Anyone remember catalytic antibodies - from 20 years ago - which also promised rapid engineering of "enzymes" for specific reactions. They were made by immunizing an animal with a transition state analog - under the theory that stabilizing the transition state would speed up reactions (since that is what enzymes do). Well, these "abzymes" completely revolutionized enzymology and biotechnology.....oh, wait...
Assuming he runs - it must be Bloomberg. I have heard from people that have met him that he is a total computer geek - and really understands technology.
I don't know about this specific case, but in general a hydrogel already has water in it. So it does not remove water when exposed to blood - it exchanges liquid with it (passively by diffusion, or by flow if the liquid is force through the gel). And in this case is proposed to bind the virus when liquid containing the virus enters the gel.
Molecular imprinting has been around for at least 15 or 20 years, and I have yet to see any binding affinities (strengths) that are really useful. Sure - if you have a 0.01 molar solution of some molecule you can make an imprint that will allow you to concentrate it to 0.02 molar. But with viruses the concentrations in blood are so low that you need an extremely high affinity (not to mention decent specificity - because of all the other competing molecules in the blood). Have not read the original work, but this sounds like a bunch of hype. Maybe there is a startup company brewing and they need the press.
A bit off topic maybe, but anyone know of good sites for more general startup help - that includes non-internet companies? A place to discuss contract terms, get recommendations for legal help, advice on whether to go LLC or C-corp - or one of the million other questions that come up.
Because the drug is FDA approved, many if not most of the drugs that are contraindicated are already known. It is always possible that someone takes a combination of drugs that was not known to be dangerous - but if that happens - that will be discovered and dealt with as has happened for many other drugs in the past. It is hardly a new problem, and there are well established ways to deal with the issue. Clinical trials might discover some of these potentially unknown contraindicated drugs - but even without the clinical trials those drugs will be found by shear chance and the large number of people taking the drug. Clearly it would be better if there was a clinical trial, but my point is that a drug like this can come into wide spread and effective use without it.
That will also get worked out off label. You will have people doing all sorts of things - low doses, high doses, frequent, infrequent. The things that work will get reported as case studies - and a dosing regime will emerge.
It is not clear to me that one will need clinical trials - ever. You can be absolutely sure that there are hundreds if not thousands of people taking this already - off label - which is perfectly legal. What would you do if you had a serious cancer that was untreatable or did not respond to other treatments? If it works - doctors will start publishing case reports of the results. If the results are dramatic enough - ie curing many people with otherwise hopeless cancers - then that will probably become clear from the case reports and word of mouth. I know - not a controlled study - but still, if the results are dramatic enough it would become clear that it works. In that case, it would fairly quickly work its way into general use - given the way information spreads on the internet - and how particularly active cancer patients must be in looking for the latest treatments.
The other thing is of course that you can be sure that drug companies have their organic chemist busy synthesizing analogues that are likely to more potent - and patentable.
Yeah - it reminds me of what we used to call the Sigma Experiment. Go to the Sigma Chemical Company catalog - pick 100 compounds at random - dump them on your cells and see what happens. Some will die, some will grow more, express more or less of one protein or the other. Lots of stuff will happen. Take the results from the compound(s) that kill cells and write a paper entitled "Cytotoxic effects of compound A on human Z (preferably a common cancer) cells" - ending with the sentence - "....these results suggest that compound A is a potential therapuetic agent for [the cancer in question]". That is so far from making a drug as to be irrelevant - and even damaging (loss of trees). This may indeed lead to a drug - but more than 99.99% of reports like this do not.
It would be interesting to see what would happen if you gave that money to the students instead. $150 for a C, $200 for a B and $250 for an A? You can pay the teachers a million bucks, but if students aren't motivated or able it will not help. I am not sure I buy the assumption here that the teachers can be motivated to do a lot better with money. The teachers have to teach and the students have to learn, and I would be inclined to think that students not being motivated (or able due to circumstances aside from the teacher) to do the work to learn is a bigger contributor to poor test scores than inability or lack of motivation from the teachers.
This has to be a problem similar to that of deciding where in a store to put products to optimize sales, and that must be a pretty sophisticated science by now. Do you put the sesame oil next to the other oils or the asian foods? Laundry soups near the entrance or in the back? So the question becomes - is this approach to the problem better than others that are out there? Hopefully they have already tested it against other models and shown that it does well - before subjecting some unwitting small business owner to their fancy new software.
Yeah - add this to the jillion other tumor supressors. These give insights into the pathways that control cancerous cells, but have not been the great targets for therapy one might have thought when the first ones where found. There is nothing obviously special about this particular gene compared to the others. But my read would not be hyping - just someone who doesn't know where the base line is to begin with.
