I don't think it has to do with just research, but simply the fact that different degrees are recognized differently in different fields. The term "biochemist," to me, refers to someone with a PhD in biochemistry. If you have a BS or MS in biochemistry, you're called a lab technician. If you have a BS or MS in engineering, however, you're an engineer. It's just different, and it misses the point of google's strategy of having lots of CS PhDs, which is unusual because engineering companies probably have lots of research engineers with MS degrees, CS companies have lots of people without PhDs, etc.
Actually the problem with publishing certain medical discoveries in the "Standard Outlets" is that they are "Standard Outlets." The discovery that stomach ulcers were bacteria caused was so contraversial that the MD who discovered it was nearly cashiered out of the profession. The fact of his ability to treat them effectively had no account. The fact that he had cultured H-Pilori had no account and got him no standing in the standard outlet journals for medicine.
The flaw in your reasoning is the idea that the viability of nanobacteria is as easy to prove/falsify as the assertion that bacterium X causes disease Y. Medical science is driven by dogma, politics, etc. much more than basic science, as medical scientists have to deal with things that are harder to prove. The guy who figured out that H. pylori causes ulcers couldn't get anyone to listen because he couldn't perform the simple study to prove it, namely putting a bunch of people in cages and infecting them (or giving placebo), then waiting to see if they got ulcers. It wasn't until he drank a culture of the bugs himself and got an ulcer that anyone listened.
On the other hand, if someone is making an extremely simple claim, like "these things in this tube are alive," there are extremely simple ways to test that. The fact that something "replicates" is certainly not convincing evidence for life, only for some sort of chemical reaction. It might be a really really interesting chemical reaction, but if someone "grows" a bunch of these nanobugs, but then can't isolate DNA from them, you have to be really suspicious, because isolating DNA from anything is a trivial procedure.
Oh, BTW, what you're saying about heart disease is BS. You're confusing endocarditis with atherosclerosis, and in neither case are arterial plaques in any similar to dental plaque. IAAMDPHD.
I work in a neuroscience lab, where we were running up against the wall of 32-bit address space. We ended up getting a quad opteron system with 16GB of RAM, and it's been great. AMD releases a highly-tuned math library called the "AMD Core Math Library" that has a full implementation of LAPACK, as well as a bunch of FFT routines. If you download octave (a matlab-compatible analysis package), you can recompile it and link it against the ACML, resulting in some serious speed improvements over matlab or C code linked to generic math libraries. I strongly recommend looking into this.
A poorly educated population can't support the world's scientists. Sure, current immigration policies harm US science. But long term, the current public school system will wreck US science.
I agree that the US high school system sucks, but I honestly think there are bigger concerns for basic science in the US. I don't think the problem is lack of smart, well-educated people, as much as the fact that those smart, well-educated people are increasingly choosing to go into business or medicine or whatever now because pay is bad, jobs are scarce, etc.
Also, I went to a public high school in the US. My level of science education was lower than the private school kids I went to college with--I was one of the very few who hadn't even taken calculus! The first year of college was tough; now, it's completely irrelevant. I probably know less about literature, I don't speak a second language fluently, and so forth, but I don't feel that I've been disadvantaged at all scientifically, because maybe 1% of all the science any scientist knows is stuff they picked up in high school. At the best private high schools in the world, that might approach 1.5%. Of course, there are plenty of people who slip through the cracks because of lack of opportunities, and that is truly awful, but I think there are bigger threats that are easier to fix.
As a scientist in the US, I have to say the biggest fixable problem is the ridiculous immigration policies that have been adopted after 9/11. Sure, public education needs improvement, but most of the world's smartest people never have and never will be born in a country representing 6% of the world population. The lab I work in has three Europeans, one Chinese, one Australian, and two Americans (including me), and it's great. The success of the US scientific enterprise has been (and should be) dependent upon concentrating the best talent from other countries in one place, and the US is going in the wrong direction. I personally know plenty of foreign students and postdocs getting screwed, and news has gotten back to their universities. A friend of a friend was barred re-entry into the US from Portugal after a speeding ticket and forced to drop out of the top theoretical physics PhD program on the West Coast. A coworker has been unable to visit home (China) for six years because if she leaves the country there's a 50% chance she will be denied re-entry for a six-month waiting period, which would destroy all of her experiments. A very good friend of mine was in deportation danger for smashing a guy's car window (the guy deserved it). There was a component of the Patriot Act that required attendance to be taken at all graduate school courses, and a missed class by any foreign graduate student (including Canadians) to be documented and justified.
