modify the behavior of their fellow citizens - aside from the furthest fringes of the Libertarian Party and the outright anarchists, just about every political group (and certainly every politician of note in the US, even Ron Paul) endorses some degree of coercion in the interests of the general welfare. Where they disagree is on the degree of coercion permissible, and what types of behavior are subject to this kind of small-scale social engineering - be it sexual activities, drug use, dumping used motor oil down storm drains, or running your AC in the parking lot. As a general rule, however, you will find that most people, regardless of where they fall on the political spectrum, agree that activities which have the potential to damage the lives or property of others should either be prohibited, or strongly discouraged through economic sanctions. Which is why laws regulating the disposal of toxic wastes (especially radioactive or carcinogenic) are not considered especially controversial.
So, from a libertarian or conservative perspective, there is nothing inherently "socialist" about penalizing CO2 emissions if they can be shown to negatively impact the rest of human civilization. In fact, their mantra of taking personal responsibility for the costs of one's behavior demands it. Which is largely why the backlash against global warming research tends to be framed in explicitly right-wing terms: if the entire thing is just some socialist plot to remake the global economy, then driving the Escalade to work doesn't conflict with their principles. No one wants to admit that their self-indulgent lifestyles might lead to someone's coastal home being flooded, let alone be held accountable for it.
The last and most subjective objection I have is that the people screaming loudest for decarbonization tend to do so in a way that makes it hard for me to distinguish what they are saying from "blah blah blah Socialism Is Great blah blah blah I get to ride in private jets but you have to ride a bike to work and turn down your thermostat in the winter blah blah blah"
Funny, I have the exact same subjective response to the "skeptics": it's hard to take their arguments seriously when they keep claiming that global warming research is actually a massive conspiracy of socialists bent on world domination, and suggest that a cap-and-trade regime to reduce CO2 emissions would effectively revert us to a pre-industrial economy. (I've even seen a few claim that we should be increasing CO2 emissions because it will improve agricultural productivity.) You do realize that most of the actual climatologists doing real research (as opposed to, say, Al Gore) don't own private jets, right?
The best sources I can come up with (things like this [wsj.com] and this [transworldnews.com]) suggest that hundreds of millions are spent on one side, and billions on the other.
The big difference here is that those billions are mostly spent on scientific research, while the oil company money is mostly being spent on PR and lobbying.
You live in Texas, don't you?
I live in California, asshole.
If we were the individualists you think we are, we would have died out as a species fifty thousand years ago.
We certainly are individualists compared to ants and bees, and you are confusing "social" with "collectivist". Although relatively few societies in human history have considered the rights of the individual to be paramount, even fewer were genuinely collectivist - European welfare states do not count.
The reason we find compulsory eithanasia abhorrent is because we ARE a social species. If we were individualist we wouldn't give a damn.
Um, no, because we as a society respect the rights of the individual, and will not put someone to death simply because the collective finds him or her a burden. (Ignoring the US's broken system of "health care" for the moment.) In a truly collectivist society, the rights and needs of the individual are completely dispensable, and forced labor, compulsory euthanasia, and thought control would be the natural order of things. To such a species, our willingness to subsidize the weak and elderly, and our ability to choose our own occupation/religion/spouse, would seem like suicidal weaknesses.
This is not a theme I'm pulling out of my ass - there are numerous works of science fiction which explore this concept. ("Ender's Game", "The Forever War", and "A Deepness In The Sky" are the books that immediately spring to mind.)
But you'd have to think that any species at that point where they have left their planet and are exploring space would have strict rules about interfering with species that aren't at their level yet
Sure, but those strict rules wouldn't necessarily be an enlightened policy of non-interference and remote observation - they could just as well be "Nuke them from orbit. It's the only way to be sure." I guess this is Stephen Hawking's scenario, and it seems at least as probable to me as the sanctimonious higher beings from Star Trek. Gene Roddenberry wasn't much of a realist.
(On that note, I'm eagerly waiting for someone to do the Battlestar Galactica treatment of Star Trek - throw out the absurd elements and technobabble, and make it much more morally ambiguous. The original series did occasionally hint at the darker side of interstellar empire, such as resource wars and frequent interference in planetary civilizations, but I'd like to see this played up, especially the Cold War metaphors.)
We aren't remotely advanced enough to know what ranges of values within what parameters would make for safe vs unsafe contact
I mostly agree - but as with any other discussion of extraterrestrial life, we can make informed guesses based on observation of life here on Earth. At any rate, my comment wasn't so much trying to posit "this is the way things must be" as it was a reaction to the common supposition that any life intelligent and sophisticated enough for interstellar travel would also be ethically more advanced, and would be repelled by our violence and pollution. The history of the 20th century shows that technological achievement and superior ethics, or environmental consciousness, do not necessarily go hand in hand where humans are concerned. Why assume otherwise for aliens?
If there IS intelligent life out there, I have serious doubts that they consider us being under the same umbrella as them
Actually, that's my least favorite Star Trek cliche - the benevolent, highly-evolved, omnipotent alien race that sees humans as mere children, either unworthy of their time, or in need of friendly guidance (and hectoring lectures about killing each other). I would say exactly the opposite is more likely to be true: any alien species aggressive and inventive enough to explore space is guaranteed to have endured warfare and ecological destruction in recent memory. Species that lose their aggression will stay at home smoking pot, eating takeout, and watching cartoons until they all die of boredom and/or congestive heart failure. That doesn't mean that they'll find our behavior at all intelligible; if a space-faring race was highly collectivist (either by evolution or by engineering), they might find our individuality and the violence that it often leads to incomprehensible. But I doubt they'll have managed to avoid strip mining, fossil fuels, or nuclear fission in the course of their technological development, and they'll probably engage in practices that we would find abhorrent, like compulsory euthanasia.
That doesn't necessarily mean that they'll advertise their presence to us - there are a number of good reasons to avoid doing so, which would apply even if we were a pacifistic agrarian species. But I absolutely think they would study us, because they won't even be exploring interstellar space unless they were either exceptionally curious, or exceptionally desperate. I personally find it more likely that intelligent life rarely makes it out of their home solar system in person - although I'd wager that there are a few scattered derelicts full of cryogenically frozen alien colonists drifting for centuries.