If a child can grow up and reproduce, its genetic material really is not flawed from an evolutionary standpoint.
Evolution is about which individuals, which traits and which genes live and reproduce. It is not about subjective impressions of fitness by human observers. What survives is fit; what does not was not. The arbiter consists of survival and reproduction.
How is our species weakened if more of us survive? Looking at the data, our species has become stronger.
I know one thing that does not happen to Darwin's theory. It does not get learned very well.
There is no all powerful nature to reverse. There is just what happens. Through evolution, some individuals have more offspring; others fewer. Some species grow; others diminish or disappear. Consequently, the characteristics of populations change through time.
Evolution is not a moral law; it is a fact of life. Best and worst are defined by what actually happens, not by ideas of diversity or quality. Fit is defined by living long and reproducing fruitfully. If intelligence allows someone to accomplish those two tasks, then fitness depends on intelligence. If people survive and reproduce without much regard to how intelligent they are, it does not matter. If less intelligent people have more offspring, which is a completely reasonble proposition based on empirical data instead of egocentrism, then intelligence is not a positive survival trait.
I have neglected social impacts of traits when I strictly should not have. Traits that do not allow someone to live long or reproduce themselves might somehow allow others around them to do so. If their genes get passed along through parallel lineages, those genes might be beneficial for survival.
I think there are some important exceptions to your ideas. There are cheetahs. All of them are nearly identical genetically, not that they are thriving tremendously. There are species that no longer have males. They have only females who produce only more females. That survival strategy is not conducive to diversity, but the species have made it this far.
The risk for death for each and every one of us is 100%.
I doubt that we can help or hurt evolution. Evolution is just what happens. It does not get better or worse. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.
In evolution, the rules are always changing. One man's deleterious trait is another man's survival trait. There is no higher arbitrator of evolution. It is a simple matter of who survives and reproduces. If humans create a world in which people who formerly would have died younger and reproduced less do not, we have not prevented evolution. We have created a different world in which the favorability of different traits has been altered. Will the world we create ultimately become unsustainable? I think so.
It is bad that evolution is so misunderstood, even by people who think they know it. Evolution is descriptive. It describes what happens. Evolution does not depend on our decisions about what the good genes are except in the ways that our decisions lead to outcomes in survival and reproduction.
Evolution is a descriptive science. Evolution is what happens. It is not some infallible dictum about what really happens. If we alter our genes, the alterations will influence our survival and reproduction, and evolution will continue.
Muons are created high above the earth when cosmic rays interact with matter up there. They shoot out from those reactions at velocities near light speed. Because they are traveling at such high velocities, their lifetimes are extended as predicted by special relativity. Instead of nearly all decaying within a tiny fraction of a second, many of the muons exist long enough to travel down and reach us. They are a few seconds old--I think it is a few seconds; it might be less--when they reach us. They pass through objects on the surface of the earth at about the rate 1 / second / cm^2.
Muons can react with matter, but such interaction is very unlikely. If the matter is denser, such as stone, they are more likely to interact. By placing detectors inside the pyramid and counting muons coming from overhead for a long time, the scientists can estimate how much matter. They have another estimate of the matter is there by comparing to the number they would expect if they had passed through air. If that experimental estimate of the matter present is somewhat less than the expected amount based on the thickness and density of the pyramid above the detector and the density of the stone, there much be less stone than expected, possibly due to a secret chamber.
Can you use the RAID controller? My motherboard has an ICH5-R. It implements a software RAID system. The system works fine with Linux when I set legacy mode in the BIOS. I would like to use its RAID functions.
I heard a psychiatrist give exactly the interaction problem that you mention. Someone in the audience asked whether they do well in their own worlds or in groups of one another. He said not. People with Asperger's have social deficits that make interpersonal exchange and relationships very difficult. Certainly, they would not have such a hard time when placed with others who are unlikely to notice their problems, but that situation is different from actually being able to interact well in the right group of peers. Their problems persist even in social groups of similar people, but Asperger's sufferers are unlikely to see their own problems exhibited by others. Not having their deficits pointed out to them because nobody else can notice them is not the same as not having them. Not being made fun of is different from being able to have good, satisfying relationships.
Your argument reminds me of a discussion about schizophrenia. You might think that you could put them in a group of other schizophrenics and then they would figure out that they cannot all be Jesus. It does not work that way.
