We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.
Which probably means that some small fraction of the population was already resistant when the "experiment" began. No need to wait for a lucky mutation. Just apply strong selection pressure and the trait quickly spreads.
BT crops were first introduced in 1995 and there has been a steady stream of resistance reports since the early 2000's so it's just been a matter of time before the worms got it. There's even a paper here from 2003 where it was empirically determined that approx 1 in 1000 insects already carried a resistance gene in the wild before any selection pressure. http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fgould/pdfs/Burd2003.pdf
Is this a surprise, that nature can route around humans? Seriously, this was expected. However, all this means is that Monsato and other evil corporations like it who create GM seeds now have an opening for a new product to develop and sell, for an even higher price. And they will get this higher price because the "old" GM seeds are not successful any more. And the cycle continues...
Really, the crux of the problem is that Monsanto has an effective monopoly on GM crops (~90% market share last I checked), and it's operating with as much scruples as any other company in the same position (i.e. Ma Bell, US. Steel, Standard Oil, Microsoft back in the early 90's . . ). As much as I hate people who claim "the free market" will cure all our woes, if we just had 2 or 3 equally powerful GM companies they would actually have to compete with each other on price and features and licensing terms (for example, allowing farmers to save seeds for replanting).
The sad state of things as they are now are the end result of the effective monopoly combined with the unprecedented patent protection that GM crops have been afforded compared to other types of plant breed protection - this guarantees that every new innovation will be overproduced and overused to maximize profits up until they are completely useless. I mean, we are talking about 15 year-old technology in a field where you have trouble giving away last year's gene sequencers on craiglist because they are so outdated.
It may amuse you to learn how the Monsanto people "engineered" their genetically modified and patent-protected seeds.
They hit them with random mutagens until they found something that was resistant to Roundup. And then they bred them like pedigree cats to enhance the effect. The grass genome (from which corn, wheat, and a number of other crops are derived) is absurdly complex, believed to contain four to six times as many genes as the human, and comes in five copies. Engineering it is very hit-and-miss. So they didn't even bother. Instead they patented the outcome of a directed natural process. It's like patenting the domesticated cow genome. (The grass-eating variety, not the mother-in-law variety.)
This is incorrect, my biochem prof many moons ago consulted for Monsanto and gave us a nice lecture on how this was accomplished. Basically, Roundup (glyphosphate) inhibits an enzyme in most plants that is required to synthesize essential amino acids from glycine. It turns out certain insects have an orthologous enzyme that is not inhibited by glyphosphate - this was spliced into the "roundup ready" seeds. This is how the engineered strains can also have high yield; if you simply tried to randomly mutate glyphosphate resistance, chances are you'd also reduce the efficiency of the enzyme itself and produce a pretty sickly crop with poor yields. The problem with weeds is that even a sickly growing weed can mess up your crop.
Genetic engineering is certainly not elegant, it's mostly cut-and-paste jobs, but you only use directed evolution to fine tune things as it justs gets stuck in a local evolutionary minimum.
This is one of the most relevant comments on this entire story (though Wikipedia puts the current human mortality figure at around 60%).
No, we don't want to censor information. But we DO, in certain cases.
No, in general it's not good for society if scientific information is withheld. But if this baby gets out, would we still HAVE a society? This is truly a nightmare scenario: a virus with mortality rates comparable to ebola, as transmissible as the common flu.
I truly do understand the arguments for putting information out there. But think for a moment about what happens if a suicidal person gets ahold of this, or a religious zealot who thinks it won't affect him or his flock, or some other nut who believes it won't affect him or that society is too sick to go on, etc., etc. All it would take is one.
We're not talking about someone grabbing a high powered rifle and gunning down a few people in a public square (as bad as that can be). We're talking potentially billions dead.
Completely agreed. What makes this a real dilemma from a policy perspective is that since the threat of mutations arising that cause a naturally occurring pandemic are real, knowing the intermediate steps means that you can monitor local outbreaks via the virus sequence and know whether this calls for a "we can weather this" response or a invoke our doomsday quarantine everything response or something inbetween. The stakes are pretty high.
The authors note that they estimate at least 100 public health agencies, maybe 1,000 experts, would then need to know the exact sequence to look for in order to coordinate an effective global response, and that at that point it would be pointless to treat it as classified as few of these people operate in organizations that are capable of that level of secrecy.
So we have a catch-22. Everyone agrees that giving a detailed recipe, although unlikely to be feasible for a non-state actor to implement, is probably a bad idea. But the value of this research to protect global public health is nil if every country in the world with a public health infrastructure is not allowed to know the sequence to look for in infected patients (after all, once a virus goes pandemic there's very little we can do to stop it from crossing borders). It's clear cut how to dial "11" or "0" on the secrecy meter - classify it and tell no-one, or tell everyone, but is there a "medium" setting that doesn't effectively result in being "0"??
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
This is the classical dual-use dilemma. It should be pointed out all the scientists involved are public health researchers and not military trying to make a weapon. Knowing exactly what mutations cause the virus to go airborne and become human to human transmissible would provide a very accurate and effective way for public health workers on the ground to assess in-real time via some sort of PCR diagnostic that could be done in any reasonably equipped hospital lab whether a local outbreak is about to go pandemic or not, and react accordingly.
Interview of the lead scientist in the NYtimes indicates that even if the complete recipe were revealed, it would be difficult to replicate without very sophisticated equipment. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to spell out exactly what you need to do, especially as there are probably analagous things that can be done with other viruses that don't require such a sophisticated setup.
Q. How easy is it to recreate this virus? A: It is not very easy. You need a very sophisticated specialist team and sophisticated facilities to do this. And in our opinion, nature is the biggest bioterrorist. There are many pathogens in nature that you could get your hands on very easily, and if you released those in the human population, we would be in trouble.
And therefore we think that if bioterror or biowarfare would be a problem, there are so many easy ways of doing it that nobody would take this H5N1 virus and do this very difficult thing to achieve it.
You could not do this work in your garage if you are a terrorist organization. But what you can do is get viruses out of the wild and grow them in your garage. There are terrorist opportunities that are much, much easier than to genetically modify H5N1 bird flu virus that are probably much more effective.
Not too off the mark. Prior trials on HIV prevention have been done on high risk populations in Thailand and Botswana. And these are studies sponsored by the CDC, not a rogue evil scientist as with the Guatemala experiments (whom, it should be noted, had absolutely no oversight even though he was using US tax dollars as these checks weren't required back then).
Overseas trials do bring up a whole host of ethical concerns (especially when dealing with populations that have little or no access to healthcare - making participation in a trial perhaps the only way to see a real doctor). This is a real issue because usually the control population gets "standard of care" which is very different in the US vs the developing world. What's even shadier is that there have been allegations of drug companies secretly hiring shady doctors in the third world to enroll patients in highly risky studies that would never be approved in the US, and the patients often don't even know they were in an experimental study, they thought they were getting a proven treatment.