I second that, or I should probably say n+1 that. But maybe the best thing that can happen here is that one ISP does this and lots of people dump them as a result. That way they will get it out of their system.
There should be courses in how to conduct and participate in meetings starting in high school, and no one should be allowed out of college without having taken a couple such courses. The amount of time and resources wasted on poor organization and participation in meetings - some evidence in the other comments here - is really extraordinary. But being a good participant in a meeting requires more than showing up and saying what ever jumps in to your brain cell.
Bottom up construction has been a central tenet in some parts of the nanotechnology community. The idea that putting things together by controlling the position of individual atoms/molecules during fabrication will allow enormous breakthroughs in computing and other fields. But at least in the silicon based semiconductor business, the top down approach keeps marching mercilessly toward the bottom. This while bottom up synthesis/fabrication is still stuck at proof of concept. Might "top down" make it to the bottom - before the "bottom up" makes it to the top?
With an automatic response like that, I wonder if virus writers would learn to craft a virus that caused the sentinal program to generate a signature that removed/damaged important files (or otherwise wreak havoc) on the computers they were supposed to protect. Cause an autoimmune response if you will.
From the article: As for Mangan's allegations, they are "an unsubstantiated crusade," Airbus spokesman Clay McConnell said.
It gets my attention when they say unsubstantiated, which could be read to mean that he can not provide documents supporting his case, rather than saying it is untrue or false. It just makes me feel that they are avoiding the real issue.
They also say: "Don't you think we would look into it, and if we found it was true we would do something about it?" McConnell asked.
To that one says that risk-reward calculations made in the board room are not so black and white.
It probably should not matter, and the offtopic mod is fair enough.
But it is also true that names do matter - Dale Carnegie makes that point in a pretty compelling way. An institutional name will of course not matter as much as personal name - but people who are at Johns Hopkins still get annoyed when people call it John Hopkins - whether it should matter or not.
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone remember catalytic antibodies - from 20 years ago - which also promised rapid engineering of "enzymes" for specific reactions. They were made by immunizing an animal with a transition state analog - under the theory that stabilizing the transition state would speed up reactions (since that is what enzymes do). Well, these "abzymes" completely revolutionized enzymology and biotechnology.....oh, wait...
What, now I have to bring a typewriter everytime I go to the restaurant - to fill in the tip and total?
Assuming he runs - it must be Bloomberg. I have heard from people that have met him that he is a total computer geek - and really understands technology.
I don't know about this specific case, but in general a hydrogel already has water in it. So it does not remove water when exposed to blood - it exchanges liquid with it (passively by diffusion, or by flow if the liquid is force through the gel). And in this case is proposed to bind the virus when liquid containing the virus enters the gel.
Molecular imprinting has been around for at least 15 or 20 years, and I have yet to see any binding affinities (strengths) that are really useful. Sure - if you have a 0.01 molar solution of some molecule you can make an imprint that will allow you to concentrate it to 0.02 molar. But with viruses the concentrations in blood are so low that you need an extremely high affinity (not to mention decent specificity - because of all the other competing molecules in the blood). Have not read the original work, but this sounds like a bunch of hype. Maybe there is a startup company brewing and they need the press.
Maybe IBM should depose Maureen O'Gara? Find out where all that information came from...
Everytime something like this happens I log on to the ACLU site and give them another hundred dollars. At this rate I am going to broke by next week.
I seem to recall that Steve Jobs said when introducing the iPhone that they were aiming for 1% of the market initially.
A bit off topic maybe, but anyone know of good sites for more general startup help - that includes non-internet companies? A place to discuss contract terms, get recommendations for legal help, advice on whether to go LLC or C-corp - or one of the million other questions that come up.
Because the drug is FDA approved, many if not most of the drugs that are contraindicated are already known. It is always possible that someone takes a combination of drugs that was not known to be dangerous - but if that happens - that will be discovered and dealt with as has happened for many other drugs in the past. It is hardly a new problem, and there are well established ways to deal with the issue. Clinical trials might discover some of these potentially unknown contraindicated drugs - but even without the clinical trials those drugs will be found by shear chance and the large number of people taking the drug. Clearly it would be better if there was a clinical trial, but my point is that a drug like this can come into wide spread and effective use without it.
That will also get worked out off label. You will have people doing all sorts of things - low doses, high doses, frequent, infrequent. The things that work will get reported as case studies - and a dosing regime will emerge.
