The Brian Lehrer show, a popular New York City talk show, had a program on health care in the election, and they invited the listeners to post suggestions to a Wiki.
The best part is a lot of links to the New England Journal of Medicine http://www.nejm.org/ which has lot of (free-access) articles on health care in the elections in the recent editions.
If you want to read one good article to understand the health care system, I'd recommend http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/6/549 7 Feb 2008, 358(6):549, Perspective: Market-based failure -- a second opinion on U.S. health care costs.
A lot of people thought that both Obama and McCain were missing the point -- we need a Canadian-style, single-payer, Medicare for all system, which would cost 1/2 to 2/3 as much as our current insurance-based system (depending on how you calculate it).
One of the people who argues for single-payer is Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Princeton University economics professor who just won the Nobel Prize in economics.
This is a bizarre argument (which gives me nostalgic memories of my college freshman all-night bull sessions). But it's important because it gets to the heart of the social contract that we (almost) all agree to, which we recently understand much better because of studies in the evolution of cooperation and in economic experiments in cooperation, like Prisoner's Dilemma. (I recently read a few good articles by Samuel Bowles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) which is why I'm so interested.
If taxes were voluntary, they wouldn't be taxes.
If contributions were voluntary, then freeloaders wouldn't contribute, and would benefit from the contributions of those who do. Cooperation would collapse, and we wouldn't have the advantages of cooperation. We wouldn't have roads, or electricity, or water, or cities.
I know you believe that they could all be produced by entrepreneurs, but if you look at the history of industrialization, you'd see that governments play a major role. Try to find a country with electricity that wasn't promoted by the government or the colonial power.
In fact, try to find a country run by free-market libertarian principles. Afghanistan is the closest I can think of right now, but their GNP is nothing to brag about.
I see no moral problem with people doing whatever they can to avoid paying them.
That's because you're a selfish freeloader. That's why we need tax laws that are enforced.
I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to the poor. I think we'd have a more productive economy if we did (look at Finland).
In fact, I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to me.
Right. I immediately checked the American Library Association too.
Contrary to what some of the posters are saying, we do have an expectation of privacy when we use the library, since we are guaranteed privacy by the ALA policies (below) that we can reasonably expect every library to follow. The library director was indeed an incompetent putz. He was placing our freedom to read, and our entire Constitution, at risk. He should be removed from any position of responsibility.
There was a long story in the New York Times magazine about a guy who was completely innocent, and a completely assimilated American -- except that he was Muslim and his name was Mohammed. He used the same public computer in Kinko's that one of the 9/11 hijackers had used the same day. (Sure, it's a strange coincidence, but how many people used that public computer?)
The FBI arrested him (although "arrest" implies legal process) and kept him for days (maybe weeks, I forget) and repeatedly refused to let him contact his wife or a lawyer. Finally he got depressed and suicidal. These interrogations can be very brutal, as we've recently found out.
After they figured out that he had nothing to do with 9/11, or terrorism, or any crime, instead of apologizing and letting him go, they subject his immigration documents to Kenneth Starr-type scrutiny and tried to make a case in immigration court (where you have fewer rights) that his marriage was a sham, and that he should be deported.
The moral of this story (and there are others) is that even an innocent person has good reason to avoid the FBI's high false positive dragnet.
(Sorry I don't have the citation of the New York Times story; your librarian can help you find it.:)
Recent years have seen an increase in the number and frequency of challenges to the confidentiality of library records across the United States, and a new dimension has been added to confidentiality concerns. Throughout the 1980s, the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) received queries from individual librarians who had been pressured by the FBI or local law enforcement agencies for information about library users, or who were afraid of being held liable for a patron's acts after providing information on such topics as bomb construction, weapons, or satanism. Some of these librarians were tempted to maintain special files on patrons who seemed "suspicious" or who made "unusual" requests. These queries revealed a lack of confidence in confidentiality procedures or a misunderstanding of the important links among confidentiality, intellectual freedom, and librarians' professional and legal obligations to uphold the privacy rights of patrons.