He presented other data that help explain the rise in autism spectrum conditions. Autism spectrum disorders are like high blood pressure or high cholesterol in a way. Their definition rests on decisions about where along a spectrum merits diagnosis. Children with Asperger's or a similar disease tend to have parents who, while not having any diagnosable disorder, do have scores on some psychiatric assessments of interpersonal skills whose distribution is shifted toward people with the disorders when compared to the general population. Such people with small deficits that do not meet disease criteria seem to marry to one another, too. At least some of the rise in these diseases could result from an increase in people with minor deficits meeting and having children. It is easy to speculate that in the less mobile past, the conditions were rare enough that people could not self assort so easily.
It is not a matter of who fits into whose definition of anything. Why even mention it? Your second paragraph about social standards has little to do with Asperger's. Your strawmen are distractions from the real problem.
If you had seen a few people who suffer with Asperger's, you might understand that it is not just a matter of popularity and fitting in. It is can be a very extreme set of problems relating to others. Many people with Asperger's suffer mightily for the way they are, and it is not just a matter of not being cool according to the popular crowd. Maybe it is just my experience of hearing experts talk about the disease. It involves an unusual disconnect from the world that leads to suffering far beyond not getting invited to the cool social functions in high school.
If you really care, I urge you to learn something more than simple information. It is a fantasy to think that Asperger's is just a matter of being weird or that people with it are fine, but just different. Maybe a few fit that idea. Many of them, however, have real difficulties due to a real, diagnosable and clear disorder that should not be dismissed too readily.
Your hyperbole is unconvincing, and you are wrong. There most certainly are not effective techniques for transforming behavior. Talk to a few people who have taken medicine for mental illness. The drugs help. They are not cures or transformers of person by any stretch.
Asperger's does describe a problem. Many people suffer from the problem. It is awful for you to dismiss their condition so readily. You ought to meet some Asperger's children and their parents. The children can be wonderful, but it does not make their troubles any less real.
Nobody is arguing that the availability of pharmacotheraphy is justification for its use. You should not set up such a weak strawman. To deny people help for problems, as judged by them and the people around them, would be cruel and ignorant.
Do you really think it would be so bad? Unless it were targeted to an area of the brain involved in pain processing, it would not be painful. If we were able to isolate the roots of antisocial behavior precisely enough to know certain brain areas and pathways, it might be cruel not to treat. Autonomy is a central idea of modern medicine and modern governments, and I would not advocate performing such procedures on a competent person against her or his wishes. Such treatments for people who could benefit, however, should be a goal.
It certainly is a frightening proposition, but I want to counter some of the stupid/. jokes. You seem to understand the procedure well, almost certainly more than I do. I will add a little more, though.
Typically, a person has a few treatments within a few days. The mechanism of its action is mysterious. It works very well for some people, though. The most likely adverse effect is amnesia, especially for events surrounding the therapy. The recovery from depression can be very fast compared to medications. I have heard of people who preferred ECT to drugs upon having a recurrence of depression years later because it had worked very quickly for them the first time, and they did not want to wait so long to get better. People who receive therapy usually come out with much improved mood and seem perfectly normal.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an investigational tool that may replace ECT someday. The idea is the same, to cause a burst of activity within the brain. It might offer the advantage of better targeting. The magnetic pulses are focused somehow to affect structures such as the amygdala and cingulate gyrus more than the rest of the brain and the body. I have heard that early studies have shown promise, but I have not read about it first hand.
Whether or not you decide to pursue ECT, I wish you the best.
There is one was to evaluate the suitability of a product that exceeds all others in accuracy and satisfaction, using it and finding out. Specifications and recommendations are useful, but they are flawed. There is a terrible implicit assumption about the information available in your ideas. It is in a company's interest to inflate specifications and recommendations. Legal recourse in the event of insufficient performance provides some protection, true, but it is a poor substitute for direct evaluation.
One problem is that there is little way to judge exactly how suitable a computer will be for ones needs other than using it. A computer constitutes a major expenditure for many people. Apple is selling some people products that do not meet their needs and then forcing them to keep them. There is no good way to evaluate whether different configurations meet customer needs.
Temporal synchrony seems unlikely to explain (much of) the binding problem. The Singer results relied on neurons with overlapping receptive fields. They showed synchrony, but it is easy to argue that the neurons recorded simply had common neurons driving them. Also, his screening technique for finding neurons was biased toward selecting neurons with some synchrony. Newer experiments show very little evidence for synchrony when using neurons responding to well separated areas of the visual scene and not selecting pairs based on correlated firing.
