The human genome is far from completely mapped. But it's getting there. Doubletwist and Sun are teaming together on this to sell their annotation of the genome instead of trying to patent it all. Prices start at $10k and will run companies up to $650k US (discounts for academic/nonprofit). Read the link at Yahoo Science about it.
When the U.S. orbiting station Skylab was making it's rather uncontrolled reentry into Earth's atmosphere, there were some people freaking out (a la Y2K kind of panic). People were blaming the heart attacks of family members on the stress that big ol'Skylab might fall on them.
NASA was pretty sure it would burn up...mostly. But a big chunk did land in remote Australia (there's someone on eBay now putting up some fibres they claim are from the wreckage).
Sure, most people would love to see these things put some light shows up in the night sky, but seeing the really horrendous PR generated by the skylab-crash-phobes would make anyone want to make these crash in the ocean away from land.
As it is, watch the news covering this.They'll put some teasers out there and we'll have a few people selling "Iridium Shelters".
To me, this is a significant victory for the people in Holland, MI! You had to help mobilize otherwise apathetic voters to get out and shoot down this proposal.
And it is important for those of us opposed to these types of censorship to learn from your experiences. Because these same people are coming to all of our neighborhoods if they aren't already there.
The groups that wanted these filters are not stopping. I am sure they are not even done with Holland, MI (what they can't get done with voters, they then usually try to get with legislators, and vice-versa).
Enjoy your victory, but don't forget the price of freedom really is eternal vigilence (and overcoming apathy).
As reported by "This Way Out" in 1998, CyberPatrol listed the AFA as a "hate group" and could block their homepage out. I remember this getting them all bent which was plesant to read about. Must be why they did not want Cyberpatrol! The link is here: http://www.qrd.org/media/radio/thiswayout/summary/ newswrap/1998/532-06.08.98 But to make it easy, the text of that news blurb is: And finally... Donald Wildmon's American Family Association has been an enthusiastic advocate for Internet filtering software as a means for parents to censor their children's web-surfing, in large part to prevent children from learning about gays and lesbians. In fact the AFA has a business agreement whereby it promotes one particular filtering package, X-Stop. But suddenly the shoe is on the other foot, as the most popular filter software, CyberPatrol, is now filtering out the AFA's own website... because its homophobic content violates CyberPatrol's standards on intolerance.
And if the phone and power stayed on out here in bush two hours west of Brisbane, than NOBODY has an excuse for losing power *anywhere* in the world. Guess the TV stations and Y2K survivalists will have to keep our attention someother way.
This is at least the third or fourth keyboard I've seen for the Palm Pilot. Currently, I use an old Apple Newton keyboard (and a utility called "PiloKey") for my Palm III. It's smaller than some of the keyboards but it is DEFINITELY not as cool as one of these folding keyboards! That's a big selling point of this. And the price really isn't bad. For those of us used to lugging around notebook computers for work, doing the occassional short email, being able to carry just a PalmPilot is wonderful. But on the palm, entering short text is fine but using a keyboard to get a more lenthy text is really handy and only having to carry around one of these babies is sweet and the price isn't too bad considering the others in the field. Just hope it's a stable interface. PiloKey tends to lock up every now and then and require a full reboot and then reinstalling the extension that lets it recognize the keyboard. And having used a HP palmtop also, the Palm Pilot is still the best one because it doesn't try to pack everything and the kitchen sink into these things. Does it work with all the Palm models or just the most recent ones? They don't put that in their specs that I could find.
This assay depends upon PCR amplification of the MTB sample. You're completely correct, there would be no use waiting for the sample to grow up and then use this assay (it would then take as long as it does now!). But this assay is like all the other microarray ones used for DNA sequencing by hybdridization (we use them now too!), they have to PCR up the baby first. And that poses additional problem as you mentioned along with cross contamination (something we always find in other labs when we screen their stuff as part of our gov't duties).
In the case of tuberculosis, it does not appear to be a problem so much of "overprescribing" antibiotics that results in drug resistance (and TB does not seem to pick up other pieces of DNA that confer drug resistance such as the case for vancomycin resistant S. aureus). The problem has been that the antibiotic treatment requires pills every day for anywhere from 3 to 12 months. And many of these drugs have some nasty side effects.
Even a survey of physicians who had to undergo TB prophylaxis showed that almost half of them couldn't even complete the full treatement!
Another recent, not slashdot-kind-of-news article a few months back reported the trials on an anti-TB treatment that could be done in 2 WEEKS.
Last problem has been coaxing pharmaceutical companies to invest in antiTB drug research. 3rd world countries aren't able to pay $200/pill for something. So keeping drug resistance from spreading and treating it completely to cure is the goal of both the CDC and WHO right now.
These chips CANNOT be "implanted" into humans. They are just part of the evolution of "point of care" (POC) devices that make what would be sophisticated and expensive tests, cheaper and more easily peformed. Think more of glucose monitors available for diabetics to track their conditions at home more effictively.