It's a testament to the strength of American science that foreign applications to US grad schools have decreased by only 25% in spite of the ridiculous situation placed on us by the current government. Funding issues and stem cells aside, things have to change in November.
Completely true. Additionally, the classic studies on persistent neuronal activity in prefrontal cortex (of monkeys) during "delay periods" between visual stimuli date from the 1980's. So if the brain's cache was found, it was found 20 years ago. The novelty of these studies has to do with correlating the person's behavioral capacity with the physiological measurements.
IAAB, and I'm constantly shocked at the persistence of a fundamental misconception of how drug/herbicide resistance works. Putting in a mutation or extra gene that confers resistance to a chemical does NOT make the organism stronger. If anything, it makes the organism weaker. The organism only has an advantage when that chemical is around. Basically, if golf course grass were overtaking parks and forests, and the only thing holding it back was use of herbicides, it would be incredibly stupid to release herbicide-resistant golf course grass into the wild. However, if the native grass isn't overgrowing everything now, the herbicide-resistant grass won't either. The worst case scenario is that we're going to be in the situation where we were before the herbicide was invented. It's the same thing with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are no deadlier than bacteria were prior to the discovery of penicillin.
I'm not trying to trivialize peoples' concerns. I'm sure farming sucked before modern herbicides, and if the grass or a wild relative is a problem for farmers, people should think carefully about doing this. But it is simply incorrect to believe that this grass will somehow be stronger than the native grass.
I used to work in a BSL3 facility, and what you are saying is not true. Hospital ERs are not at the level of a BSL2 lab facility, which has hoods with HEPA filters IIRC. Level 3 requires a negative pressure room with an airlock, hoods with HEPA filters, double gloves, special gowns that close in the back, and sometimes ventilators. No air leaves the room except through filters. This is not like a hospital ER.
IAAN, and this is not a big breakthrough in any sense. Basically, this is something that was first done using manually-positioned electrodes probably twenty years ago, and now they can grow neurons on a dish that has electrodes built into it and do it that way. WoO-hAH!
The computational power of neurons comes from the way they work in groups, not the way they work alone. Therefore, it's strongly dependent upon the detailed organization of their connectivity. Grinding up a piece of brain and regrowing it on a dish will obviously not retain native connectivity. Additionally, the time it would take to manually rewire an interesting circuit by giving little localized electrical pulses (or do anything else interesting) is longer than neurons are viable in culture, and that's not a problem that's been solved yet.
I'm not saying this technology won't have important uses as a research tool, just that it won't be useful for what people here seem to think it will be useful for (high-density pornography storage). BTW, one of the more interesting characters in this field is Steve Potter, a somewhat strange guy who does some technically impressive work
Memory storage in the brain is believed by pretty much everyone in the field to be stored in the "strength" of synapses that connect neurons to each other. The connection between synaptic plasticity and "memory" depends on what one means by memory. There are multiple types of memory, and the mechanisms likely differ, but all of them probably involve synaptic plasticity. It's certainly possible that certain types of memory (such as pavlovian conditioning) would be more likely to involve more localized grandmother-cell-esque connectivity changes, while memories of a movie you saw would be more likely to involve widely-distributed connectivity changes that alter what attractor a big complicated dynamical system is going to settle into.
Anyway, the brain is extremely complex, but neuroscientists know much more about it than is generally recognized. In any case, there is experimental evidence that one can selectively erase memories from a human brain from as long ago as the late 1960s. I read a review article about it fairly recently, but I can't remember where. The basic idea is that retrieval of a memory renders that memory unstable, and if you electrically shock the head after getting the patient to retrieve the memory, you can selectively erase it. Given the obvious connection to the movie, I was surprised that McGaugh didn't mention it. This is the first reference to the phenomenon I can find. Here is a more recent review, for those with access to Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The review I read recently said that people were starting to consider using this for patients who had undergone extremely traumatic experiences.