It is not a static magnetic field. A 60 Hz magnetic field is also a 60 Hz electric field. The radiation field from a dipole drops of with the inverse of distance squared. The intensity drops off with the fourth power.
It has been a few years since I studied this material. Please let me know if I am in error.
There is a limit to pH, but it is not so hard and fast. Since pH refers to concentration in water, it is possible to displace more and more of the water with acid solute. There should be either a limit of solubility for the solute or a notion of all solute, no water that limits the extreme of pH for a given solute.
Your etymology is misleading. The word can refer to gnosticism, but it rarely does. Instead, the root is the Greek word for knowledge, "gnOsis." The prefix "a-" means without.
I can interpret the term several ways. An agnostic might claim not to know. He or she might claim that something is not able to be known. Neither goes against the components of the word. There are many paths that can lead someone not to have knowledge. Uncertainty is one, and a belief about whether one can be reasonably certain is another. Unknown and unknowable are hard to distinguish in the term "agnostic."
One confound is that newspaper writers are not in school. In the real world, nerds are much freer to pursue their own paths. A strong correlation between nerdiness and skill leads to many successful, influential nerds in the larger culture. A closed world of schools prizes other talents, and nerds are the ones who just do not measure up by popular standards that weight toughness and appearance.
Growing up nerdy with only a few people with similar interests and abilities around me was tough, but I always hoped it would not last. Many people manage to make a jump at high school, college or somewhere else into a social environment that allows them to express themselves and pursue their generally unpopular interests in a supportive subculture. They can blossom. They find friends. They find romance. I found that I was not uniformly socially inept in the least, nor were many of the other nerds I knew. They just needed more common ground.
Closed environments with forced mixing are different. Nerds can have difficulty relating to some people and some interests. People with less eccentric personalities and goals will dominate those situations. Sports are popular. Money is popular. Beauty is popular. Their appeal is wide and common. People whose gifts and talents lie too far outside these realms will end up at the bottom in a mixed society.
I wish we had better ways to reach the isolated people. The Internet helps. Nerds can google their favorite things and see how many people share them. They can find other people. Meeting in the flesh has been more fun, and I am sorry that so many people are forced to be so lonely for so long./. has many youngsters. I hope coming here helps them bear the roughness of childhood and adolescence. There are people out there with whom they could become great friends and have fun times. They are not simply defective. Just tell them to hang on long enough. Being a nerd is always great for the coolness of the literature, games, information and learning. For people who can find them, it is also great for the friendships and social times.
I used to believe as you do. The treatments you list are aimed at killing cancer cells. A big stick, however, does not discriminate well. Swing it, and it bops whatever is in its way. These treatments are more toxic to cancer cells than to normal cells. The damaged caused by radiation beams is more lethal to malignant cells than to normal cells. The same holds for chemotherapy drugs. In general, cancer cells divide faster than normal cells. Many cancer treatments target aspects of cell division. Your points about the need for better targeting and specificity is definitely true.
We know many reasons that cells turn cancerous. They accumulate genetic mutations that allow them to divide and spread without responding to normal signals that inhibit those processes. The genetics of particular tumors and even of particular tumor types remains an area of intense research.
The causes of mutations are many. One is the intrinsic randomness of enzymes within cells. They make mistakes. DNA enzymes can introduces mistakes, and they can fail to repair mistakes. Some chemicals and some forms of radiation can damage DNA. Certain people are more likely to incur such damage over a lifetime than others because their starting genetic makeup includes defects.
It would be wonderful to have therapies that reverse harmful mutations. No such therapies exist. I know of no research pursuing such therapies. Instead, the goal of all cancer therapies is to kill malignant cells.
Cocaine is a good local anesthetic. It used to be popular for ear procedures. Taken systemically, it acts on the dopaminergic system to get a person really, really high.
Tetrodotoxin is commonly used in biomedical research to silence neurons. It blocks sodium channels. I had wondered in the past why it did not exist as a drug for humans.
There are many sodium channel blocking anesthetics available now. The drugs that end in -caine are mostly sodium channel blockers. Benzocaine, novacaine and lidocaine are examples.
From the article, it seems that TTX is being investigated for general systemic use rather than as a local anesthetic. There are only vague mentions of injections. I would appreciate more information about the drug's indications and delivery.
Slashdot Mirror
If a child can grow up and reproduce, its genetic material really is not flawed from an evolutionary standpoint.