It is not clear to me that one will need clinical trials - ever. You can be absolutely sure that there are hundreds if not thousands of people taking this already - off label - which is perfectly legal. What would you do if you had a serious cancer that was untreatable or did not respond to other treatments? If it works - doctors will start publishing case reports of the results. If the results are dramatic enough - ie curing many people with otherwise hopeless cancers - then that will probably become clear from the case reports and word of mouth. I know - not a controlled study - but still, if the results are dramatic enough it would become clear that it works. In that case, it would fairly quickly work its way into general use - given the way information spreads on the internet - and how particularly active cancer patients must be in looking for the latest treatments.
The other thing is of course that you can be sure that drug companies have their organic chemist busy synthesizing analogues that are likely to more potent - and patentable.
Yeah - it reminds me of what we used to call the Sigma Experiment. Go to the Sigma Chemical Company catalog - pick 100 compounds at random - dump them on your cells and see what happens. Some will die, some will grow more, express more or less of one protein or the other. Lots of stuff will happen. Take the results from the compound(s) that kill cells and write a paper entitled "Cytotoxic effects of compound A on human Z (preferably a common cancer) cells" - ending with the sentence - "....these results suggest that compound A is a potential therapuetic agent for [the cancer in question]". That is so far from making a drug as to be irrelevant - and even damaging (loss of trees). This may indeed lead to a drug - but more than 99.99% of reports like this do not.
My wife has T-mobile prepaid. If you buy 1000 minutes for $100 the time does not expire for a year. It has worked well for her.
This sounds like the beginnings of a fork. Could Microsoft decide to fund the future maintenance/development of SUSE?
It would be interesting to see what would happen if you gave that money to the students instead. $150 for a C, $200 for a B and $250 for an A? You can pay the teachers a million bucks, but if students aren't motivated or able it will not help. I am not sure I buy the assumption here that the teachers can be motivated to do a lot better with money. The teachers have to teach and the students have to learn, and I would be inclined to think that students not being motivated (or able due to circumstances aside from the teacher) to do the work to learn is a bigger contributor to poor test scores than inability or lack of motivation from the teachers.
This has to be a problem similar to that of deciding where in a store to put products to optimize sales, and that must be a pretty sophisticated science by now. Do you put the sesame oil next to the other oils or the asian foods? Laundry soups near the entrance or in the back? So the question becomes - is this approach to the problem better than others that are out there? Hopefully they have already tested it against other models and shown that it does well - before subjecting some unwitting small business owner to their fancy new software.
Yeah - add this to the jillion other tumor supressors. These give insights into the pathways that control cancerous cells, but have not been the great targets for therapy one might have thought when the first ones where found. There is nothing obviously special about this particular gene compared to the others. But my read would not be hyping - just someone who doesn't know where the base line is to begin with.
I second that, or I should probably say n+1 that. But maybe the best thing that can happen here is that one ISP does this and lots of people dump them as a result. That way they will get it out of their system.
There should be courses in how to conduct and participate in meetings starting in high school, and no one should be allowed out of college without having taken a couple such courses. The amount of time and resources wasted on poor organization and participation in meetings - some evidence in the other comments here - is really extraordinary. But being a good participant in a meeting requires more than showing up and saying what ever jumps in to your brain cell.
And the Americans are not doing the same to the Chinese?
I would have been shocked if this was not going on in both directions - in dozens of directions for that matter.
Bottom up construction has been a central tenet in some parts of the nanotechnology community. The idea that putting things together by controlling the position of individual atoms/molecules during fabrication will allow enormous breakthroughs in computing and other fields. But at least in the silicon based semiconductor business, the top down approach keeps marching mercilessly toward the bottom. This while bottom up synthesis/fabrication is still stuck at proof of concept. Might "top down" make it to the bottom - before the "bottom up" makes it to the top?
With an automatic response like that, I wonder if virus writers would learn to craft a virus that caused the sentinal program to generate a signature that removed/damaged important files (or otherwise wreak havoc) on the computers they were supposed to protect. Cause an autoimmune response if you will.
From the article: As for Mangan's allegations, they are "an unsubstantiated crusade," Airbus spokesman Clay McConnell said.
It gets my attention when they say unsubstantiated, which could be read to mean that he can not provide documents supporting his case, rather than saying it is untrue or false. It just makes me feel that they are avoiding the real issue.
They also say: "Don't you think we would look into it, and if we found it was true we would do something about it?" McConnell asked.
To that one says that risk-reward calculations made in the board room are not so black and white.
It probably should not matter, and the offtopic mod is fair enough.
But it is also true that names do matter - Dale Carnegie makes that point in a pretty compelling way. An institutional name will of course not matter as much as personal name - but people who are at Johns Hopkins still get annoyed when people call it John Hopkins - whether it should matter or not.