The virus you're talking about is called onyx-015, and I think it was made by Genentech. It was missing the E1B gene. There was another one missing the E1A gene, which inhibits Rb (similar to p53), but I can't remember what it's called.
There are a few weird cancers that can be sexually transmitted, but they're really rare and not dangerous IIRC. There is a really bad canine STD that's actually a cancer from some long-dead dog, and I think something like 30% of the dogs on earth have been infected with it.
(IAAB)
The fact that people with colds weren't cured does not mean the virus is genetically modified. Generally, when they do trials with viruses, they grow up a huge amount of the virus (way more than would be contained in a single patient with a cold) and inject it directly into the center of the tumor. When you catch a cold, the virus doesn't spread throughout your entire body (or else the cold would be a more serious disease). I do agree with you that the usage of the virus is patentable, as turning a virus into a medical treatment is nontrivial to say the least.
They will patent it, and they should. Of course they can't patent an organism, but there's a big difference between knowing that a virus can kill cancer cells and having a workable treatment. Bridging the gap will involve figuring out which strains are best, the right dosages, the right treatment regimens, going through all the red tape of government safety trials, etc. In the end, such things cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars ($600 million on average for a drug, most of which is spent on the clinical trials).
IAAB, and although I haven't read the original papers, the idea is that Ras activation converts weak cancer cells into dangerous ones. If the virus selectively kills cells with activated Ras, you're actually applying selection pressure that favors less dangerous cancer cells. So virus-resistant cancer cells are actually likely to be less dangerous to the person.
Re:Well, since the conclusion of his last book
on
Human Accomplishment
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· Score: 1
I always find it astounding how people will readily admit that certain breeds of dogs have undeniable traits (Jack Russel Terriers are smart, Bloodhounds have highly sensitive noses, etc.) but then look at humans and refuse to admit any bio-level distinctions might be there.
Dogs are not naturally-occurring animals. They have been bred for literally thousands of years to bring out all sorts of bizarre traits. A person who had never seen a dog before would look at five different breeds of dog and have no clue that they were even the same species of animal. Humans aren't exactly like that.
I guess that's why 75+% of the NBA is Black - because Asians and Whites are every bit as athletic, right?
75+% of judo champions are Japanese, 75+% of hockey players are white, and 75+% of the good soccer players in the US are women. What's your point?
I'm not saying that there aren't genetic differences between humans, only that the naive classification of "race" is kind of a silly one with no scientific basis. Besides, how does one control for societal pressures and differences? Do you really think things like height, health, and intelligence are inborn and have nothing to do with diet, habits, or education?
That might be the definition used by human geneticists, but for a mouse in the lab composed of cells from two different mice, molecular biologists would call that a mosaic, hence the confusion. "Chimeric" usually refers to involving cells from two different organisms, IIRC. Interesting, anyway.
That was a joke. The point was that NASA's huge budget played a critical role in the development of technologies that had applications outside the space program.
10. Robots aren't as dextrous or adaptable as humans yet.
9. Robots aren't smart enough (yet) to be autonomous when telepresence latency increases.
This, I think, is the biggest opportunity that's being missed. In the good old days, NASA invented velcro and tang, and we benefited from this spinoff technology. What new technology does NASA develop now? They should be leading the way in development of cutting edge robotics and AI technology, something that will have benefits to society far beyond space exploration.
I think that ultimately biology will contribute more to CS than the other way 'round.
I work in a biology lab, and almost nothing that we do there would be possible without computers. I don't know if anything computer scientists do requires anything that a biologist developed.
As a reluctant molecular biologist, I would argue that the fundamental problem with DNA-based computation schemes is that they work according to the principle that unlike an electronic computer, increasing the complexity of a problem doesn't increase the amount of time it takes to solve the problem. It increases the AMOUNT OF DNA required. Naively, this sounds great, until you actually start calculating out how much DNA you're going to need to perform any computation that's beyond the reach of modern electronic computers. Pretty soon it's a ball of DNA bigger than the sun.