Evolution is about which individuals, which traits and which genes live and reproduce. It is not about subjective impressions of fitness by human observers. What survives is fit; what does not was not. The arbiter consists of survival and reproduction.
How is our species weakened if more of us survive? Looking at the data, our species has become stronger.
I know one thing that does not happen to Darwin's theory. It does not get learned very well.
There is no all powerful nature to reverse. There is just what happens. Through evolution, some individuals have more offspring; others fewer. Some species grow; others diminish or disappear. Consequently, the characteristics of populations change through time.
Evolution is not a moral law; it is a fact of life. Best and worst are defined by what actually happens, not by ideas of diversity or quality. Fit is defined by living long and reproducing fruitfully. If intelligence allows someone to accomplish those two tasks, then fitness depends on intelligence. If people survive and reproduce without much regard to how intelligent they are, it does not matter. If less intelligent people have more offspring, which is a completely reasonble proposition based on empirical data instead of egocentrism, then intelligence is not a positive survival trait.
I have neglected social impacts of traits when I strictly should not have. Traits that do not allow someone to live long or reproduce themselves might somehow allow others around them to do so. If their genes get passed along through parallel lineages, those genes might be beneficial for survival.
I think there are some important exceptions to your ideas. There are cheetahs. All of them are nearly identical genetically, not that they are thriving tremendously. There are species that no longer have males. They have only females who produce only more females. That survival strategy is not conducive to diversity, but the species have made it this far.
The risk for death for each and every one of us is 100%.
I doubt that we can help or hurt evolution. Evolution is just what happens. It does not get better or worse. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens.
In evolution, the rules are always changing. One man's deleterious trait is another man's survival trait. There is no higher arbitrator of evolution. It is a simple matter of who survives and reproduces. If humans create a world in which people who formerly would have died younger and reproduced less do not, we have not prevented evolution. We have created a different world in which the favorability of different traits has been altered. Will the world we create ultimately become unsustainable? I think so.
It is bad that evolution is so misunderstood, even by people who think they know it. Evolution is descriptive. It describes what happens. Evolution does not depend on our decisions about what the good genes are except in the ways that our decisions lead to outcomes in survival and reproduction.
Evolution is a descriptive science. Evolution is what happens. It is not some infallible dictum about what really happens. If we alter our genes, the alterations will influence our survival and reproduction, and evolution will continue.
I am ready for support, too. My Asus motherboard has Intel RAID. Right now, I run in legacy mode without RAID.
For what it is worth, the RAID is not pure hardware RAID.
Muons are created high above the earth when cosmic rays interact with matter up there. They shoot out from those reactions at velocities near light speed. Because they are traveling at such high velocities, their lifetimes are extended as predicted by special relativity. Instead of nearly all decaying within a tiny fraction of a second, many of the muons exist long enough to travel down and reach us. They are a few seconds old--I think it is a few seconds; it might be less--when they reach us. They pass through objects on the surface of the earth at about the rate 1 / second / cm^2.
Muons can react with matter, but such interaction is very unlikely. If the matter is denser, such as stone, they are more likely to interact. By placing detectors inside the pyramid and counting muons coming from overhead for a long time, the scientists can estimate how much matter. They have another estimate of the matter is there by comparing to the number they would expect if they had passed through air. If that experimental estimate of the matter present is somewhat less than the expected amount based on the thickness and density of the pyramid above the detector and the density of the stone, there much be less stone than expected, possibly due to a secret chamber.
Can you use the RAID controller? My motherboard has an ICH5-R. It implements a software RAID system. The system works fine with Linux when I set legacy mode in the BIOS. I would like to use its RAID functions.
"It ain't bragging if you can do it."
I heard a psychiatrist give exactly the interaction problem that you mention. Someone in the audience asked whether they do well in their own worlds or in groups of one another. He said not. People with Asperger's have social deficits that make interpersonal exchange and relationships very difficult. Certainly, they would not have such a hard time when placed with others who are unlikely to notice their problems, but that situation is different from actually being able to interact well in the right group of peers. Their problems persist even in social groups of similar people, but Asperger's sufferers are unlikely to see their own problems exhibited by others. Not having their deficits pointed out to them because nobody else can notice them is not the same as not having them. Not being made fun of is different from being able to have good, satisfying relationships.
Your argument reminds me of a discussion about schizophrenia. You might think that you could put them in a group of other schizophrenics and then they would figure out that they cannot all be Jesus. It does not work that way.