At least, with the CDC trials, one can be assured that the participants are actually volunteers who gave explicit consent and had the risks explained to them (unlike those Guatemalan prisoners who had no choice), that the trial protocol passed review by external ethics boards both in the US and by the local governmental authority (again, unlike Guatemala where outside of a few prison officials the local gov't had no idea what was going on). Not that these are fool-proof checks in countries with unstable or nonexistent public health infrastructures and highly corrupt officials, but at least it's something.
The solution to this is simple. In fact, people have been doing it for thousands of years: selective breeding. Take your landfill bacteria sample. Break it up into groups, and give each group some toxins to nosh on. The group that performs best gets cultured and split up again. All others get culled. Repeat. This technique was already proven in a 16 year old's science project.
Yes, that would be the standard operating procedure for an organism with a rapid generation time (20 minutes for e. coli) and culturable in a lab (so you can control the nutrient conditions and do your selective breeding). I can't find any information on the generation time of Xenophyophores, in fact it may not be known, but I would be shocked if it was quicker than months to years per generation. And something that only lives on the sea floor is probably the hardest conditions I can think of (until aliens are discovered) to try and replicate in a lab. So double icksnay on the selective breeding.
It would be easier to sequence its genome and try to reverse engineer the biochemical pathway that is responsible for sequestering the radioactive substances. If it were a small, standalone pathway with just a handful of genes that are not hopelessly interwoven with weird deep-sea biological processes we have no clue about, you might have a shot transplanting it into something that is easier to manipulate like algae or tobacco plants.
Now, when I say easier, I mean "free trip to Stockholm" easier, not "high school science project" easier. Remember the early 90's when photoshop came out and everyone thought it was sooo clever to cut out someone's head and put it on a supermodel's body? That's about how sophisticated genetic engineering is right now.
I can't be the only one thinking that an organism that is simple and can absorb heavy metals sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like something that *could* be easy (in relative terms) to genetically modify for cleaning up toxic areas.
Yes, I know, what could possibly go wrong...
There are actually lots of microbes that metabolize and break down toxic wastes. Typically they are found simply by digging into a pile of hazardous waste and seeing what is growing there. The problem is that these organisms don't have to be particularly fast or efficient to defend their niche, they just need to survive where other's can't, so in their natural state they will not make a significant difference on the timescales convenient to us (i.e. a 1,000 year cleanup). So we need to at least understand enough to genetically engineer a yugo into a porche, and that isn't exactly easy.
The second catch here is that deep sea life also typically has extremely slow metabolisms to begin with compared to terrestrial organisms. You can't spend energy faster than you take it in, and that's very slow indeed on the ocean floor. Fish down there are adapted to months inbetween feedings and can live for many decades, I can only imagine how slowly these 10 cm blobs eat and reproduce.
This is flux pinning, and apparently, is a different phenomenon than the Meissner effect.
Yes, but this was already well known in the late 1980's when type II superconductors hit center stage in the solid-state physics world. And 30 seconds later every single person in the field thought "hey, we could SOOO build a sweet maglev train with this". But it's still not practical by any stretch of the imagination except as a neat toy.
So/. is only 20+ years late instead of ~80 years with the Meissner effect.
Okay, but around that time there was some important work tying information theory to perception that was relatively groundbreaking work. It's still cited today, and modeling of visual cortex as "noisy channels" is still fairly widespread practice. However, maybe that makes sense because most of the common tools used in psychophysics historically came from Signal Detection Theory, and other radio operator related math.
Agreed. IANASH (I am not a science historian) but the impression I get from the book is that it was this initial success that spawned all the other fields to try and have a "me too" moment which led to the bubble. So although I'm pretty sure the book does mention this as an event that happened, the science itself was certainly not presented with the same clarity and poignancy that the author details early developments in the mathematics of logarithms and wacky precursors to the telegraph. If you can recommend an accessible history of psychophysics, I'd be all ears:-)
I'm a little confused by your comment about the ill-fated information theory. It still does dominate many fields. I know that psychophysics has benefitted greatly from it, and the people doing it are plenty "mathematically inclined."
I did not mean that information theory was ill-fated, but right after it's publication there was an irrational jubilation that all of science was going to be solved in an "information theory" framework that led to failed journals, societies, and hundreds of really poorly thought out papers all entitled "An information theory approach to ____(insert longstanding scientific problem here)". Generally these papers took the log of some important measurement, calculated an "effective bandwidth", and maintained that this was somehow a more profound way to understand the problem (the significance of which was left to the reader's imagination).
Shannon himself complained in a 1956 editorial that "Information theory has become something of scientific bandwagon. . ..A few first-rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half finished. The latter are not a credit to the writers and a waster of time to their readers."
We are way past the "information theory" bubble nowadays and the practitioners are quite mature by comparison, so it's hard to imagine the time described by these historical anecdotes. My best mental approximation would be if Craig Venter, Stephen Hawkings, and Bill Gates simultaneously held a press conference announcing that some "new kind of science" (*cough cough Wolfram*) was going to unify gene therapy research, cosmology, and social welfare in sub-saharan Africa all at once.. That's how ridiculous it got.
Perhaps that is the most useful thing I got from this book, that history shows us that scientific fads can even be based on real, ultimately transformative breakthroughs. But they will still walk and feel like a fad when people, especially out-of-field scientists, are irrationally exuberant about it.
I'm still confused. Is this the kind of book that has at least some equations and algorithms (I get that its not exclusively this) or is it the kind of book that mostly rampages on about Turing's love life and how the crude savages of the era screwed him over? I'm just trying to figure out how soft -n- fluffy it is.
Neither, and therein lies the weakness of this book. This review is spot on. The beginning chapters are all these interesting historical anecdotes that do a pretty good job of contextualizing the disjointed and awkward methods of transmitting and thinking about information in the pre-Shannon era. As a series of lesser-known historical anecdotes, it's quite fascinating to know that Babbage like to crack codes as a hobby and that Shannon and Turing directly influenced each other's work as they had regular lunchtime discussions at Bell labs. That is interesting thread that got me to read the book, it felt like a great set-up to a really interesting and accessible primer to information theory.
But then, once Shannon is introduced, the author seems at a loss to explain what information theory is actually used for other than a vague sentiment that it's "useful everywhere, like in the internets and satellites and stuff". In fact, the narrative seems to fall into the same trap that is described wherein a bunch of non-mathematically inclined "visionaries" from psychologists to linguists and architects all jump on an ill-fated "information theory can explain everything" bandwagon without really understanding what it is that information theory can and can't do, leading to quasi-celebrity status for a (very bewildered) Shannon. This then devolves into an extended discussion of memes from the early work of Dawkins which met a similar fate (the "journal of mimetics" was short-lived due to a complete inability of it's founders to agree on exactly what belonged in it). The treatment of biological information is amazingly scant beyond some re-hashing of Dawkins and Gould, given how fundamental information theory is to the modern field of bioinformatics and the like. It then wraps up with with obligatory creation stories of wikipedia, google and discussions of information glut, the likes of which a slashdot audience would already know by heart and therefore find unenlightening.
The actual information theory examples explained in the book do not go beyond the toy examples from Shannon's paper, which is itself very well written and eminently accessible if you have a little statistics and math background. So if you are looking for that, go straight to the source instead instead of reading this book. If you are looking for some neat historical anecdotes about what people used to do to save money on telegraph messages and dreams that Ada Loveless had about being able to see a new world in her head where algorithm developers would someday rule the world, by all means enjoy the first 5 chapters, but the remainder is quite forgettable I'm afraid.