I would go so far as to say that DNA-based computation per se is worthless. However, the biochemistry of DNA, RNA, and proteins is really just a special case of some fancy polymer chemistry, and it's certainly possible that groundbreaking work in DNA computation could lead to useful computers based on other types of polymer molecules.
The reason things like genesis or neuron are slow is because they are simulating a neuron in a very artificial way. One could easily make an analog VLSI circuit with a number of spatial "compartments" that would be formally equivalent to a NEURON or GENESIS compartment model, except the thing wouldn't have to integrate numerically, and it could run thousands of times faster than a real neuron does. Basically, people forget that the computational core of the neuron is the voltage gated cation channel. It is the fundamental nonlinearity of neural computation, analogous to the transistor in electronic circuits. Transistors are a lot faster than ion channels, and I would argue that since the fundamental building block in electronic circuits is superior, an electronic brain could in principle be "better" than a biological one. The problem, however, is figuring out and implementing the proper connectivity among those units on an analog chip, and I don't see it going away any time soon.
One interesting thing about "lactose intolerance" is that it's really the default state. Most people in the world are lactose intolerant, with the exception of some rich Western Europeans. Funny how the norm is defined.
It's great to see a post by someone who knows what they're talking about, but a few minor comments: clinically, I think staph and strep are usually differentiated by enzymatic assays, not by how they cluster (though you can do that too). As far as strep pyogenes, which causes strep throat, that does not cause pyelonephritis, which is infection of the kidney. Glomerulonephritis, an inflammatory kidney disease which is not due to infection, arises from an incompletely understood mechanism believed to involve antigenic mimicry. Antigens are things that your immune system reacts against--the "M antigen," IIRC, of strep pyogenes mimics, or "looks like," components of your kidneys and heart on a molecular level, so untreated strep throat can actually cause you to mount an autoimmune response against your heart (rheumatic fever) and kidneys (glomerulonephritis). That is the reason that doctors are so aggressive in terms of treating strep throat with antibiotics, not because strep throat itself is a dangerous condition.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think it has to do with just research, but simply the fact that different degrees are recognized differently in different fields. The term "biochemist," to me, refers to someone with a PhD in biochemistry. If you have a BS or MS in biochemistry, you're called a lab technician. If you have a BS or MS in engineering, however, you're an engineer. It's just different, and it misses the point of google's strategy of having lots of CS PhDs, which is unusual because engineering companies probably have lots of research engineers with MS degrees, CS companies have lots of people without PhDs, etc.
Actually the problem with publishing certain medical discoveries in the "Standard Outlets" is that they are "Standard Outlets." The discovery that stomach ulcers were bacteria caused was so contraversial that the MD who discovered it was nearly cashiered out of the profession. The fact of his ability to treat them effectively had no account. The fact that he had cultured H-Pilori had no account and got him no standing in the standard outlet journals for medicine.
The flaw in your reasoning is the idea that the viability of nanobacteria is as easy to prove/falsify as the assertion that bacterium X causes disease Y. Medical science is driven by dogma, politics, etc. much more than basic science, as medical scientists have to deal with things that are harder to prove. The guy who figured out that H. pylori causes ulcers couldn't get anyone to listen because he couldn't perform the simple study to prove it, namely putting a bunch of people in cages and infecting them (or giving placebo), then waiting to see if they got ulcers. It wasn't until he drank a culture of the bugs himself and got an ulcer that anyone listened.
On the other hand, if someone is making an extremely simple claim, like "these things in this tube are alive," there are extremely simple ways to test that. The fact that something "replicates" is certainly not convincing evidence for life, only for some sort of chemical reaction. It might be a really really interesting chemical reaction, but if someone "grows" a bunch of these nanobugs, but then can't isolate DNA from them, you have to be really suspicious, because isolating DNA from anything is a trivial procedure.
Oh, BTW, what you're saying about heart disease is BS. You're confusing endocarditis with atherosclerosis, and in neither case are arterial plaques in any similar to dental plaque. IAAMDPHD.