The benefits of endurance exercise on general health make it desirable to identify orally active agents that would mimic or potentiate the effects of exercise to treat metabolic diseases. Although certain natural compounds, such as reseveratrol, have endurance-enhancing activities, their exact metabolic targets remain elusive. We therefore tested the effect of pathway-specific drugs on endurance capacities of mice in a treadmill running test. We found that PPARÎ/Î agonist and exercise training synergistically increase oxidative myofibers and running endurance in adult mice. Because training activates AMPK and PGC1α, we then tested whether the orally active AMPK agonist AICAR might be sufficient to overcome the exercise requirement. Unexpectedly, even in sedentary mice, 4 weeks of AICAR treatment alone induced metabolic genes and enhanced running endurance by 44%. These results demonstrate that AMPK-PPARÎ pathway can be targeted by orally active drugs to enhance training adaptation or even to increase endurance without exercise.
A company made ant poision, but the federal regulatory agency made them take it off the market.
Their law firm recommended that they appeal the agency's decision in court, so they did. They lost. The law firm recommended that they appeal to a higher court, so they did. They lost. The law firm recommended that they appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The company sent a fax telling the law firm not to do it. The law firm appealed to the Supreme Court anyway. They lost.
Doing that, they ran up bills of $400,000. The ant poison company refused to pay. The law firm sued for the bill.
To prove their case, the company had to find the fax machine's printed confirmation, to prove they sent the fax. They couldn't find it. They lost. They had to pay the law firm.
(This is my quick recollection from a Wall Street Journal story.)
Admittedly this is about a fax, not an email, but the principle should be the same. If they had a copy of an email saying, "To confirm our conversation today, we don't want you to appeal any farther," they would have won the case.
So yeah, there are some emails you should save forever, particularly CYA emails.
This safe sex page doesn't even mention that going into IT can ensure a 100% avoidance of STDS. And they call themselves experts!
That's interesting. H. Hunter Handsfield is one of the top experts on STDs in the U.S. I have a textbook with his chapters, and I heard him give a lecture on STDs at a National Institutes of Health conference. That conference was not a good place to pick up girls.
He's also the author of the famous color atlas of STDs, which is another good way to discourage activities which lead to STDs.
The New Scientist reported on a conference in London in which participants tried out different pickup lines and evaluated the results.
The worst pickup line of all: "I have a PhD in computer science."
The cells that would be used are progenitor cells obtained from the blood or bone marrow,...
The word you're looking for to describe those cells is stem cells. But it wasn't the poster's fault. The poorly written article makes the same mistake.
Stem cells are able to differentiate along different pathways, to become the cells that form tissues, such as the lining and structural tissues used to form blood vessels. But progenitor cells also differentiate along different pathways to become cells that form tissues. If cell A is on the pathway to cell B, then A is a progenitor of B. Cell A might or might not be a stem cell. Some researchers do refer to the cells that lead to specific tissues, like heart muscle, as stem cells. But people also refer to them as progenitor cells. The source of funding might have something to do with the choice of language.
Actually, I think it was a pretty well-written article. (Disclosure: I know Ed Edelson.)
But I don't think Edelson would mind the criticism. Good science teachers always want students to show off how smart they are and try to prove them wrong. Better to be cocky than stupid.
Don Ho had this surgery done where his own stem cells, extracted from his blood, were injected into his heart. He died soon after but his surgeon claims that the surgery was so successful that Don didn't recover fully before resuming touring and put too much strain on his heart and died.
Actually, there were several studies that infused heart muscle stem cells into damaged hearts, over the last few years. Some German researchers are widely regarded as the most aggressive, or the most irresponsible, depending on who you talk to. The problem is that their patients also died. As I recall, the treatment didn't do any harm, but it didn't do any good. (That was dumb luck; patients can die in these studies.) There was a good review article in Science magazine that I'm too lazy to look up. A lot of people thought that human trials were premature, and they should go back to the mice and get it working first.
The problem with mice is that they don't pay doctors' bills. The advantage of mice is that, if the mouse dies, you can always get another mouse.
The Harvard researchers went back to the mice, which is what they should be doing. The interesting thing they did was mix the endothelial progenitor cells with the mesenchymal progenitor cells (or stem cells, if you prefer). And they got it working in real, living mice. The vessels lined up just right, and joined each other just the way real blood vessels are supposed to. I'd like to read the Circulation article and see what growth factors they used (probably VEGF and some other stuff).
To put this in context, it's important to realize that circulatory heart disease damages blood vessels, which then damages heart muscle. These Harvard guys are repairing blood vessels. Other people are working on heart muscle.
Since the personalized genome companies were started by people in the medical community, they could just as easily say, "Facing a medical community that will promote anything to the public..."
Or, "Facing an online media that will say anything sensational in a desperate effort to attract readers..."
Right. 2 of the criminal corporations that were treated the way you say are the asbestos industry and the tobacco industry.
