The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine nearly killed me when I was a child.
Take a look at vaccine adjuvants. Doctors are not scientists, they are business people, and use a lot of hocus-pocus for financial and other reasons. For a large part doctors and biologists have no clue what they are really doing.
No holistic/philosopical objections here, just pure science.
Likely you got the whole-cell pertussis vaccine which had about 10x higher rates of reactogenicity than the newer generation of acellular pertussis vaccines. The vast majority of reactions are redness, swelling, pain and not life-threatening.
The newer, "cleaner" acellular pertussis vaccine seems to be less immunogenic than the older "dirtier" vaccine. That may be contributing to the whooping cough outbreaks because it needs to be boosted more frequently than the current schedule.
Aluminum hydroxide ("Alum"), or aluminum hydroxy phosphate, work very well as adjuvants for many vaccines. They also adsorb the protein components of the vaccine and help stabilize them for a longer refrigerated shelf life.
Thimerosol ("mercury") hasn't been used in single dose vaccines since 2001. It was used as a bactericidal agent in multi-use vials to suppress the growth of bacteria if there was inadvertent contamination.
To say that vaccine developers "have no clue what they are doing" is pretty harsh. It now takes $300 million or more to develop a licensed vaccine today and the pre-clinical and clinical hurdles are steep.
I vividly recall a physics professor of mine, about 25 years ago, who worked on fusion, saying: "It will be almost impossible. The neutron flux for efficient, continous power generation is so intense that no known materials could sustain the exposure". He talked about materials getting brittle- the materials in closest contact with the fusion core would fail (in weeks, months) and there was no cost effective way to deal with that for long term, stable, low-cost power generation.
>Shadow's (Craig Venter's dog) sequence being released >and freely available to the public (a rare trend in biotech).
"Rare trend", please, you don't know what you're saying. If you want genomes, good genomes, many genomes, and public too, just go to TIGR, courtesy of C. Venter:
http://www.tigr.org/
Better than the dog genome for the sake of our future struggle with microbes is the the "Comprehensive Microbial Resource (CMR) at TIGR:
http://www.tigr.org/tigr-scripts/CMR2/CMRHomePag e. spl
122 completed genomes to date.
Be thankful when your wrinkly old immune compromised butt needs some help in the hospital in a few years.
I'm sorry, but if you look at the numbers here
you'll see that past perihelic oppositions of Mars to earth are just about as close as this one. Year 2003= 34.6 million miles. Year 1956 = 35.1 mill. = difference of 1.4%. Year 1971 = 34.9 mill. = diff. 0.9%. Year 1988= 36.5 mill = diff. 5.5%
I doubt that such a marginally closer opposition distance significantly improves observations of anything.
Actually, as the chimeric embryo develops, the immune system would become tolerized to ALL self-antigens present. This is part of the normal development of a young immune system. The process is called "anergy", which makes immune cells unresponsive to self antigens. Since the two selfs are merged earlier than when the immune system develops, I doubt that autoimmunity is a problem.
Same thing with the Who's "Quadrophenia"- you can only get the track "Doctor Jimmy" when you buy the whole album. It is the longest song on the album, but what's up with these exclusions?
Even if you can get your own stem cells to differentiate into new islets, the immune system defect that led to their destruction in the first place still exists, so it is likely they will be destroyed again. The solution would be to knock out the self-antigen responsible (assuming it's not essential for islet function) or to fix the immune system and trick it into being tolerant of the problem antigen(s) (we are not there yet). Or take immunosuppressant drugs, which is not worth the cure in my opinion.
I just read the Nature Medicine article
and the authors speculate that they were able to induce differentiation
of hepatic stem cells or hepatocytes into islet-like cells, and it
looks very convincing. A potential major shortcoming of this approach
is not addressed, which is that in type I ("juvenile") diabetes, the
islet cells are destroyed by an autoimmune response. Thus if you
generate new self "pseudo islets", you may have present the very
antigens that led to their destruction in the first place. The reason
that is not a problem in this experiment is that the authors
artificially destroy the islets with the toxin streptozotocin. The real test would
be in an animal model that mimics type I diabetes, like the non-obese
diabetic (NOD) mouse. I hope and assume that is the next critical
experiment.