You're giving the phrase too much credit. The term "class warfare" is just an advertising slogan. It's what conservatives say in response to any program which might raise revenues on the upper class. It's not something that can be torn apart and dissected - it's just a phrase meant to evoke a gut response and get people to vote the other way. History means nothing to a slogan.
Right on!
My grandparents had everything their family owned in China robbed by bandits, then the Marxists came and forcibly confiscated everything else and said "this belongs to the people now, you'll leave and never come back if you know what's good for you". They fled with nothing more than the shirts on their back. THAT is "redistribution of wealth". Decades later, my remaining foreign-educated relatives were stripped of their professorships and forced to work in rice paddies during the Cultural Revolution. THAT is "class warfare". I demand the next politician who uses either of these phrases either retroactively get flunked in history 101, or be willing to explain to my grandparents how adjusting the marginal tax rate by from 15 to 25% for the top 10% of earners is in any way similar to either of these.
Someone with mod points please bump the parent up.
I read the entire transcript and failed to see that any of the points in the summary were actually key points in this sordid story. This transcript clearly shows that using criminal investigators to investigate scientific misconduct is usually a bad idea, but without any context on what decisions the OIG actually took either using or ignoring this interview (as opposed to those taken by Monett's own agency), it's hard to accuse them of anything in particular other than wasting alot of time.
What's odd in this case is there there's so little respect for science and the scientists that do it. and the idea that the government should hire its own scientists is just absurd - scientists need to report to an academic institution.
I agree that it's hard to get truly unbiased science working for a government agency that has certain vested interests and is governed by political appointees. The idea of manuscripts having to pass a "poltical correctness" litmus test is a huge red flag for transparency.
But the flip side is that many of these agencies are in charge of scientific evaluations which require extensive in-house expertise that would be difficult to outsource without creating larger conflicts of interest. Most academics rely on said government agencies directly or indirectly for research funding, which would presents a problem when it comes to objectively evaluating that agency's mistakes. Often the specific science required by a government agency is decidedly unsexy stuff (example, the transects detailed in the manuscript) that an independent academic would simply not be able to sustain an academic career with in the absence of a long-term contract from the government agency specifically for that purpose. Contract research (i.e. where an outside expert is hired) is great for short term studies with a highly specific goals, but for long term stuff where you are not exactly sure what to look for up front, you must have your own in-house expertise. Even if you contract out all the gruntwork (i.e. seasonal, short-term staff), you need long-term staff trained to analyze the results and evaluate how it impacts the mission of the agency , not to mention to design these studies in the first place.
agenda is corrosive to science.
Hear hear! I always maintain that if we really wanted an objective take on AGW, the best thing to do would be to identify the best and brightest climatologists, seclude them in a secret bunker somewhere, tell them they can't be fired but please keep us updated on a regular basis on Exactly How Bad it really is. Instead, we turn every single utterance that anyone remotely related to climate research into A Big Deal in the mass media, we have politicians threatening to cut all their funding on a regular basis, we've created a climate where only the agenda-aggrandizing, media-attention-craving big ego set can survive. And that's not really what we wanted regardless of your political stance.
it's also kind of appalling that they still do these transects with some guys in a bush plane: no continual video record, no constant gps track, etc.
Heh, that's how wildlife biology is done, experienced eyes and good notetaking are usually superior to technological overkill in most circumstances. I'm sure if you want to foot the tax bill for continuous video monitoring that can detect a seal on the ice in any direction from 1,300 feet from a moving helicopter, said biologists wouldn't be against having one. Heck, I was impressed they have a data recorder and an actual database set up for this and not just scribbles in lab notebook.
Coming from the bio-molecular simulation world, you'll find that the GPU performance is not only vendor specific (as has been mentioned) but even among essentially equivalent simulation software will be implementation specific (i.e. package X was written for CUDA and needs double precision so you have to buy the expensive Tesla stuff vs package Y in single-precision will work with a consumer NVIDIA card vs something else that works in an AMD card) and even problem-specific (i.e. there's a speedup if you simulate this many atoms but not if you simulate more than that many atoms arranged in such and such a way.). It may work in a GPU but not even provide any speedup.
In such a scenario there's no substitute for in-house benchmarking on evaluation hardware with real-world test cases before you plunk down for a large GPU order. The majority stakeholders may already be aware of strict hardware requirements for any existing GPU code, so start there. If noone has used GPU's in their applications before now and this is an attempt to "future-proof" the cluster, don't do it! Delay the purchase until you can establish that the user group will actually see a benefit from GPUs before you buy, otherwise it will easily become a white elephant. .
Ever wonder why the option at the end of every damn Government spending cycle to NOT spend the money is never an option to choose? Like we have to wonder how the hell we ended up trillions of dollars in debt.
Sad to say, I've seen Government "last-minute" spending like this too, but not exactly to this level of magnitude. This is a shitload of money "left over". This may have come from somewhere, but "budget" obviously had nothing to do with it.
Yeah, I used to wonder that too. Then my wife got a job in state government. And the answer became painfully obvious judging by the maximum pace at which stuff gets done even when you have people willing to work hard and important problems sitting right in front of you. If you allowed unspent money to roll over indefinitely, that would create an irresistible incentive to do the cheapest job that won't get you in trouble and then hoard, hoard that money. Heck, you could stretch that 3-year project into a 5-year one by doing it very slowly. You could build up a war chest and use it on pet projects that noone approved. Or you could wait till no-one even remembers the project existed anymore and then embezzle it.
So as inefficient as it is, the blanket rule that all money must be spent the year in which it is allocated is a simple way to increase transparency and accountability across the board. It may even be one of the driving forces anything gets done remotely on schedule in an environment where purchasing a USB cable requires 2 requisition forms, 3 vendor quotes, the signature of your boss (who is in an all-day meeting), your boss's boss (who is talking with legislators today and can't be disturbed), and pre-approval from someone in accounting (who just went on vacation yesterday).
Of course, it would be great if getting the job done on time and under-cost were somehow rewarded. But that's incentivizing success, that's the profit maximizing, the corporate bottom line, whereas the the Gub'ment bottom line is minimizing "embarrassment" (be it from the media, the voting public, and especially legislators on the appropriations committee). You use a Gub'ment bureaucracy for things you can't trust the for-profit world to do on their own, so the service provided has to be somewhat divorced from the revenue stream if you want to ensure more reliable results than just contracting out to a private company. (I'm sure Ron Paul would beg to differ, but then again he also probably enjoys being able drink water out of the tap without getting sick). You wouldn't pay a health inspector, for example, just based on the number of sites inspected per day because that encourages as cursory a job as possible on as many sites as possible. Instead, you set a minimum quota they have to fulfill, and then make it known you'll have their head on a platter if a restaurant shows up in the news for salmonella poisoning the week after you've signed off on it. That's the Gub'ment way... .