Workers were exposed to asbestos for decades, while asbestos companies like Johns-Mansville knew that it was causing lung cancer, according to medical reports in their files that came out after they were sued, but they didn't warn those workers. When it all came out, they were hit with millions of dollars in damages, and went bankrupt. You don't see much asbestos around any more.
The tobacco industry is unfortunately so wealthy and politically powerful that they're almost (but not quite) untouchable. They got hit with millions of dollars in damages. The public health people who took them on were pretty smart, and they got money to pay for anti-tobacco education, publicity campaigns, etc. In a big court case, huge amounts of documents get subpoenaed, but the defendants insist on making them confidential as one of the conditions for settling (see the IBM antitrust case). This time, the public health people insisted on making the documents public, and put them in a great database, which revealed their devious methods, and exposed the people we trusted who betrayed us (search Google for "tobacco documents").
Unfortunately, the corporate executives didn't go to jail, even though they killed more people (400,000/year from cigarettes) than Osama bin Laden ever will.
Given the sentiments you expressed, you would probably enjoy reading Ted Rall http://www.gocomics.com/rallcom/, although you probably do already. He was warning us from the very first about Obama.
I just spent 2 days reading a few articles about this general area of research in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, so let me try to explain this to my fellow/.r's who so generously explain to me about warez and the penguin.
Doctors now believe that cancer goes through several stages before it becomes a problem. Cells become cancerous all the time, but usually the immune systen destroys them. To simplify a bit, immune cells such as dendrocytes (which is the hot immune cell these days) recognize cancer proteins. Dendrocytes take a piece of the cancer protein to a T cell, and the T cell kills the cancer cells. There's a great explanation of the immune process on Kimball's Biology Pages http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AntigenPresentation.html, and if you take a few minutes to figure it out you'll understand one of the most amazing discoveries of the last century.
The reason we get cancer is that sometimes that process doesn't work. All it takes is one time during your lifetime when a cancer cell "figures out" a way to evade the immune system, and the cancer takes off.
It obviously occurs to doctors that it would be cool (and probably win a Nobel prize) if they could figure out some way to goose the immune system into fighting cancer, just the way they goose it into fighting viruses with vaccines.
One guy who tried that was Steven Rosenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rosenberg at the NIH. Rosenberg took melanoma cells from patients, and tried to stimulate the patient's immune system with a molecule called interleukin-2 that cells use to signal immune attacks. I remember reading about that around 1984, I think. The cancer slowed down but it came back. Rosenberg has been working on it ever since.
I remember seeing a cover headline in Fortune magazine back then about Rosenberg, to the effect, "Cure for cancer." (No question mark.) Do you suppose the media hype these things?
In order to understand cancer research, you have to understand that they can kill cancer cells in laboratory bottles, they can cure cancer in mice, but when they try to kill cancer cells in humans, time and again, it doesn't work. When it finally works in humans, that's news. The other thing you have to understand is that there are many treatments that make cancer tumors shrink or disappear for a while, but they usually come back. Cancer patients don't want the cancer to go away for 6 months -- they want it to go away forever. There are a few cancers that can sometimes be cured, like testicular cancer and childhood leukemia, and maybe some prostate cancers, but most of the time, for the big 3 (colon, breast, lung) oncologists are just trying to extend life. Of course, if you're 65 and your doctor can keep you alive for another 20 years with colon cancer or leukemia, that's not so bad. Most of the successful treatments for cancer extend the life of a cancer patient from, say, 20 months to 25 months, or 40 months to 45 months, but sometimes they get a really big jump, and for people with chronic myelogenic leukemia, imatinab (Gleevec) can extend their lives indefinitely.
Anyway, the really big news is that somebody actually managed to get a treatment like Rosenberg's to work on a real human with melanoma, who seems to be cured after 2 years. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Treatment of metastatic melanoma with autologous CD4+ T cells against NY-ESO-1, Naomi Hunder et al., 358:2698 http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/25/2698 In the past, they've gotten melanoma (and kidney cancer) to regress for a while, but it came back. This time it seems to be gone for good -- in one patient.
Basically, they had a patient with melanoma that had spread to his lungs. He had T cells that
So could someone explain how this effects us? How is this a major leap as the article says? Watching it be born seems cool and all but how does that help us kill it? Good question actually. Let me try an answer.
If we know the steps that HIV uses to assemble its virus particles, we can look for a way to jam up one of those steps.