He presented other data that help explain the rise in autism spectrum conditions. Autism spectrum disorders are like high blood pressure or high cholesterol in a way. Their definition rests on decisions about where along a spectrum merits diagnosis. Children with Asperger's or a similar disease tend to have parents who, while not having any diagnosable disorder, do have scores on some psychiatric assessments of interpersonal skills whose distribution is shifted toward people with the disorders when compared to the general population. Such people with small deficits that do not meet disease criteria seem to marry to one another, too. At least some of the rise in these diseases could result from an increase in people with minor deficits meeting and having children. It is easy to speculate that in the less mobile past, the conditions were rare enough that people could not self assort so easily.
It is not a matter of who fits into whose definition of anything. Why even mention it? Your second paragraph about social standards has little to do with Asperger's. Your strawmen are distractions from the real problem.
If you had seen a few people who suffer with Asperger's, you might understand that it is not just a matter of popularity and fitting in. It is can be a very extreme set of problems relating to others. Many people with Asperger's suffer mightily for the way they are, and it is not just a matter of not being cool according to the popular crowd. Maybe it is just my experience of hearing experts talk about the disease. It involves an unusual disconnect from the world that leads to suffering far beyond not getting invited to the cool social functions in high school.
If you really care, I urge you to learn something more than simple information. It is a fantasy to think that Asperger's is just a matter of being weird or that people with it are fine, but just different. Maybe a few fit that idea. Many of them, however, have real difficulties due to a real, diagnosable and clear disorder that should not be dismissed too readily.
Your hyperbole is unconvincing, and you are wrong. There most certainly are not effective techniques for transforming behavior. Talk to a few people who have taken medicine for mental illness. The drugs help. They are not cures or transformers of person by any stretch.
Asperger's does describe a problem. Many people suffer from the problem. It is awful for you to dismiss their condition so readily. You ought to meet some Asperger's children and their parents. The children can be wonderful, but it does not make their troubles any less real.
Nobody is arguing that the availability of pharmacotheraphy is justification for its use. You should not set up such a weak strawman. To deny people help for problems, as judged by them and the people around them, would be cruel and ignorant.
Do you really think it would be so bad? Unless it were targeted to an area of the brain involved in pain processing, it would not be painful. If we were able to isolate the roots of antisocial behavior precisely enough to know certain brain areas and pathways, it might be cruel not to treat. Autonomy is a central idea of modern medicine and modern governments, and I would not advocate performing such procedures on a competent person against her or his wishes. Such treatments for people who could benefit, however, should be a goal.
It certainly is a frightening proposition, but I want to counter some of the stupid /. jokes. You seem to understand the procedure well, almost certainly more than I do. I will add a little more, though.
Typically, a person has a few treatments within a few days. The mechanism of its action is mysterious. It works very well for some people, though. The most likely adverse effect is amnesia, especially for events surrounding the therapy. The recovery from depression can be very fast compared to medications. I have heard of people who preferred ECT to drugs upon having a recurrence of depression years later because it had worked very quickly for them the first time, and they did not want to wait so long to get better. People who receive therapy usually come out with much improved mood and seem perfectly normal.
Transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) is an investigational tool that may replace ECT someday. The idea is the same, to cause a burst of activity within the brain. It might offer the advantage of better targeting. The magnetic pulses are focused somehow to affect structures such as the amygdala and cingulate gyrus more than the rest of the brain and the body. I have heard that early studies have shown promise, but I have not read about it first hand.
Whether or not you decide to pursue ECT, I wish you the best.
The so-called open source representative wrote what? Let's take them one at a time. Jesa Christ!
There is one was to evaluate the suitability of a product that exceeds all others in accuracy and satisfaction, using it and finding out. Specifications and recommendations are useful, but they are flawed. There is a terrible implicit assumption about the information available in your ideas. It is in a company's interest to inflate specifications and recommendations. Legal recourse in the event of insufficient performance provides some protection, true, but it is a poor substitute for direct evaluation.
One problem is that there is little way to judge exactly how suitable a computer will be for ones needs other than using it. A computer constitutes a major expenditure for many people. Apple is selling some people products that do not meet their needs and then forcing them to keep them. There is no good way to evaluate whether different configurations meet customer needs.
Temporal synchrony seems unlikely to explain (much of) the binding problem. The Singer results relied on neurons with overlapping receptive fields. They showed synchrony, but it is easy to argue that the neurons recorded simply had common neurons driving them. Also, his screening technique for finding neurons was biased toward selecting neurons with some synchrony. Newer experiments show very little evidence for synchrony when using neurons responding to well separated areas of the visual scene and not selecting pairs based on correlated firing.