As much as I want the JWST to succeed, I'm sure this precise concern will cause many sleepless nights for the space scientists and engineers involved. It's an excellent argument against mortgaging the future of an entire field on one, single, monolithic project.
Fortunately, the JWST is going on an Arianne 5 provided by ESA, which has a 95% success rate (2 failures in 36 launches). As a bonus, if it blows up we can point fingers at the Europeans, always a popular pastime on this side of the pond.
I agree - this is the most unsatisfying aspect of this study, in that most cases end with settlement and a non-disclosure agreement, meaning there is absolutely no data on how meritorious the claim was and how exploitative the settlement was. It seems quite obvious to me, (IANAL) that only relatively strong patent claims would actually result in litigation, and that most "troll-like" behavior would be in cases that are simultaneously weak but expensive enough to contest that a settlement is cheaper. Arguably, the prevalence of this behavior, which cannot be addressed in any way by this study, is at the heart of the patent troll debate.
from page 26 of TFA:
"One important caveat is that most cases settle. Indeed, most of the cases studied here settled or were otherwise disposed of without a merits ruling. This can affect the findings in a couple of ways. First, it reduces the sample size. Second, it is unclear why cases settle. It may be that only the weakest patents are litigated because defendants refuse to pay. However, it could also be that the strongest patents are litigated because plaintiffs refuse to settle for a nuisance payment. Third, many cases are litigated to judgment because NPEs are asserting infringement where there is none."
Given that senators get older every year, you can rest assured they have never significantly cut funding for aging related research unless it was stem-cell related. For grins, you can do a full-text search for "telomerase" and "aging" in the NIH funded grant database and see how many hits you get. . .
you'll see lots of ideas along the lines you've proposed (not exactly but close). I'm not in the aging field, but I can attest that to the fact that pretty much everyone who took cell biology with me walked out of the aging lecture thinking "why can't we fix this already", so I'm pretty sure others are trying as we speak. The devil is always in the details, of course, and from what little I do know I'm not holding my breath until we get a working gene therapy vector that doesn't give you leukemia as a side effect. . .
Yes, it's more impressive than an "OR" gate (which could simply be two different mechanisms that trigger the same effect), but the word Logic circuit just doesn't do it for me.
You really want to impress me, show me an "XOR" - either of two indications, but not both.
Looks like these undergrads still have some bugs to work out, but in principle such a thing should be eminently possible given that most genes already have tons of positive and negative regulators that can be easily co-opted and transplanted. The trick is making a robust system with enough dynamic range that you can easily read the output, but with enough finesse that it can dampen the noise as well as mother nature does it.
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
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It's been noted by other posters, but this treatment is just amping up what the cell would normally do if it detected a viral infection, that is, kill itself to save the host. It turns out most successful viruses have evolved a way to shut off this response, and this treatment is like adding a redundant way to activate it. That's not to say it couldn't backfire, most of these self-destruct pathways need to be activated by multiple inputs to avoid accidental triggering (just like needing two special keys to be pressed at once to launch a nuke), and now it's replaced by one giant shiny red button.
As for weakening our immune system, I should add It's a common misconception that the adaptive immune system provides the bulk of our body's defense from invasions (i.e. the one that can "learn" from vaccinations and infections). In fact the first line of defense is the innate immune system which is what is protecting us 99% of the time, and the naturally occurring suicide pathways alluded to before (apoptosis) are a last-line of defense - neither of these are systems with any capability to "learn" from an infection and therefore they won't get weaker just because we use them less should such treatments prove effective.
Back when I was doing biomolecular NMR research, I would regularly have to crawl under a 16.4 T magnet to calibrate the pulse sequences. All the fillings in my mouth would ache like I was getting my first set of braces in middle-school again. Freaky.
Back to TFA - only an abstract is posted, so I can't read about the proposed mechanism, but as all the people who work with MRI's have pointed out this amount of effect on blood viscosity at such a "low" field strength is hard to imagine unless there is something unusual about the shape or duration of the pulse that makes it substantially different from the static field in an MRI. Previous work with static fields has shown maybe a 1% change at 1T field strengths, with the more significant, 15-20% changes not evident until 5T or so (which is much higher than a typical clinical-use MRI, although some research MRIs certainly are in this range)
The filers of the patent are all employees of microsoft's blue-sky R&D labs (research.microsoft.com) in their "health and well being" section. They are not associated at all with microsoft product development, or with the Gates foundation, this is microsoft's attempt to replicate what Bell Labs or Xerox parc used to be like, and you can only hire that caliber of talent out of academia by letting them do whatever they want. Good gig if you can get it.
And they are, in fact, people who primarily do work in bioinformatics and human-computer interfaces and such, this patent very much reads like something written by electric engineers as it spends 75% of the time talking about the monitoring apparatus and otherwise just rehashes textbook-level information on the actual pathology and biology of parasites. So for all of those who are somehow worried that this is a part of an evil conspiracy on microsoft's part, don't worry, these people don't actually have a wet lab with germs and bugs in it, nor would they know what to do with them if they had it.
I think what MichealSmith meant was that maybe this organism is an "extremophile" because it developed in an arsenic-rich environment, thus adapting to use the arsenic which would otherwise kill it. You know, like how some organisms are resisctant to high temperatures that would kill you or me, because it turns out that they are mostly found in hot springs and the like.
Oh, well in that case the answer is an emphatic yes! The researchers were scraping the bottom of Mono Lake precisely because it has the highest known naturally occurring concentration of arsenic and they hypothesized some of the stuff living there might actually be eating it as opposed to just being able to tolerate it.
One of the fascinating aspects of the field of bioremediation (that is, trying to use microbes to break down our toxic waste) is that if you are looking for a strain that will eat toxin X, the best way to find one is go to a dump full of toxin X and see whats living under the sludge. The part that is amazing about it is these toxic dumps didn't exist 50 years ago, and the toxic chemicals simply don't exist in nature, unlike Mono lake and arsenic, both of which has been around a *long* time. So anything thriving on toxic chemicals near the dump site therefore must have adapted/evolved within the last 50 years or so (unless the giant spaghetti monster put it there).
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We didn't expect it to happen so quickly, that's all. Bacteria evolve much more rapidly than insects: E. coli splits once every 8 hours under optimal conditions in colonies of millions of cells, and may mutate up to 0.003% of their genome with each cell division under stress. That's a lot of brute forcing power. Insects, by contrast, have much more elaborate and stringent eukaryotic mutation controls, and most species take a couple of weeks to hatch.
Which probably means that some small fraction of the population was already resistant when the "experiment" began. No need to wait for a lucky mutation. Just apply strong selection pressure and the trait quickly spreads.
BT crops were first introduced in 1995 and there has been a steady stream of resistance reports since the early 2000's so it's just been a matter of time before the worms got it. There's even a paper here from 2003 where it was empirically determined that approx 1 in 1000 insects already carried a resistance gene in the wild before any selection pressure.
http://www4.ncsu.edu/~fgould/pdfs/Burd2003.pdf
Is this a surprise, that nature can route around humans? Seriously, this was expected. However, all this means is that Monsato and other evil corporations like it who create GM seeds now have an opening for a new product to develop and sell, for an even higher price. And they will get this higher price because the "old" GM seeds are not successful any more. And the cycle continues...