Try MP3 Sushi for
Mac OS X. My only complaint is that it does shut itself off (not crash) from time to time, once or twice a week, but easy to correct. From the docs:
"What is MP3 Sushi?
With only a few clicks, MP3 Sushi allows any Mac to be turned into a
network Jukebox or Radio broadcast station. It's a cool way to share
and stream music amongst a local network or the Internet.
MP3 Sushi is a port of Open Source software - gnump3d, Lame,
libmp3lame, iceS and icecast - wrapped with a beautiful user interface.
Although MP3 Sushi was designed to be used by everyone, it still
provides advanced features such as live downsampling, access protection
and network configuration.
Thanks to the Rendezvous technology (aka ZeroConf), an extra
application called MP3 Buddies makes it easy to find every Jukebox and
Radio servers on your local network. Once MP3 Buddies is launched
on a user computer, a list of servers is displayed and in just one
click the user can browse the Jukebox songs in his or her favorite
browser or listen to the Radio in iTunes.
Features and requirements
Mac OS X only - MP3 Sushi makes great use of Mac OS X Unix
foundations and cool new features such as: Rendezvous, Toolbars,
Sheets, Extra Menu, Dock Menu, User Defaults... It's written entirely
in Cocoa using Objective-C."
The transmittable nature of SARS, the lack of epidemological information and its severe resistance to antibiotics seems tailor made to fit the scenario outlined in the second article ( it even originated in the far east and is a strain of avian flu ).
Influenza is a virus. Repeat: antibiotics are NOT for viral infections. Someone needs to get on the ball and crank out a vaccine.
> Skeptical Inquirer and Skeptic Magazine do a good job.
These publications are great, but they're preaching to the converted.
I agree- I used to devour Skeptical Inquirer for years. But I slowly burned
out on it, the cyclical Sisyphusian effort to quash pseudoscience left me
depressed. The way I look at it now is something like a vaccine strategy:
we will never overcome magical thinking, but we must be vigilant and relentless
with our debunking.
I think the biggest problem is that education tends to emphasize rote
memorization, which stunts students' critical thinking skills.
In a review of Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Marianne Flashfrozen
writes:
On the academic side, Feynman was dismayed at the way his
Brazilian university students memorized things like mad, but didn't understand
any of it. "When they heard 'light that is reflected from a medium with an
index,' they didn't know that it meant a material such as water . They didn't
know that the 'direction of the light' is the direction in which you see
something when you're looking at it, and so on. Everything was entirely memorized,
yet nothing had been translated into meaningful words...I couldn't see how
anyone could be educated by this self-propagating system in which people
pass exams, and teach others to pass exams, but nobody knows anything." This
directly conflicted with Feynman's teaching philosophy- for him, physics
was about discovery and experiment, not rote memorization.
Another problem is that science educators don't always know as much about
this kind of stuff as they should.
I think there should be some kind of "boot camp/ retreat" for interested
educators, liberally subsidized with money from Skeptic organiziations, to
provide teaching tools for debunking urban legends, popular pseudoscience,
creationism, etc. Imagine how different things might be if everyone could
have a Carl Sagan as a high school science teacher.
There was a fascinating article in the Jan 20? New Yorker magazine about the ongoing attempts to establish communication with patients who have diseases that render them ultimately "locked in"- they have little or no discernable responses to outside stimuli, but are most likely completely aware. There's a German guy who was featured in the article who has some of the most advanced non-invasive brain monitoring equipment for patient use. He tries to train the patients to modulate frequencies and amplitudes using biofeedback. Amazing what you can accomplish with just binary "Yes, No" responses. Even at about 0.1 Hz...
The journalist relates the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby who was magazine editor and suffered a stroke in his forties. He was completely paralyzed except for a blinking eyelid, yet he was able to write a book
"The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death"
Yes, but we are talking accuracy here, not absolute values, so using a more accurate timebase to measure a femtosecond process still begs the question of why you would need that extreme "1 part in 10^16 of a femtosecond" accuracy. Measuring a nominally 1 fs reaction to 1 part in 100 (1% accuracy) is no doubt good enough.
Protein folding is on the order of millseconds, but "something" is always occuring at all time scales. The Music of the Universe covers all frequencies.