I work in a neuroscience lab, where we were running up against the wall of 32-bit address space. We ended up getting a quad opteron system with 16GB of RAM, and it's been great. AMD releases a highly-tuned math library called the "AMD Core Math Library" that has a full implementation of LAPACK, as well as a bunch of FFT routines. If you download octave (a matlab-compatible analysis package), you can recompile it and link it against the ACML, resulting in some serious speed improvements over matlab or C code linked to generic math libraries. I strongly recommend looking into this.
A poorly educated population can't support the world's scientists. Sure, current immigration policies harm US science. But long term, the current public school system will wreck US science.
I agree that the US high school system sucks, but I honestly think there are bigger concerns for basic science in the US. I don't think the problem is lack of smart, well-educated people, as much as the fact that those smart, well-educated people are increasingly choosing to go into business or medicine or whatever now because pay is bad, jobs are scarce, etc.
Also, I went to a public high school in the US. My level of science education was lower than the private school kids I went to college with--I was one of the very few who hadn't even taken calculus! The first year of college was tough; now, it's completely irrelevant. I probably know less about literature, I don't speak a second language fluently, and so forth, but I don't feel that I've been disadvantaged at all scientifically, because maybe 1% of all the science any scientist knows is stuff they picked up in high school. At the best private high schools in the world, that might approach 1.5%. Of course, there are plenty of people who slip through the cracks because of lack of opportunities, and that is truly awful, but I think there are bigger threats that are easier to fix.
As a scientist in the US, I have to say the biggest fixable problem is the ridiculous immigration policies that have been adopted after 9/11. Sure, public education needs improvement, but most of the world's smartest people never have and never will be born in a country representing 6% of the world population. The lab I work in has three Europeans, one Chinese, one Australian, and two Americans (including me), and it's great. The success of the US scientific enterprise has been (and should be) dependent upon concentrating the best talent from other countries in one place, and the US is going in the wrong direction. I personally know plenty of foreign students and postdocs getting screwed, and news has gotten back to their universities. A friend of a friend was barred re-entry into the US from Portugal after a speeding ticket and forced to drop out of the top theoretical physics PhD program on the West Coast. A coworker has been unable to visit home (China) for six years because if she leaves the country there's a 50% chance she will be denied re-entry for a six-month waiting period, which would destroy all of her experiments. A very good friend of mine was in deportation danger for smashing a guy's car window (the guy deserved it). There was a component of the Patriot Act that required attendance to be taken at all graduate school courses, and a missed class by any foreign graduate student (including Canadians) to be documented and justified.
It's a testament to the strength of American science that foreign applications to US grad schools have decreased by only 25% in spite of the ridiculous situation placed on us by the current government. Funding issues and stem cells aside, things have to change in November.
Completely true. Additionally, the classic studies on persistent neuronal activity in prefrontal cortex (of monkeys) during "delay periods" between visual stimuli date from the 1980's. So if the brain's cache was found, it was found 20 years ago. The novelty of these studies has to do with correlating the person's behavioral capacity with the physiological measurements.
IAAB, and I'm constantly shocked at the persistence of a fundamental misconception of how drug/herbicide resistance works. Putting in a mutation or extra gene that confers resistance to a chemical does NOT make the organism stronger. If anything, it makes the organism weaker. The organism only has an advantage when that chemical is around. Basically, if golf course grass were overtaking parks and forests, and the only thing holding it back was use of herbicides, it would be incredibly stupid to release herbicide-resistant golf course grass into the wild. However, if the native grass isn't overgrowing everything now, the herbicide-resistant grass won't either. The worst case scenario is that we're going to be in the situation where we were before the herbicide was invented. It's the same thing with antibiotic-resistant bacteria, which are no deadlier than bacteria were prior to the discovery of penicillin.
I'm not trying to trivialize peoples' concerns. I'm sure farming sucked before modern herbicides, and if the grass or a wild relative is a problem for farmers, people should think carefully about doing this. But it is simply incorrect to believe that this grass will somehow be stronger than the native grass.
I used to work in a BSL3 facility, and what you are saying is not true. Hospital ERs are not at the level of a BSL2 lab facility, which has hoods with HEPA filters IIRC. Level 3 requires a negative pressure room with an airlock, hoods with HEPA filters, double gloves, special gowns that close in the back, and sometimes ventilators. No air leaves the room except through filters. This is not like a hospital ER.