This video (and the research behind it) helps us understand how HIV assembles its virus particles. It helps researchers figure out a way to jam up the works.
Researchers have already figured out how to jam up the works in some of the other steps in HIV processes. As a result, HIV used to kill people after about 6 years. Now they can go on for decades.
Of course, the main reason they do it is because it's cool. Scientists who do things just because it's cool have probably saved more lives than scientists who do things because they're trying to save lives.
As an added benefit, they better understand how the cell works. Once they understand how the cell works, it's easier to do other cool things like give cancer patients another 10 or 20 years. And 20 more years looks pretty good when you're 65 years old.
I'm glad to see that the federal government has decided that it's a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to violate the TOS by giving false information in registration.
My p0rn site says, "I affirm by clicking on this agreement that I am not a police officer, detective, agent of any government agency or prosecutor, or any kind of investigator, and I will not bring and have no intention of bringing any legal action or complaint against this web site or anyone affiliated with this web site."
So if any anti-p0rn investigator clicks onto my web site, he's violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by by getting fraudulent unauthorized access to my computer, and the U.S. Attorney's Office will prosecute him or her.
Sounds like someone in the Porn community that supports the troops could set up a very interesting charity.
I can see it now: "Support the troops, send them quality American porn!" You mean like this?
http://www.skylighters.org/jane/
A British submarine had been attacked, and was crippled and powerless on the bottom of the ocean. Sea currents swirled round the vessel and there was always the chance the enemy would swoop in for the kill. The crew inside fully expected the vessel to become their tomb, but knew how they wanted to spend their last moments. A request was put in to the captain. The submariners wanted to live out what time remained gazing at pictures, currently in his safe, of a stunningly beautiful woman from Eastleigh, Hampshire. Their commanding officer obliged and the images of the supremely sexy Christabel Leighton-Porter, aka "Jane," were distributed. Soon after, against all odds, the submarine was elevated to the surface.
Jane served throughout the war, and was painted on the tanks with those brave British boys who went ashore on D-Day. After the War, she was rewarded with an audience with the King. She is remembered to this day by those who fought with her.
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
You picked a poor metaphor. The guy who did the obituaries in the New York Times was Theodore Bernstein, who is most distinguished for arguing at an editorial conference before the imminent Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion that the Times had an obligation to print what they knew about the invasion, which would have scuttled the invasion. (That was the journalistic equivalent of the engineer's pre-flight conference before the Challenger disaster.) That invasion led to the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cuban missile nuclear showdown, which was as close as we've ever come to destroying the world.
Bernstein was accused of left-wing sympathies during the days of the blacklist, and as a result, the Times busted him down to the obituary page. Back in those days, we had a social contract that, if you committed yourself to a corporation, they would give you a job for life, so instead of firing people who were drunk or incompetent, the Times would just assign them to the obituary page. Unlike everyone else, Bernstein revolutionized the obituary page by writing serious obituaries.
Bernstein also wrote a textbook about copy-editing called Headlines and Deadlines, which is still used in journalism schools. The main point of that book, BTW, was that copy editors should check the facts of a story, and make sure it gets all sides. If the Times had followed that advice, they would have avoided some recent humiliations. So Bernstein got the last laugh again.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm not sure they can call this a "memory molecule" so much as a "molecule responsible for changing the receptors at the synapse to make a memory."
I'll never ask you to write a headline.
--
"In describing genetic mechanisms, there is a choice between being inexact and incomprehensible" http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laureates/1965/press.html
The Brian Lehrer show, a popular New York City talk show, had a program on health care in the election, and they invited the listeners to post suggestions to a Wiki.
The Wiki came out pretty good http://issues.wnyc.org/wiki/index.php/Health_Care:_Whose_Plan_Rules%3F (and the subsequent radio program was also pretty good).
The best part is a lot of links to the New England Journal of Medicine http://www.nejm.org/ which has lot of (free-access) articles on health care in the elections in the recent editions.
If you want to read one good article to understand the health care system, I'd recommend http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/6/549 7 Feb 2008, 358(6):549, Perspective: Market-based failure -- a second opinion on U.S. health care costs.
A lot of people thought that both Obama and McCain were missing the point -- we need a Canadian-style, single-payer, Medicare for all system, which would cost 1/2 to 2/3 as much as our current insurance-based system (depending on how you calculate it).
One of the people who argues for single-payer is Paul Krugman, the New York Times columnist and Princeton University economics professor who just won the Nobel Prize in economics.