I am a biochemist/molecular biologist and I can't imagine what the author has in mind. I'm sure it was just a giddy deadline thing. He probably wrote something earlier on gene transcription timing or chronobiology and made an goofy link to this new "cutting edge research pushing back the foreskin of science..."
Accuracy on the order of 1 second in 1 billion years is about 1 part in 3x10^16. I see no way that is important to have for measurements of any observable biological process.
I agree, the disease angle is purely gratuitous and silly. The journalist (and/or the editor) are probably trying to fulfill a stupid editorial edict to punch up "science" articles with 'human interest" elements. CNN is notoriously bad and sloppy in this regard. Perhaps BBC is getting that way too. And Slashdot.
Occam's Razor is applied given the state of knowledge at the time. If you ignore evidence that contradicts a hypothesis or makes it more complex, then you are not applying Occam's razor correctly. Occam's Razor is used to select the simplest hypothesis among competing hypotheses that can explain the same set of evidence. It does not even make sense to apply it here: Newton's hypotheses would not be in competition given what we know today. He did not have the subtle evidence that the fringes of his Laws were a little frayed. Relativity and QM don't "debunk" Newtonian Physics, they supersede it.
To put a finer point on it: one can never prove a hypothesis ("belief, "truth"), one can only reject (disprove) it. An accepted belief (the "null hypothesis", the most "reasonable explanation", the assertion with the most "confidence", etc.- whatever you wish to call it) is rejected when data arising from the hypothesis contradicts the hypothesis itself.
For example, the Theory (hypothesis) of Evolution is the most reasonable hypothesis to account for all the data we have concerning biology and the supporting data from geology and chemistry. It is now the "null hypothesis". It is not "truth" and no hypothesis ever will be. But it is a damn compelling hypothesis ("belief") and it will take alot of clever experiments and observations BASED ON EVOLUTIONARY THEORY to show compelling contradictions to topple it from its present perch. Someone waving his hands and saying "Something must have created complex organisms fully formed" doesn't cut it. Creationism is just a very shallow competing "hypothesis" that some less rational ("ignorant"?) people find more compelling.
You might want to take a look at the excellent bibliography management software
EndNote. It has a lot of functionality that might serve as a foundation for what you want to accomplish.
Slashdot Mirror
The pertussis (whooping cough) vaccine nearly killed me when I was a child.
Take a look at vaccine adjuvants. Doctors are not scientists, they are business people, and use a lot of hocus-pocus for financial and other reasons. For a large part doctors and biologists have no clue what they are really doing.
No holistic/philosopical objections here, just pure science.
Likely you got the whole-cell pertussis vaccine which had about 10x higher rates of reactogenicity than the newer generation of acellular pertussis vaccines. The vast majority of reactions are redness, swelling, pain and not life-threatening.
The newer, "cleaner" acellular pertussis vaccine seems to be less immunogenic than the older "dirtier" vaccine. That may be contributing to the whooping cough outbreaks because it needs to be boosted more frequently than the current schedule.
Aluminum hydroxide ("Alum"), or aluminum hydroxy phosphate, work very well as adjuvants for many vaccines. They also adsorb the protein components of the vaccine and help stabilize them for a longer refrigerated shelf life.
Thimerosol ("mercury") hasn't been used in single dose vaccines since 2001. It was used as a bactericidal agent in multi-use vials to suppress the growth of bacteria if there was inadvertent contamination.
To say that vaccine developers "have no clue what they are doing" is pretty harsh. It now takes $300 million or more to develop a licensed vaccine today and the pre-clinical and clinical hurdles are steep.
Ja, aber gewiss.
I vividly recall a physics professor of mine, about 25 years ago, who worked on fusion, saying: "It will be almost impossible. The neutron flux for efficient, continous power generation is so intense that no known materials could sustain the exposure". He talked about materials getting brittle- the materials in closest contact with the fusion core would fail (in weeks, months) and there was no cost effective way to deal with that for long term, stable, low-cost power generation.
Well, if you look at the topics of a conference (11th International Conference on Fusion Reactor Materials) in Japan just a few weeks ago, that problem has not gone away yet.
>Shadow's (Craig Venter's dog) sequence being released
g e. spl
>and freely available to the public (a rare trend in biotech).