Really, the crux of the problem is that Monsanto has an effective monopoly on GM crops (~90% market share last I checked), and it's operating with as much scruples as any other company in the same position (i.e. Ma Bell, US. Steel, Standard Oil, Microsoft back in the early 90's . . ). As much as I hate people who claim "the free market" will cure all our woes, if we just had 2 or 3 equally powerful GM companies they would actually have to compete with each other on price and features and licensing terms (for example, allowing farmers to save seeds for replanting).
The sad state of things as they are now are the end result of the effective monopoly combined with the unprecedented patent protection that GM crops have been afforded compared to other types of plant breed protection - this
guarantees that every new innovation will be overproduced and overused to maximize profits up until they are completely useless. I mean, we are talking about 15 year-old technology in a field where you have trouble giving away last year's gene sequencers on craiglist because they are so outdated.
It may amuse you to learn how the Monsanto people "engineered" their genetically modified and patent-protected seeds.
They hit them with random mutagens until they found something that was resistant to Roundup. And then they bred them like pedigree cats to enhance the effect. The grass genome (from which corn, wheat, and a number of other crops are derived) is absurdly complex, believed to contain four to six times as many genes as the human, and comes in five copies. Engineering it is very hit-and-miss. So they didn't even bother. Instead they patented the outcome of a directed natural process. It's like patenting the domesticated cow genome. (The grass-eating variety, not the mother-in-law variety.)
This is incorrect, my biochem prof many moons ago consulted for Monsanto and gave us a nice lecture on how this was accomplished. Basically, Roundup (glyphosphate) inhibits an enzyme in most plants that is required to synthesize essential amino acids from glycine. It turns out certain insects have an orthologous enzyme that is not inhibited by glyphosphate - this was spliced into the "roundup ready" seeds. This is how the engineered strains can also have high yield; if you simply tried to randomly mutate glyphosphate resistance, chances are you'd also reduce the efficiency of the enzyme itself and produce a pretty sickly crop with poor yields. The problem with weeds is that even a sickly growing weed can mess up your crop.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roundup_(herbicide)#Genetic_engineering
Genetic engineering is certainly not elegant, it's mostly cut-and-paste jobs, but you only use directed evolution to fine tune things as it justs gets stuck in a local evolutionary minimum.
This is one of the most relevant comments on this entire story (though Wikipedia puts the current human mortality figure at around 60%).
No, we don't want to censor information. But we DO, in certain cases.
No, in general it's not good for society if scientific information is withheld. But if this baby gets out, would we still HAVE a society? This is truly a nightmare scenario: a virus with mortality rates comparable to ebola, as transmissible as the common flu.
I truly do understand the arguments for putting information out there. But think for a moment about what happens if a suicidal person gets ahold of this, or a religious zealot who thinks it won't affect him or his flock, or some other nut who believes it won't affect him or that society is too sick to go on, etc., etc. All it would take is one.
We're not talking about someone grabbing a high powered rifle and gunning down a few people in a public square (as bad as that can be). We're talking potentially billions dead.
Completely agreed. What makes this a real dilemma from a policy perspective is that since the threat of mutations arising that cause a naturally occurring pandemic are real, knowing the intermediate steps means that you can monitor local outbreaks via the virus sequence and know whether this calls for a "we can weather this" response or a invoke our doomsday quarantine everything response or something inbetween. The stakes are pretty high.
The authors note that they estimate at least 100 public health agencies, maybe 1,000 experts, would then need to know the exact sequence to look for in order to coordinate an effective global response, and that at that point it would be pointless to treat it as classified as few of these people operate in organizations that are capable of that level of secrecy.
So we have a catch-22. Everyone agrees that giving a detailed recipe, although unlikely to be feasible for a non-state actor to implement, is probably a bad idea. But the value of this research to protect global public health is nil if every country in the world with a public health infrastructure is not allowed to know the sequence to look for in infected patients (after all, once a virus goes pandemic there's very little we can do to stop it from crossing borders). It's clear cut how to dial "11" or "0" on the secrecy meter - classify it and tell no-one, or tell everyone, but is there a "medium" setting that doesn't effectively result in being "0"??
When I first read that the government wanted a scientific journal to bowdlerize their findings, I was naturally appalled. Then I read the article further and I was even more appalled – at the scientists.
Deliberately researching how to spread lethal bird flu to humans and make it more infectious? What the hell were they thinking? How could this possibly be a good idea? Even as a weapon, it's far too dangerous to ever use – once unleashed, it can and probably will spread back to whoever initiated it.
To quote Ian Malcolm from Jurassic Park: "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to think if they should."
This is the classical dual-use dilemma. It should be pointed out all the scientists involved are public health researchers and not military trying to make a weapon. Knowing exactly what mutations cause the virus to go airborne and become human to human transmissible would provide a very accurate and effective way for public health workers on the ground to assess in-real time via some sort of PCR diagnostic that could be done in any reasonably equipped hospital lab whether a local outbreak is about to go pandemic or not, and react accordingly.
Interview of the lead scientist in the NYtimes indicates that even if the complete recipe were revealed, it would be difficult to replicate without very sophisticated equipment. But that doesn't mean it's a good idea to spell out exactly what you need to do, especially as there are probably analagous things that can be done with other viruses that don't require such a sophisticated setup.
Q. How easy is it to recreate this virus?
A: It is not very easy. You need a very sophisticated specialist team and sophisticated facilities to do this. And in our opinion, nature is the biggest bioterrorist. There are many pathogens in nature that you could get your hands on very easily, and if you released those in the human population, we would be in trouble.
And therefore we think that if bioterror or biowarfare would be a problem, there are so many easy ways of doing it that nobody would take this H5N1 virus and do this very difficult thing to achieve it.
You could not do this work in your garage if you are a terrorist organization. But what you can do is get viruses out of the wild and grow them in your garage. There are terrorist opportunities that are much, much easier than to genetically modify H5N1 bird flu virus that are probably much more effective.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/12/22/health/security-in-h5n1-bird-flu-study-was-paramount-scientist-says.html?pagewanted=2&hp
Nah, we just have to find blind corners of human civilization that nobody cares about. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guatemala_syphilis_experiment , http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuskegee_syphilis_experiment
To do this in todays times... Guantanamo anyone?
Not too off the mark. Prior trials on HIV prevention have been done on high risk populations in Thailand and Botswana. And these are studies sponsored by the CDC, not a rogue evil scientist as with the Guatemala experiments (whom, it should be noted, had absolutely no oversight even though he was using US tax dollars as these checks weren't required back then).
http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/prep/resources/factsheets/pdf/prep.pdf
Overseas trials do bring up a whole host of ethical concerns (especially when dealing with populations that have little or no access to healthcare - making participation in a trial perhaps the only way to see a real doctor). This is a real issue because usually the control population gets "standard of care" which is very different in the US vs the developing world. What's even shadier is that there have been allegations of drug companies secretly hiring shady doctors in the third world to enroll patients in highly risky studies that would never be approved in the US, and the patients often don't even know they were in an experimental study, they thought they were getting a proven treatment.