Come on, these pandemic scares happen every fall and it's boy crying wolf at this point. History indicates that eventually they will be right
History indicates that pandemics are as common as floods and earthquakes, and every few generations they kill 50 million people. http://www.google.com/search?en&q=1918+influenza+epidemic
"To send men to the firing squad, judicial proof is unnecessary." George "Dubya" Bush
There, fixed that for ya.
I agree. Let's have more stories about horses. Maybe we'll get more chicks on Slashdot.
Which gives me an idea for a good pickup line: "You look like you like horses." I'll have to try that out.
It would probably work more often than "What's your distro?"
The other thing he could try is this http://hardware.slashdot.org/hardware/07/08/08/0029252.shtml
This is a bizarre argument (which gives me nostalgic memories of my college freshman all-night bull sessions). But it's important because it gets to the heart of the social contract that we (almost) all agree to, which we recently understand much better because of studies in the evolution of cooperation and in economic experiments in cooperation, like Prisoner's Dilemma. (I recently read a few good articles by Samuel Bowles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samuel_Bowles_(economist) which is why I'm so interested.
If taxes were voluntary, they wouldn't be taxes.
If contributions were voluntary, then freeloaders wouldn't contribute, and would benefit from the contributions of those who do. Cooperation would collapse, and we wouldn't have the advantages of cooperation. We wouldn't have roads, or electricity, or water, or cities.
I know you believe that they could all be produced by entrepreneurs, but if you look at the history of industrialization, you'd see that governments play a major role. Try to find a country with electricity that wasn't promoted by the government or the colonial power.
In fact, try to find a country run by free-market libertarian principles. Afghanistan is the closest I can think of right now, but their GNP is nothing to brag about.
That's because you're a selfish freeloader. That's why we need tax laws that are enforced.
I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to the poor. I think we'd have a more productive economy if we did (look at Finland).
In fact, I see no moral problem with robbing from the rich to give to me.
Better for those children to starve than die of lead and other heavy metal poisoning.
More likely your lawyer will tell you how useless and unenforceable HIPAA is.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/06362/749444-114.stm
"The Feds can go screw themselves."
Your post makes me feel good to be an American (which is not always easy these days).
Right. I immediately checked the American Library Association too.
Contrary to what some of the posters are saying, we do have an expectation of privacy when we use the library, since we are guaranteed privacy by the ALA policies (below) that we can reasonably expect every library to follow. The library director was indeed an incompetent putz. He was placing our freedom to read, and our entire Constitution, at risk. He should be removed from any position of responsibility.
There was a long story in the New York Times magazine about a guy who was completely innocent, and a completely assimilated American -- except that he was Muslim and his name was Mohammed. He used the same public computer in Kinko's that one of the 9/11 hijackers had used the same day. (Sure, it's a strange coincidence, but how many people used that public computer?)
The FBI arrested him (although "arrest" implies legal process) and kept him for days (maybe weeks, I forget) and repeatedly refused to let him contact his wife or a lawyer. Finally he got depressed and suicidal. These interrogations can be very brutal, as we've recently found out.
After they figured out that he had nothing to do with 9/11, or terrorism, or any crime, instead of apologizing and letting him go, they subject his immigration documents to Kenneth Starr-type scrutiny and tried to make a case in immigration court (where you have fewer rights) that his marriage was a sham, and that he should be deported.
The moral of this story (and there are others) is that even an innocent person has good reason to avoid the FBI's high false positive dragnet.
(Sorry I don't have the citation of the New York Times story; your librarian can help you find it. :)
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/otherpolicies/default.cfm
http://www.ala.org/ala/oif/statementspols/otherpolicies/developingconfidentiality.cfm
Developing a Confidentiality Policy
Recent years have seen an increase in the number and frequency of challenges to the confidentiality of library records across the United States, and a new dimension has been added to confidentiality concerns. Throughout the 1980s, the Office for Intellectual Freedom (OIF) received queries from individual librarians who had been pressured by the FBI or local law enforcement agencies for information about library users, or who were afraid of being held liable for a patron's acts after providing information on such topics as bomb construction, weapons, or satanism. Some of these librarians were tempted to maintain special files on patrons who seemed "suspicious" or who made "unusual" requests. These queries revealed a lack of confidence in confidentiality procedures or a misunderstanding of the important links among confidentiality, intellectual freedom, and librarians' professional and legal obligations to uphold the privacy rights of patrons.