"Rare trend", please, you don't know what you're saying. If you want genomes, good genomes, many genomes, and public too, just go to TIGR, courtesy of C. Venter:
http://www.tigr.org/
Better than the dog genome for the sake of our future struggle with microbes is the the "Comprehensive Microbial Resource (CMR) at TIGR:
http://www.tigr.org/tigr-scripts/CMR2/CMRHomePa
122 completed genomes to date.
Be thankful when your wrinkly old immune compromised butt needs some help in the hospital in a few years.
You are saying that you can resolve a significant difference between a golf ball at 101 yards and 100 yards?
0.5 million miles is a large absolute distance, but a small relative distance in this situation- don't confuse the two...
And last year's (2002) nonperihelic approach was 41 mill. miles, 18.5% further than this year's.
I'm sorry, but if you look at the numbers here you'll see that past perihelic oppositions of Mars to earth are just about as close as this one. Year 2003= 34.6 million miles. Year 1956 = 35.1 mill. = difference of 1.4%. Year 1971 = 34.9 mill. = diff. 0.9%. Year 1988= 36.5 mill = diff. 5.5%
I doubt that such a marginally closer opposition distance significantly improves observations of anything.
Actually, as the chimeric embryo develops, the immune system would become tolerized to ALL self-antigens present. This is part of the normal development of a young immune system. The process is called "anergy", which makes immune cells unresponsive to self antigens. Since the two selfs are merged earlier than when the immune system develops, I doubt that autoimmunity is a problem.
Same thing with the Who's "Quadrophenia"- you can only get the track "Doctor Jimmy" when you buy the whole album. It is the longest song on the album, but what's up with these exclusions?
Even if you can get your own stem cells to differentiate into new islets, the immune system defect that led to their destruction in the first place still exists, so it is likely they will be destroyed again. The solution would be to knock out the self-antigen responsible (assuming it's not essential for islet function) or to fix the immune system and trick it into being tolerant of the problem antigen(s) (we are not there yet). Or take immunosuppressant drugs, which is not worth the cure in my opinion.
I just read the Nature Medicine article and the authors speculate that they were able to induce differentiation of hepatic stem cells or hepatocytes into islet-like cells, and it looks very convincing. A potential major shortcoming of this approach is not addressed, which is that in type I ("juvenile") diabetes, the islet cells are destroyed by an autoimmune response. Thus if you generate new self "pseudo islets", you may have present the very antigens that led to their destruction in the first place. The reason that is not a problem in this experiment is that the authors artificially destroy the islets with the toxin streptozotocin. The real test would be in an animal model that mimics type I diabetes, like the non-obese diabetic (NOD) mouse. I hope and assume that is the next critical experiment.
Try MP3 Sushi for Mac OS X. My only complaint is that it does shut itself off (not crash) from time to time, once or twice a week, but easy to correct. From the docs:
"What is MP3 Sushi?
With only a few clicks, MP3 Sushi allows any Mac to be turned into a network Jukebox or Radio broadcast station. It's a cool way to share and stream music amongst a local network or the Internet.
MP3 Sushi is a port of Open Source software - gnump3d, Lame, libmp3lame, iceS and icecast - wrapped with a beautiful user interface.
Although MP3 Sushi was designed to be used by everyone, it still provides advanced features such as live downsampling, access protection and network configuration.
Thanks to the Rendezvous technology (aka ZeroConf), an extra application called MP3 Buddies makes it easy to find every Jukebox and Radio servers on your local network. Once MP3 Buddies is launched on a user computer, a list of servers is displayed and in just one click the user can browse the Jukebox songs in his or her favorite browser or listen to the Radio in iTunes.
Features and requirements
Mac OS X only - MP3 Sushi makes great use of Mac OS X Unix foundations and cool new features such as: Rendezvous, Toolbars, Sheets, Extra Menu, Dock Menu, User Defaults... It's written entirely in Cocoa using Objective-C."
The transmittable nature of SARS, the lack of epidemological information and its severe resistance to antibiotics seems tailor made to fit the scenario outlined in the second article ( it even originated in the far east and is a strain of avian flu ).
Influenza is a virus. Repeat: antibiotics are NOT for viral infections. Someone needs to get on the ball and crank out a vaccine.