At least, with the CDC trials, one can be assured that the participants are actually volunteers who gave explicit consent and had the risks explained to them (unlike those Guatemalan prisoners who had no choice), that the trial protocol passed review by external ethics boards both in the US and by the local governmental authority (again, unlike Guatemala where outside of a few prison officials the local gov't had no idea what was going on). Not that these are fool-proof checks in countries with unstable or nonexistent public health infrastructures and highly corrupt officials, but at least it's something.
The solution to this is simple. In fact, people have been doing it for thousands of years: selective breeding. Take your landfill bacteria sample. Break it up into groups, and give each group some toxins to nosh on. The group that performs best gets cultured and split up again. All others get culled. Repeat. This technique was already proven in a 16 year old's science project.
Yes, that would be the standard operating procedure for an organism with a rapid generation time (20 minutes for e. coli) and culturable in a lab (so you can control the nutrient conditions and do your selective breeding). I can't find any information on the generation time of Xenophyophores, in fact it may not be known, but I would be shocked if it was quicker than months to years per generation. And something that only lives on the sea floor is probably the hardest conditions I can think of (until aliens are discovered) to try and replicate in a lab. So double icksnay on the selective breeding.
It would be easier to sequence its genome and try to reverse engineer the biochemical pathway that is responsible for sequestering the radioactive substances. If it were a small, standalone pathway with just a handful of genes that are not hopelessly interwoven with weird deep-sea biological processes we have no clue about, you might have a shot transplanting it into something that is easier to manipulate like algae or tobacco plants.
Now, when I say easier, I mean "free trip to Stockholm" easier, not "high school science project" easier. Remember the early 90's when photoshop came out and everyone thought it was sooo clever to cut out someone's head and put it on a supermodel's body? That's about how sophisticated genetic engineering is right now.
I can't be the only one thinking that an organism that is simple and can absorb heavy metals sounds almost too good to be true. Sounds like something that *could* be easy (in relative terms) to genetically modify for cleaning up toxic areas.
Yes, I know, what could possibly go wrong...
There are actually lots of microbes that metabolize and break down toxic wastes. Typically they are found simply by digging into a pile of hazardous waste and seeing what is growing there. The problem is that these organisms don't have to be particularly fast or efficient to defend their niche, they just need to survive where other's can't, so in their natural state they will not make a significant difference on the timescales convenient to us (i.e. a 1,000 year cleanup). So we need to at least understand enough to genetically engineer a yugo into a porche, and that isn't exactly easy.
The second catch here is that deep sea life also typically has extremely slow metabolisms to begin with compared to terrestrial organisms. You can't spend energy faster than you take it in, and that's very slow indeed on the ocean floor. Fish down there are adapted to months inbetween feedings and can live for many decades, I can only imagine how slowly these 10 cm blobs eat and reproduce.
This is flux pinning, and apparently, is a different phenomenon than the Meissner effect.
Yes, but this was already well known in the late 1980's when type II superconductors hit center stage in the solid-state physics world. And 30 seconds later every single person in the field thought "hey, we could SOOO build a sweet maglev train with this". But it's still not practical by any stretch of the imagination except as a neat toy.
So /. is only 20+ years late instead of ~80 years with the Meissner effect.
Okay, but around that time there was some important work tying information theory to perception that was relatively groundbreaking work. It's still cited today, and modeling of visual cortex as "noisy channels" is still fairly widespread practice. However, maybe that makes sense because most of the common tools used in psychophysics historically came from Signal Detection Theory, and other radio operator related math.
Agreed. IANASH (I am not a science historian) but the impression I get from the book is that it was this initial success that spawned all the other fields to try and have a "me too" moment which led to the bubble. So although I'm pretty sure the book does mention this as an event that happened, the science itself was certainly not presented with the same clarity and poignancy that the author details early developments in the mathematics of logarithms and wacky precursors to the telegraph. If you can recommend an accessible history of psychophysics, I'd be all ears :-)
I'm a little confused by your comment about the ill-fated information theory. It still does dominate many fields. I know that psychophysics has benefitted greatly from it, and the people doing it are plenty "mathematically inclined."
I did not mean that information theory was ill-fated, but right after it's publication there was an irrational jubilation that all of science was going to be solved in an "information theory" framework that led to failed journals, societies, and hundreds of really poorly thought out papers all entitled "An information theory approach to ____(insert longstanding scientific problem here)". Generally these papers took the log of some important measurement, calculated an "effective bandwidth", and maintained that this was somehow a more profound way to understand the problem (the significance of which was left to the reader's imagination).
Shannon himself complained in a 1956 editorial that "Information theory has become something of scientific bandwagon. . . .A few first-rate research papers are preferable to a large number that are poorly conceived or half finished. The latter are not a credit to the writers and a waster of time to their readers."
We are way past the "information theory" bubble nowadays and the practitioners are quite mature by comparison, so it's hard to imagine the time described by these historical anecdotes. My best mental approximation would be if Craig Venter, Stephen Hawkings, and Bill Gates simultaneously held a press conference announcing that some "new kind of science" (*cough cough Wolfram*) was going to unify gene therapy research, cosmology, and social welfare in sub-saharan Africa all at once.. That's how ridiculous it got.
Perhaps that is the most useful thing I got from this book, that history shows us that scientific fads can even be based on real, ultimately transformative breakthroughs. But they will still walk and feel like a fad when people, especially out-of-field scientists, are irrationally exuberant about it.
I'm still confused. Is this the kind of book that has at least some equations and algorithms (I get that its not exclusively this) or is it the kind of book that mostly rampages on about Turing's love life and how the crude savages of the era screwed him over? I'm just trying to figure out how soft -n- fluffy it is.
Neither, and therein lies the weakness of this book. This review is spot on. The beginning chapters are all these interesting historical anecdotes that do a pretty good job of contextualizing the disjointed and awkward methods of transmitting and thinking about information in the pre-Shannon era. As a series of lesser-known historical anecdotes, it's quite fascinating to know that Babbage like to crack codes as a hobby and that Shannon and Turing directly influenced each other's work as they had regular lunchtime discussions at Bell labs. That is interesting thread that got me to read the book, it felt like a great set-up to a really interesting and accessible primer to information theory.
But then, once Shannon is introduced, the author seems at a loss to explain what information theory is actually used for other than a vague sentiment that it's "useful everywhere, like in the internets and satellites and stuff". In fact, the narrative seems to fall into the same trap that is described wherein a bunch of non-mathematically inclined "visionaries" from psychologists to linguists and architects all jump on an ill-fated "information theory can explain everything" bandwagon without really understanding what it is that information theory can and can't do, leading to quasi-celebrity status for a (very bewildered) Shannon. This then devolves into an extended discussion of memes from the early work of Dawkins which met a similar fate (the "journal of mimetics" was short-lived due to a complete inability of it's founders to agree on exactly what belonged in it). The treatment of biological information is amazingly scant beyond some re-hashing of Dawkins and Gould, given how fundamental information theory is to the modern field of bioinformatics and the like. It then wraps up with with obligatory creation stories of wikipedia, google and discussions of information glut, the likes of which a slashdot audience would already know by heart and therefore find unenlightening.