Real geeks read Cell (with pictures)
DOI: 10.1016/j.cell.2008.06.051
http://www.cell.com/content/article/fulltext?uid=PIIS0092867408008386
AMPK and PPARÎ Agonists Are Exercise Mimetics
The benefits of endurance exercise on general health make it desirable to identify orally active agents that would mimic or potentiate the effects of exercise to treat metabolic diseases. Although certain natural compounds, such as reseveratrol, have endurance-enhancing activities, their exact metabolic targets remain elusive. We therefore tested the effect of pathway-specific drugs on endurance capacities of mice in a treadmill running test. We found that PPARÎ/Î agonist and exercise training synergistically increase oxidative myofibers and running endurance in adult mice. Because training activates AMPK and PGC1α, we then tested whether the orally active AMPK agonist AICAR might be sufficient to overcome the exercise requirement. Unexpectedly, even in sedentary mice, 4 weeks of AICAR treatment alone induced metabolic genes and enhanced running endurance by 44%. These results demonstrate that AMPK-PPARÎ pathway can be targeted by orally active drugs to enhance training adaptation or even to increase endurance without exercise.
Here's an example.
A company made ant poision, but the federal regulatory agency made them take it off the market.
Their law firm recommended that they appeal the agency's decision in court, so they did. They lost. The law firm recommended that they appeal to a higher court, so they did. They lost. The law firm recommended that they appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. The company sent a fax telling the law firm not to do it. The law firm appealed to the Supreme Court anyway. They lost.
Doing that, they ran up bills of $400,000. The ant poison company refused to pay. The law firm sued for the bill.
To prove their case, the company had to find the fax machine's printed confirmation, to prove they sent the fax. They couldn't find it. They lost. They had to pay the law firm.
(This is my quick recollection from a Wall Street Journal story.)
Admittedly this is about a fax, not an email, but the principle should be the same. If they had a copy of an email saying, "To confirm our conversation today, we don't want you to appeal any farther," they would have won the case.
So yeah, there are some emails you should save forever, particularly CYA emails.
Except when the sources are bad. Take this knol article, for instance
http://knol.google.com/k/hunter-handsfield/safe-sex/nAi5F17X/WdH0tg#
This safe sex page doesn't even mention that going into IT can ensure a 100% avoidance of STDS. And they call themselves experts!
That's interesting. H. Hunter Handsfield is one of the top experts on STDs in the U.S. I have a textbook with his chapters, and I heard him give a lecture on STDs at a National Institutes of Health conference. That conference was not a good place to pick up girls.
He's also the author of the famous color atlas of STDs, which is another good way to discourage activities which lead to STDs.
The New Scientist reported on a conference in London in which participants tried out different pickup lines and evaluated the results.
The worst pickup line of all: "I have a PhD in computer science."
So you are correct in that respect.
The cells that would be used are progenitor cells obtained from the blood or bone marrow,...
The word you're looking for to describe those cells is stem cells. But it wasn't the poster's fault. The poorly written article makes the same mistake.
Well, actually, they were progenitor cells, or at least that's what the investigators called them. http://americanheart.mediaroom.com/index.php?s=43&item=471
Stem cells are able to differentiate along different pathways, to become the cells that form tissues, such as the lining and structural tissues used to form blood vessels. But progenitor cells also differentiate along different pathways to become cells that form tissues. If cell A is on the pathway to cell B, then A is a progenitor of B. Cell A might or might not be a stem cell. Some researchers do refer to the cells that lead to specific tissues, like heart muscle, as stem cells. But people also refer to them as progenitor cells. The source of funding might have something to do with the choice of language.
Actually, I think it was a pretty well-written article. (Disclosure: I know Ed Edelson.)
But I don't think Edelson would mind the criticism. Good science teachers always want students to show off how smart they are and try to prove them wrong. Better to be cocky than stupid.
Don Ho had this surgery done where his own stem cells, extracted from his blood, were injected into his heart. He died soon after but his surgeon claims that the surgery was so successful that Don didn't recover fully before resuming touring and put too much strain on his heart and died.
Actually, there were several studies that infused heart muscle stem cells into damaged hearts, over the last few years. Some German researchers are widely regarded as the most aggressive, or the most irresponsible, depending on who you talk to. The problem is that their patients also died. As I recall, the treatment didn't do any harm, but it didn't do any good. (That was dumb luck; patients can die in these studies.) There was a good review article in Science magazine that I'm too lazy to look up. A lot of people thought that human trials were premature, and they should go back to the mice and get it working first.