It is not a static magnetic field. A 60 Hz magnetic field is also a 60 Hz electric field. The radiation field from a dipole drops of with the inverse of distance squared. The intensity drops off with the fourth power.
It has been a few years since I studied this material. Please let me know if I am in error.
There is a limit to pH, but it is not so hard and fast. Since pH refers to concentration in water, it is possible to displace more and more of the water with acid solute. There should be either a limit of solubility for the solute or a notion of all solute, no water that limits the extreme of pH for a given solute.
Your etymology is misleading. The word can refer to gnosticism, but it rarely does. Instead, the root is the Greek word for knowledge, "gnOsis." The prefix "a-" means without.
I can interpret the term several ways. An agnostic might claim not to know. He or she might claim that something is not able to be known. Neither goes against the components of the word. There are many paths that can lead someone not to have knowledge. Uncertainty is one, and a belief about whether one can be reasonably certain is another. Unknown and unknowable are hard to distinguish in the term "agnostic."
One confound is that newspaper writers are not in school. In the real world, nerds are much freer to pursue their own paths. A strong correlation between nerdiness and skill leads to many successful, influential nerds in the larger culture. A closed world of schools prizes other talents, and nerds are the ones who just do not measure up by popular standards that weight toughness and appearance.
/. has many youngsters. I hope coming here helps them bear the roughness of childhood and adolescence. There are people out there with whom they could become great friends and have fun times. They are not simply defective. Just tell them to hang on long enough. Being a nerd is always great for the coolness of the literature, games, information and learning. For people who can find them, it is also great for the friendships and social times.
Growing up nerdy with only a few people with similar interests and abilities around me was tough, but I always hoped it would not last. Many people manage to make a jump at high school, college or somewhere else into a social environment that allows them to express themselves and pursue their generally unpopular interests in a supportive subculture. They can blossom. They find friends. They find romance. I found that I was not uniformly socially inept in the least, nor were many of the other nerds I knew. They just needed more common ground.
Closed environments with forced mixing are different. Nerds can have difficulty relating to some people and some interests. People with less eccentric personalities and goals will dominate those situations. Sports are popular. Money is popular. Beauty is popular. Their appeal is wide and common. People whose gifts and talents lie too far outside these realms will end up at the bottom in a mixed society.
I wish we had better ways to reach the isolated people. The Internet helps. Nerds can google their favorite things and see how many people share them. They can find other people. Meeting in the flesh has been more fun, and I am sorry that so many people are forced to be so lonely for so long.
Buck up, young nerds. A great future awaits.
I used to believe as you do. The treatments you list are aimed at killing cancer cells. A big stick, however, does not discriminate well. Swing it, and it bops whatever is in its way. These treatments are more toxic to cancer cells than to normal cells. The damaged caused by radiation beams is more lethal to malignant cells than to normal cells. The same holds for chemotherapy drugs. In general, cancer cells divide faster than normal cells. Many cancer treatments target aspects of cell division. Your points about the need for better targeting and specificity is definitely true.
We know many reasons that cells turn cancerous. They accumulate genetic mutations that allow them to divide and spread without responding to normal signals that inhibit those processes. The genetics of particular tumors and even of particular tumor types remains an area of intense research.
The causes of mutations are many. One is the intrinsic randomness of enzymes within cells. They make mistakes. DNA enzymes can introduces mistakes, and they can fail to repair mistakes. Some chemicals and some forms of radiation can damage DNA. Certain people are more likely to incur such damage over a lifetime than others because their starting genetic makeup includes defects.
It would be wonderful to have therapies that reverse harmful mutations. No such therapies exist. I know of no research pursuing such therapies. Instead, the goal of all cancer therapies is to kill malignant cells.
Cocaine is a good local anesthetic. It used to be popular for ear procedures. Taken systemically, it acts on the dopaminergic system to get a person really, really high.
Tetrodotoxin is commonly used in biomedical research to silence neurons. It blocks sodium channels. I had wondered in the past why it did not exist as a drug for humans.
There are many sodium channel blocking anesthetics available now. The drugs that end in -caine are mostly sodium channel blockers. Benzocaine, novacaine and lidocaine are examples.
From the article, it seems that TTX is being investigated for general systemic use rather than as a local anesthetic. There are only vague mentions of injections. I would appreciate more information about the drug's indications and delivery.