The actual information theory examples explained in the book do not go beyond the toy examples from Shannon's paper, which is itself very well written and eminently accessible if you have a little statistics and math background. So if you are looking for that, go straight to the source instead instead of reading this book. If you are looking for some neat historical anecdotes about what people used to do to save money on telegraph messages and dreams that Ada Loveless had about being able to see a new world in her head where algorithm developers would someday rule the world, by all means enjoy the first 5 chapters, but the remainder is quite forgettable I'm afraid.
Link to Shannon's 1948 paper. http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/ms/what/shannonday/shannon1948.pdf
You're giving the phrase too much credit. The term "class warfare" is just an advertising slogan. It's what conservatives say in response to any program which might raise revenues on the upper class. It's not something that can be torn apart and dissected - it's just a phrase meant to evoke a gut response and get people to vote the other way. History means nothing to a slogan.
Right on!
My grandparents had everything their family owned in China robbed by bandits, then the Marxists came and forcibly confiscated everything else and said "this belongs to the people now, you'll leave and never come back if you know what's good for you". They fled with nothing more than the shirts on their back. THAT is "redistribution of wealth". Decades later, my remaining foreign-educated relatives were stripped of their professorships and forced to work in rice paddies during the Cultural Revolution. THAT is "class warfare". I demand the next politician who uses either of these phrases either retroactively get flunked in history 101, or be willing to explain to my grandparents how adjusting the marginal tax rate by from 15 to 25% for the top 10% of earners is in any way similar to either of these.
Someone with mod points please bump the parent up.
I read the entire transcript and failed to see that any of the points in the summary were actually key points in this sordid story. This transcript clearly shows that using criminal investigators to investigate scientific misconduct is usually a bad idea, but without any context on what decisions the OIG actually took either using or ignoring this interview (as opposed to those taken by Monett's own agency), it's hard to accuse them of anything in particular other than wasting alot of time.
What's odd in this case is there there's so little respect for science and the scientists that do it. and the idea that the government should hire its own scientists is just absurd - scientists need to report to an academic institution.
I agree that it's hard to get truly unbiased science working for a government agency that has certain vested interests and is governed by political appointees. The idea of manuscripts having to pass a "poltical correctness" litmus test is a huge red flag for transparency.
But the flip side is that many of these agencies are in charge of scientific evaluations which require extensive in-house expertise that would be difficult to outsource without creating larger conflicts of interest. Most academics rely on said government agencies directly or indirectly for research funding, which would presents a problem when it comes to objectively evaluating that agency's mistakes. Often the specific science required by a government agency is decidedly unsexy stuff (example, the transects detailed in the manuscript) that an independent academic would simply not be able to sustain an academic career with in the absence of a long-term contract from the government agency specifically for that purpose. Contract research (i.e. where an outside expert is hired) is great for short term studies with a highly specific goals, but for long term stuff where you are not exactly sure what to look for up front, you must have your own in-house expertise. Even if you contract out all the gruntwork (i.e. seasonal, short-term staff), you need long-term staff trained to analyze the results and evaluate how it impacts the mission of the agency , not to mention to design these studies in the first place.
agenda is corrosive to science.
Hear hear! I always maintain that if we really wanted an objective take on AGW, the best thing to do would be to identify the best and brightest climatologists, seclude them in a secret bunker somewhere, tell them they can't be fired but please keep us updated on a regular basis on Exactly How Bad it really is. Instead, we turn every single utterance that anyone remotely related to climate research into A Big Deal in the mass media, we have politicians threatening to cut all their funding on a regular basis, we've created a climate where only the agenda-aggrandizing, media-attention-craving big ego set can survive. And that's not really what we wanted regardless of your political stance.
it's also kind of appalling that they still do these transects with some guys in a bush plane: no continual video record, no constant gps track, etc.
Heh, that's how wildlife biology is done, experienced eyes and good notetaking are usually superior to technological overkill in most circumstances. I'm sure if you want to foot the tax bill for continuous video monitoring that can detect a seal on the ice in any direction from 1,300 feet from a moving helicopter, said biologists wouldn't be against having one. Heck, I was impressed they have a data recorder and an actual database set up for this and not just scribbles in lab notebook.
Coming from the bio-molecular simulation world, you'll find that the GPU performance is not only vendor specific (as has been mentioned) but even among essentially equivalent simulation software will be implementation specific (i.e. package X was written for CUDA and needs double precision so you have to buy the expensive Tesla stuff vs package Y in single-precision will work with a consumer NVIDIA card vs something else that works in an AMD card) and even problem-specific (i.e. there's a speedup if you simulate this many atoms but not if you simulate more than that many atoms arranged in such and such a way.). It may work in a GPU but not even provide any speedup.
In such a scenario there's no substitute for in-house benchmarking on evaluation hardware with real-world test cases before you plunk down for a large GPU order. The majority stakeholders may already be aware of strict hardware requirements for any existing GPU code, so start there. If noone has used GPU's in their applications before now and this is an attempt to "future-proof" the cluster, don't do it! Delay the purchase until you can establish that the user group will actually see a benefit from GPUs before you buy, otherwise it will easily become a white elephant. .
Ever wonder why the option at the end of every damn Government spending cycle to NOT spend the money is never an option to choose? Like we have to wonder how the hell we ended up trillions of dollars in debt.
Sad to say, I've seen Government "last-minute" spending like this too, but not exactly to this level of magnitude. This is a shitload of money "left over". This may have come from somewhere, but "budget" obviously had nothing to do with it.
Yeah, I used to wonder that too. Then my wife got a job in state government. And the answer became painfully obvious judging by the maximum pace at which stuff gets done even when you have people willing to work hard and important problems sitting right in front of you. If you allowed unspent money to roll over indefinitely, that would create an irresistible incentive to do the cheapest job that won't get you in trouble and then hoard, hoard that money. Heck, you could stretch that 3-year project into a 5-year one by doing it very slowly. You could build up a war chest and use it on pet projects that noone approved. Or you could wait till no-one even remembers the project existed anymore and then embezzle it.
So as inefficient as it is, the blanket rule that all money must be spent the year in which it is allocated is a simple way to increase transparency and accountability across the board. It may even be one of the driving forces anything gets done remotely on schedule in an environment where purchasing a USB cable requires 2 requisition forms, 3 vendor quotes, the signature of your boss (who is in an all-day meeting), your boss's boss (who is talking with legislators today and can't be disturbed), and pre-approval from someone in accounting (who just went on vacation yesterday).
Of course, it would be great if getting the job done on time and under-cost were somehow rewarded. But that's incentivizing success, that's the profit maximizing, the corporate bottom line, whereas the the Gub'ment bottom line is minimizing "embarrassment" (be it from the media, the voting public, and especially legislators on the appropriations committee). You use a Gub'ment bureaucracy for things you can't trust the for-profit world to do on their own, so the service provided has to be somewhat divorced from the revenue stream if you want to ensure more reliable results than just contracting out to a private company. (I'm sure Ron Paul would beg to differ, but then again he also probably enjoys being able drink water out of the tap without getting sick). You wouldn't pay a health inspector, for example, just based on the number of sites inspected per day because that encourages as cursory a job as possible on as many sites as possible. Instead, you set a minimum quota they have to fulfill, and then make it known you'll have their head on a platter if a restaurant shows up in the news for salmonella poisoning the week after you've signed off on it. That's the Gub'ment way. .. .