IAAN, and this is not a big breakthrough in any sense. Basically, this is something that was first done using manually-positioned electrodes probably twenty years ago, and now they can grow neurons on a dish that has electrodes built into it and do it that way. WoO-hAH!
The computational power of neurons comes from the way they work in groups, not the way they work alone. Therefore, it's strongly dependent upon the detailed organization of their connectivity. Grinding up a piece of brain and regrowing it on a dish will obviously not retain native connectivity. Additionally, the time it would take to manually rewire an interesting circuit by giving little localized electrical pulses (or do anything else interesting) is longer than neurons are viable in culture, and that's not a problem that's been solved yet.
I'm not saying this technology won't have important uses as a research tool, just that it won't be useful for what people here seem to think it will be useful for (high-density pornography storage). BTW, one of the more interesting characters in this field is Steve Potter, a somewhat strange guy who does some technically impressive work
Memory storage in the brain is believed by pretty much everyone in the field to be stored in the "strength" of synapses that connect neurons to each other. The connection between synaptic plasticity and "memory" depends on what one means by memory. There are multiple types of memory, and the mechanisms likely differ, but all of them probably involve synaptic plasticity. It's certainly possible that certain types of memory (such as pavlovian conditioning) would be more likely to involve more localized grandmother-cell-esque connectivity changes, while memories of a movie you saw would be more likely to involve widely-distributed connectivity changes that alter what attractor a big complicated dynamical system is going to settle into.
Anyway, the brain is extremely complex, but neuroscientists know much more about it than is generally recognized. In any case, there is experimental evidence that one can selectively erase memories from a human brain from as long ago as the late 1960s. I read a review article about it fairly recently, but I can't remember where. The basic idea is that retrieval of a memory renders that memory unstable, and if you electrically shock the head after getting the patient to retrieve the memory, you can selectively erase it. Given the obvious connection to the movie, I was surprised that McGaugh didn't mention it. This is the first reference to the phenomenon I can find. Here is a more recent review, for those with access to Nature Reviews Neuroscience. The review I read recently said that people were starting to consider using this for patients who had undergone extremely traumatic experiences.
The virus you're talking about is called onyx-015, and I think it was made by Genentech. It was missing the E1B gene. There was another one missing the E1A gene, which inhibits Rb (similar to p53), but I can't remember what it's called.
There are a few weird cancers that can be sexually transmitted, but they're really rare and not dangerous IIRC. There is a really bad canine STD that's actually a cancer from some long-dead dog, and I think something like 30% of the dogs on earth have been infected with it.
(IAAB) The fact that people with colds weren't cured does not mean the virus is genetically modified. Generally, when they do trials with viruses, they grow up a huge amount of the virus (way more than would be contained in a single patient with a cold) and inject it directly into the center of the tumor. When you catch a cold, the virus doesn't spread throughout your entire body (or else the cold would be a more serious disease). I do agree with you that the usage of the virus is patentable, as turning a virus into a medical treatment is nontrivial to say the least.
They will patent it, and they should. Of course they can't patent an organism, but there's a big difference between knowing that a virus can kill cancer cells and having a workable treatment. Bridging the gap will involve figuring out which strains are best, the right dosages, the right treatment regimens, going through all the red tape of government safety trials, etc. In the end, such things cost literally hundreds of millions of dollars ($600 million on average for a drug, most of which is spent on the clinical trials).
IAAB, and although I haven't read the original papers, the idea is that Ras activation converts weak cancer cells into dangerous ones. If the virus selectively kills cells with activated Ras, you're actually applying selection pressure that favors less dangerous cancer cells. So virus-resistant cancer cells are actually likely to be less dangerous to the person.
I always find it astounding how people will readily admit that certain breeds of dogs have undeniable traits (Jack Russel Terriers are smart, Bloodhounds have highly sensitive noses, etc.) but then look at humans and refuse to admit any bio-level distinctions might be there.