I agree- I used to devour Skeptical Inquirer for years. But I slowly burned out on it, the cyclical Sisyphusian effort to quash pseudoscience left me depressed. The way I look at it now is something like a vaccine strategy: we will never overcome magical thinking, but we must be vigilant and relentless with our debunking.
I think the biggest problem is that education tends to emphasize rote memorization, which stunts students' critical thinking skills.
In a review of Feynman's "Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman", Marianne Flashfrozen writes:
Another problem is that science educators don't always know as much about this kind of stuff as they should.
I think there should be some kind of "boot camp/ retreat" for interested educators, liberally subsidized with money from Skeptic organiziations, to provide teaching tools for debunking urban legends, popular pseudoscience, creationism, etc. Imagine how different things might be if everyone could have a Carl Sagan as a high school science teacher.
Based on what he said:
"Crashes and screen seizures were regular occurrences. And the iBook doesn't play well with a lot of things that are part of the Microsoft world."
It sounds like he might be booting up in OS 9 instead of OS X, and he probably didn't fork out any money to upgrade his MS Office suite.
The journalist relates the story of Jean-Dominique Bauby who was magazine editor and suffered a stroke in his forties. He was completely paralyzed except for a blinking eyelid, yet he was able to write a book "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly: A Memoir of Life in Death"
Yes, but we are talking accuracy here, not absolute values, so using a more accurate timebase to measure a femtosecond process still begs the question of why you would need that extreme "1 part in 10^16 of a femtosecond" accuracy. Measuring a nominally 1 fs reaction to 1 part in 100 (1% accuracy) is no doubt good enough.
Protein folding is on the order of millseconds, but "something" is always occuring at all time scales. The Music of the Universe covers all frequencies.
I am a biochemist/molecular biologist and I can't imagine what the author has in mind. I'm sure it was just a giddy deadline thing. He probably wrote something earlier on gene transcription timing or chronobiology and made an goofy link to this new "cutting edge research pushing back the foreskin of science..."
Accuracy on the order of 1 second in 1 billion years is about 1 part in 3x10^16. I see no way that is important to have for measurements of any observable biological process.
> Does anyone know any other good uses for such and
> exact timing system?
GPS
I agree, the disease angle is purely gratuitous and silly. The journalist (and/or the editor) are probably trying to fulfill a stupid editorial edict to punch up "science" articles with 'human interest" elements. CNN is notoriously bad and sloppy in this regard. Perhaps BBC is getting that way too. And Slashdot.
Nope. like this
Occam's Razor is applied given the state of knowledge at the time. If you ignore evidence that contradicts a hypothesis or makes it more complex, then you are not applying Occam's razor correctly. Occam's Razor is used to select the simplest hypothesis among competing hypotheses that can explain the same set of evidence. It does not even make sense to apply it here: Newton's hypotheses would not be in competition given what we know today. He did not have the subtle evidence that the fringes of his Laws were a little frayed. Relativity and QM don't "debunk" Newtonian Physics, they supersede it.
Yes, that's a brilliant site. One favorite response was:
" Dr. Pickover, regarding the ESP test, in one case you guessed correctly and once you were wrong..."
I would love to use this as an employment test to weed out the liars and boneheads.
To put a finer point on it: one can never prove a hypothesis ("belief, "truth"), one can only reject (disprove) it. An accepted belief (the "null hypothesis", the most "reasonable explanation", the assertion with the most "confidence", etc.- whatever you wish to call it) is rejected when data arising from the hypothesis contradicts the hypothesis itself.
For example, the Theory (hypothesis) of Evolution is the most reasonable hypothesis to account for all the data we have concerning biology and the supporting data from geology and chemistry. It is now the "null hypothesis". It is not "truth" and no hypothesis ever will be. But it is a damn compelling hypothesis ("belief") and it will take alot of clever experiments and observations BASED ON EVOLUTIONARY THEORY to show compelling contradictions to topple it from its present perch. Someone waving his hands and saying "Something must have created complex organisms fully formed" doesn't cut it. Creationism is just a very shallow competing "hypothesis" that some less rational ("ignorant"?) people find more compelling.
You might want to take a look at the excellent bibliography management software EndNote. It has a lot of functionality that might serve as a foundation for what you want to accomplish.