And what if the rocket goes BOOM on the way up?
As much as I want the JWST to succeed, I'm sure this precise concern will cause many sleepless nights for the space scientists and engineers involved. It's an excellent argument against mortgaging the future of an entire field on one, single, monolithic project.
Fortunately, the JWST is going on an Arianne 5 provided by ESA, which has a 95% success rate (2 failures in 36 launches). As a bonus, if it blows up we can point fingers at the Europeans, always a popular pastime on this side of the pond.
I agree - this is the most unsatisfying aspect of this study, in that most cases end with settlement and a non-disclosure agreement, meaning there is absolutely no data on how meritorious the claim was and how exploitative the settlement was. It seems quite obvious to me, (IANAL) that only relatively strong patent claims would actually result in litigation, and that most "troll-like" behavior would be in cases that are simultaneously weak but expensive enough to contest that a settlement is cheaper. Arguably, the prevalence of this behavior, which cannot be addressed in any way by this study, is at the heart of the patent troll debate.
from page 26 of TFA: "One important caveat is that most cases settle. Indeed, most of the cases studied here settled or were otherwise disposed of without a merits ruling. This can affect the findings in a couple of ways. First, it reduces the sample size. Second, it is unclear why cases settle. It may be that only the weakest patents are litigated because defendants refuse to pay. However, it could also be that the strongest patents are litigated because plaintiffs refuse to settle for a nuisance payment. Third, many cases are litigated to judgment because NPEs are asserting infringement where there is none."
Given that senators get older every year, you can rest assured they have never significantly cut funding for aging related research unless it was stem-cell related. For grins, you can do a full-text search for "telomerase" and "aging" in the NIH funded grant database and see how many hits you get. . .
http://projectreporter.nih.gov/reporter.cf
you'll see lots of ideas along the lines you've proposed (not exactly but close). I'm not in the aging field, but I can attest that to the fact that pretty much everyone who took cell biology with me walked out of the aging lecture thinking "why can't we fix this already", so I'm pretty sure others are trying as we speak. The devil is always in the details, of course, and from what little I do know I'm not holding my breath until we get a working gene therapy vector that doesn't give you leukemia as a side effect. . .
Yes, it's more impressive than an "OR" gate (which could simply be two different mechanisms that trigger the same effect), but the word Logic circuit just doesn't do it for me.
You really want to impress me, show me an "XOR" - either of two indications, but not both.
http://2008.igem.org/Team:Davidson-Missouri_Western/DNA_Encoded_XOR_Gates
Looks like these undergrads still have some bugs to work out, but in principle such a thing should be eminently possible given that most genes already have tons of positive and negative regulators that can be easily co-opted and transplanted. The trick is making a robust system with enough dynamic range that you can easily read the output, but with enough finesse that it can dampen the noise as well as mother nature does it.
I wonder, though, where a treatment like this leaves the human immune system.
A vaccine spurs the immune system to generate antibodies, so that when we're actually infected by the virus, the antibodies are available to combat it. Our own immune systems do all the work.
This new type of treatment, however, kills off the cells that have been infected by viruses, so the viruses aren't able to use the cell's materials to replicate. As the cells die, so do the viruses. From the sound of it, the treatment achieves this without any assistance from the immune system.
>
It's been noted by other posters, but this treatment is just amping up what the cell would normally do if it detected a viral infection, that is, kill itself to save the host. It turns out most successful viruses have evolved a way to shut off this response, and this treatment is like adding a redundant way to activate it. That's not to say it couldn't backfire, most of these self-destruct pathways need to be activated by multiple inputs to avoid accidental triggering (just like needing two special keys to be pressed at once to launch a nuke), and now it's replaced by one giant shiny red button.
As for weakening our immune system, I should add It's a common misconception that the adaptive immune system provides the bulk of our body's defense from invasions (i.e. the one that can "learn" from vaccinations and infections). In fact the first line of defense is the innate immune system which is what is protecting us 99% of the time, and the naturally occurring suicide pathways alluded to before (apoptosis) are a last-line of defense - neither of these are systems with any capability to "learn" from an infection and therefore they won't get weaker just because we use them less should such treatments prove effective.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Innate_immune_system
Back to TFA - only an abstract is posted, so I can't read about the proposed mechanism, but as all the people who work with MRI's have pointed out this amount of effect on blood viscosity at such a "low" field strength is hard to imagine unless there is something unusual about the shape or duration of the pulse that makes it substantially different from the static field in an MRI. Previous work with static fields has shown maybe a 1% change at 1T field strengths, with the more significant, 15-20% changes not evident until 5T or so (which is much higher than a typical clinical-use MRI, although some research MRIs certainly are in this range)
see fig 5 of this article if you have institutional access for the work cited above http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S030488530001249X
similarly, the WHO summary of health effects of exposure to magnetic fields only cautions against cardiovascular effects for fields > 8T http://www.who.int/mediacentre/factsheets/fs299/en/index.html
The filers of the patent are all employees of microsoft's blue-sky R&D labs (research.microsoft.com) in their "health and well being" section. They are not associated at all with microsoft product development, or with the Gates foundation, this is microsoft's attempt to replicate what Bell Labs or Xerox parc used to be like, and you can only hire that caliber of talent out of academia by letting them do whatever they want. Good gig if you can get it.
And they are, in fact, people who primarily do work in bioinformatics and human-computer interfaces and such, this patent very much reads like something written by electric engineers as it spends 75% of the time talking about the monitoring apparatus and otherwise just rehashes textbook-level information on the actual pathology and biology of parasites. So for all of those who are somehow worried that this is a part of an evil conspiracy on microsoft's part, don't worry, these people don't actually have a wet lab with germs and bugs in it, nor would they know what to do with them if they had it.
I think what MichealSmith meant was that maybe this organism is an "extremophile" because it developed in an arsenic-rich environment, thus adapting to use the arsenic which would otherwise kill it. You know, like how some organisms are resisctant to high temperatures that would kill you or me, because it turns out that they are mostly found in hot springs and the like.
Oh, well in that case the answer is an emphatic yes! The researchers were scraping the bottom of Mono Lake precisely because it has the highest known naturally occurring concentration of arsenic and they hypothesized some of the stuff living there might actually be eating it as opposed to just being able to tolerate it.
One of the fascinating aspects of the field of bioremediation (that is, trying to use microbes to break down our toxic waste) is that if you are looking for a strain that will eat toxin X, the best way to find one is go to a dump full of toxin X and see whats living under the sludge. The part that is amazing about it is these toxic dumps didn't exist 50 years ago, and the toxic chemicals simply don't exist in nature, unlike Mono lake and arsenic, both of which has been around a *long* time. So anything thriving on toxic chemicals near the dump site therefore must have adapted/evolved within the last 50 years or so (unless the giant spaghetti monster put it there).