Dogs are not naturally-occurring animals. They have been bred for literally thousands of years to bring out all sorts of bizarre traits. A person who had never seen a dog before would look at five different breeds of dog and have no clue that they were even the same species of animal. Humans aren't exactly like that.
I guess that's why 75+% of the NBA is Black - because Asians and Whites are every bit as athletic, right?
75+% of judo champions are Japanese, 75+% of hockey players are white, and 75+% of the good soccer players in the US are women. What's your point?
I'm not saying that there aren't genetic differences between humans, only that the naive classification of "race" is kind of a silly one with no scientific basis. Besides, how does one control for societal pressures and differences? Do you really think things like height, health, and intelligence are inborn and have nothing to do with diet, habits, or education?
That might be the definition used by human geneticists, but for a mouse in the lab composed of cells from two different mice, molecular biologists would call that a mosaic, hence the confusion. "Chimeric" usually refers to involving cells from two different organisms, IIRC. Interesting, anyway.
That was a joke. The point was that NASA's huge budget played a critical role in the development of technologies that had applications outside the space program.
10. Robots aren't as dextrous or adaptable as humans yet.
9. Robots aren't smart enough (yet) to be autonomous when telepresence latency increases.
This, I think, is the biggest opportunity that's being missed. In the good old days, NASA invented velcro and tang, and we benefited from this spinoff technology. What new technology does NASA develop now? They should be leading the way in development of cutting edge robotics and AI technology, something that will have benefits to society far beyond space exploration.
I think that ultimately biology will contribute more to CS than the other way 'round.
I work in a biology lab, and almost nothing that we do there would be possible without computers. I don't know if anything computer scientists do requires anything that a biologist developed.
As a reluctant molecular biologist, I would argue that the fundamental problem with DNA-based computation schemes is that they work according to the principle that unlike an electronic computer, increasing the complexity of a problem doesn't increase the amount of time it takes to solve the problem. It increases the AMOUNT OF DNA required. Naively, this sounds great, until you actually start calculating out how much DNA you're going to need to perform any computation that's beyond the reach of modern electronic computers. Pretty soon it's a ball of DNA bigger than the sun.
I would go so far as to say that DNA-based computation per se is worthless. However, the biochemistry of DNA, RNA, and proteins is really just a special case of some fancy polymer chemistry, and it's certainly possible that groundbreaking work in DNA computation could lead to useful computers based on other types of polymer molecules.
The reason things like genesis or neuron are slow is because they are simulating a neuron in a very artificial way. One could easily make an analog VLSI circuit with a number of spatial "compartments" that would be formally equivalent to a NEURON or GENESIS compartment model, except the thing wouldn't have to integrate numerically, and it could run thousands of times faster than a real neuron does. Basically, people forget that the computational core of the neuron is the voltage gated cation channel. It is the fundamental nonlinearity of neural computation, analogous to the transistor in electronic circuits. Transistors are a lot faster than ion channels, and I would argue that since the fundamental building block in electronic circuits is superior, an electronic brain could in principle be "better" than a biological one. The problem, however, is figuring out and implementing the proper connectivity among those units on an analog chip, and I don't see it going away any time soon.
One interesting thing about "lactose intolerance" is that it's really the default state. Most people in the world are lactose intolerant, with the exception of some rich Western Europeans. Funny how the norm is defined.
Efforts are underway here.
It's great to see a post by someone who knows what they're talking about, but a few minor comments: clinically, I think staph and strep are usually differentiated by enzymatic assays, not by how they cluster (though you can do that too). As far as strep pyogenes, which causes strep throat, that does not cause pyelonephritis, which is infection of the kidney. Glomerulonephritis, an inflammatory kidney disease which is not due to infection, arises from an incompletely understood mechanism believed to involve antigenic mimicry. Antigens are things that your immune system reacts against--the "M antigen," IIRC, of strep pyogenes mimics, or "looks like," components of your kidneys and heart on a molecular level, so untreated strep throat can actually cause you to mount an autoimmune response against your heart (rheumatic fever) and kidneys (glomerulonephritis). That is the reason that doctors are so aggressive in terms of treating strep throat with antibiotics, not because strep throat itself is a dangerous condition.