The problem with mice is that they don't pay doctors' bills. The advantage of mice is that, if the mouse dies, you can always get another mouse.
The Harvard researchers went back to the mice, which is what they should be doing. The interesting thing they did was mix the endothelial progenitor cells with the mesenchymal progenitor cells (or stem cells, if you prefer). And they got it working in real, living mice. The vessels lined up just right, and joined each other just the way real blood vessels are supposed to. I'd like to read the Circulation article and see what growth factors they used (probably VEGF and some other stuff).
To put this in context, it's important to realize that circulatory heart disease damages blood vessels, which then damages heart muscle. These Harvard guys are repairing blood vessels. Other people are working on heart muscle.
Here's the Bishchoff lab http://chbresearch.org/bischoff/research/index.htm
or he would have been killing infidels on the operating table because muslims are liars and murderers.
I would have missed that (because it had such a low rating), if cailith1970 hadn't pointed it out.
That really is disgraceful racism. It's not clever or cute or funny. That's crude and stupid even by the tolerant standards of Slashdot.
There's no place in science or medicine for racism. It's not enough to ignore it. We have to let people know that their behavior is unacceptable.
When (if) you grow up and become a functioning member of society, you'll realize that.
Since the personalized genome companies were started by people in the medical community, they could just as easily say, "Facing a medical community that will promote anything to the public..."
Or, "Facing an online media that will say anything sensational in a desperate effort to attract readers..."
Right. 2 of the criminal corporations that were treated the way you say are the asbestos industry and the tobacco industry.
Workers were exposed to asbestos for decades, while asbestos companies like Johns-Mansville knew that it was causing lung cancer, according to medical reports in their files that came out after they were sued, but they didn't warn those workers. When it all came out, they were hit with millions of dollars in damages, and went bankrupt. You don't see much asbestos around any more.
The tobacco industry is unfortunately so wealthy and politically powerful that they're almost (but not quite) untouchable. They got hit with millions of dollars in damages. The public health people who took them on were pretty smart, and they got money to pay for anti-tobacco education, publicity campaigns, etc. In a big court case, huge amounts of documents get subpoenaed, but the defendants insist on making them confidential as one of the conditions for settling (see the IBM antitrust case). This time, the public health people insisted on making the documents public, and put them in a great database, which revealed their devious methods, and exposed the people we trusted who betrayed us (search Google for "tobacco documents").
Unfortunately, the corporate executives didn't go to jail, even though they killed more people (400,000/year from cigarettes) than Osama bin Laden ever will.
Given the sentiments you expressed, you would probably enjoy reading Ted Rall http://www.gocomics.com/rallcom/, although you probably do already. He was warning us from the very first about Obama.
I just spent 2 days reading a few articles about this general area of research in last week's New England Journal of Medicine, so let me try to explain this to my fellow /.r's who so generously explain to me about warez and the penguin.
Doctors now believe that cancer goes through several stages before it becomes a problem. Cells become cancerous all the time, but usually the immune systen destroys them. To simplify a bit, immune cells such as dendrocytes (which is the hot immune cell these days) recognize cancer proteins. Dendrocytes take a piece of the cancer protein to a T cell, and the T cell kills the cancer cells. There's a great explanation of the immune process on Kimball's Biology Pages http://users.rcn.com/jkimball.ma.ultranet/BiologyPages/A/AntigenPresentation.html, and if you take a few minutes to figure it out you'll understand one of the most amazing discoveries of the last century.
The reason we get cancer is that sometimes that process doesn't work. All it takes is one time during your lifetime when a cancer cell "figures out" a way to evade the immune system, and the cancer takes off.
It obviously occurs to doctors that it would be cool (and probably win a Nobel prize) if they could figure out some way to goose the immune system into fighting cancer, just the way they goose it into fighting viruses with vaccines.
One guy who tried that was Steven Rosenberg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steven_Rosenberg at the NIH. Rosenberg took melanoma cells from patients, and tried to stimulate the patient's immune system with a molecule called interleukin-2 that cells use to signal immune attacks. I remember reading about that around 1984, I think. The cancer slowed down but it came back. Rosenberg has been working on it ever since.
I remember seeing a cover headline in Fortune magazine back then about Rosenberg, to the effect, "Cure for cancer." (No question mark.) Do you suppose the media hype these things?
In order to understand cancer research, you have to understand that they can kill cancer cells in laboratory bottles, they can cure cancer in mice, but when they try to kill cancer cells in humans, time and again, it doesn't work. When it finally works in humans, that's news. The other thing you have to understand is that there are many treatments that make cancer tumors shrink or disappear for a while, but they usually come back. Cancer patients don't want the cancer to go away for 6 months -- they want it to go away forever. There are a few cancers that can sometimes be cured, like testicular cancer and childhood leukemia, and maybe some prostate cancers, but most of the time, for the big 3 (colon, breast, lung) oncologists are just trying to extend life. Of course, if you're 65 and your doctor can keep you alive for another 20 years with colon cancer or leukemia, that's not so bad. Most of the successful treatments for cancer extend the life of a cancer patient from, say, 20 months to 25 months, or 40 months to 45 months, but sometimes they get a really big jump, and for people with chronic myelogenic leukemia, imatinab (Gleevec) can extend their lives indefinitely.
Anyway, the really big news is that somebody actually managed to get a treatment like Rosenberg's to work on a real human with melanoma, who seems to be cured after 2 years. This was published in the New England Journal of Medicine, Treatment of metastatic melanoma with autologous CD4+ T cells against NY-ESO-1, Naomi Hunder et al., 358:2698 http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/short/358/25/2698 In the past, they've gotten melanoma (and kidney cancer) to regress for a while, but it came back. This time it seems to be gone for good -- in one patient.
Basically, they had a patient with melanoma that had spread to his lungs. He had T cells that
Be sure to wear your safety goggles. I know!
Although I must say that the eye heals suprisingly well after a minor injury. http://content.nejm.org/cgi/content/full/358/21/2265 (Hyphema is blood in the eye.)
If we know the steps that HIV uses to assemble its virus particles, we can look for a way to jam up one of those steps.
This video (and the research behind it) helps us understand how HIV assembles its virus particles. It helps researchers figure out a way to jam up the works.
Researchers have already figured out how to jam up the works in some of the other steps in HIV processes. As a result, HIV used to kill people after about 6 years. Now they can go on for decades.
Of course, the main reason they do it is because it's cool. Scientists who do things just because it's cool have probably saved more lives than scientists who do things because they're trying to save lives.
As an added benefit, they better understand how the cell works. Once they understand how the cell works, it's easier to do other cool things like give cancer patients another 10 or 20 years. And 20 more years looks pretty good when you're 65 years old.
ROT-13 isn't too secure. If you ever use it, you should encrypt it twice.
I'm glad to see that the federal government has decided that it's a violation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act to violate the TOS by giving false information in registration.
My p0rn site says, "I affirm by clicking on this agreement that I am not a police officer, detective, agent of any government agency or prosecutor, or any kind of investigator, and I will not bring and have no intention of bringing any legal action or complaint against this web site or anyone affiliated with this web site."
So if any anti-p0rn investigator clicks onto my web site, he's violating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, by by getting fraudulent unauthorized access to my computer, and the U.S. Attorney's Office will prosecute him or her.
Jane served throughout the war, and was painted on the tanks with those brave British boys who went ashore on D-Day. After the War, she was rewarded with an audience with the King. She is remembered to this day by those who fought with her.
This is about like the guy who does the obituaries column in the local paper sounding the alarm about nuclear war - meaningless, but no doubt it makes him feel better....
You picked a poor metaphor. The guy who did the obituaries in the New York Times was Theodore Bernstein, who is most distinguished for arguing at an editorial conference before the imminent Cuban Bay of Pigs invasion that the Times had an obligation to print what they knew about the invasion, which would have scuttled the invasion. (That was the journalistic equivalent of the engineer's pre-flight conference before the Challenger disaster.) That invasion led to the U.S.-U.S.S.R. Cuban missile nuclear showdown, which was as close as we've ever come to destroying the world.Bernstein was accused of left-wing sympathies during the days of the blacklist, and as a result, the Times busted him down to the obituary page. Back in those days, we had a social contract that, if you committed yourself to a corporation, they would give you a job for life, so instead of firing people who were drunk or incompetent, the Times would just assign them to the obituary page. Unlike everyone else, Bernstein revolutionized the obituary page by writing serious obituaries.
Bernstein also wrote a textbook about copy-editing called Headlines and Deadlines, which is still used in journalism schools. The main point of that book, BTW, was that copy editors should check the facts of a story, and make sure it gets all sides. If the Times had followed that advice, they would have avoided some recent humiliations. So Bernstein got the last laugh again.