These glucose monitors I guess *do* control a person's actions but only to the extent of if they need a shot of insulin or eat a cookie.:)
These chips CANNOT be embdedded into a human. They aren't like computer chips at all. That's just an analogy that makes them sound cool. The chips just have synthetic pieces of DNA bound to them which you hybridize the sample from the patient's strain of TB. You could swallow one of these babies and it would do nothing.
I'm a TB molecular geneticist so I figured my two cents might be worth throwing in...
There were actually two chips announced this last week. The drug diagnosis chip from Argonneand a research-based expression chip from Peter Small's lab at Stanford.
The Argonne chip is a competitor to Affymetrix/BioMerioux's TB chip which is also still in development. What these gizmos are designed to do is DNA sequencing by hybridization. The TB genome is sequenced and we roughly understand how many of the antituberculosis drugs work and what genes mutate to confer drug resistance (mostly). The traditional (and only FDA approved) way is to grow the patient's TB specimen in the presence in each of these drugs and see if growth is inhibited. For strains that are multi-drug resistant (MDR), that can take many weeks or even months to correctly diagnose. In the early days of the MDR outbreak in NY city in the early 90's, many of the patients were dead before the results were available (aggrevated by HIV/AIDS in the pre-protease inhibitor days).
Peter Small's chips are designed to understand which genes are turned on/off under different conditions. Their paper in the Oct 26th issue of PNAS is their results using these chips on TB treated with isoniazid (the first anti-TB drug).
So molecular diagnostics is a goal of everyone's. Here in our lab we use both the traditional methods and then direct DNA sequencing as an experimental program. Direct DNA sequencing is a bit tedious and can get expensive for each hunk of the TB chromosome you need to sequence to cover all the potential sites for drug-resistance conferring mutations. Arrays let you "do it in one shot".
And Argonne's reported ability to reuse these things 50x would be a huge thing. George Soros is probably footing some of this bill since he's been donating a ton of cash to try to check the expansions of TB in post-cold war Russia. Their prison system is a real nightmare and their "tough on crime attitude (much like the US!) doesn't mind if these prisoners give each other TB and they end up dying. But at least a few of these prisoners do get released and then the problem goes into the general population. The TB we're seeing from Russian immigrants now is really strange. It's not always resistant to the first line of drugs used (safer and more effective) but resistant to many of the second line drugs (full of nasty side effects, less effective, and much more expensive). Wealth individuals in Russia seem to be assuming they have drug resistant TB and just starting in the on the second line drugs.
Our prison system was caught a bit off guard when TB resurfaced in the 80's. They've *vastly* improved now and while TB is still diagnosed in prisons, the transmissions seem to be checked. Here in NY about 20% of our prison population is HIV+ so keeping TB checked is really important.
Problems with these chips arise when you have mixed populations of TB in a patient. Some cells have the mutation that causes resitance, and some don't. Since all these arrays start off with a PCR amplification reation, if the susceptable cell's DNA gets amplified over the mutant ones, you might get the wrong diagnosis. Or if a patient has two different strains of TB in them (can happen but mostly in immunocompromised individuals). But this is much less a concern than in the situation of HIV where these molecular diagnostics sometimes run into trouble.
With 1 billion people in the world infected with TB (and here in NY, it's nearly 1 out of 15...though most will never come down with "active" disease even untreated), don't assume it's a Russia/third world/poor thing!
As a molecular geneticist who's actually used some of these types of devices (like Affymetrix's GeneChip analyzer...with an amazing HP laser scanner www.affymetrix.com), they are nothing short of amazing. The engineering problems are not so much the mechanical (designing silicon surfaces, circuits, etc.) but biological (i.e. the proteins, DNA, cell gunk get in the way, clog those micro-channels or the flouresent tags used in detection have to be so far apart to avoid misreads). Also, you need a REALLY high confidence level for the data they generate. Still, they are a marvel in the way that diagnostics will be able to utilize the load of information from all the genome sequencing projects. These devices are also planned for use as "biosensors" to be used as fast screening methods for biological terrorism (right now any idiot on earth can clog up tons of local, state and federal agencies by sending a fake anthrax warning out). And a tidy sum of money is being made available to make devices like this available (for example, today's announcement by the CDC to give another $40 million in grants for anti-bioterrorism efforts--http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19990915/ hl/bio10_1.html). Cheers, JD
Slashdot Mirror
The human genome is far from completely mapped. But it's getting there. Doubletwist and Sun are teaming together on this to sell their annotation of the genome instead of trying to patent it all. Prices start at $10k and will run companies up to $650k US (discounts for academic/nonprofit). Read the link at Yahoo Science about it.
NASA was pretty sure it would burn up...mostly. But a big chunk did land in remote Australia (there's someone on eBay now putting up some fibres they claim are from the wreckage).
Sure, most people would love to see these things put some light shows up in the night sky, but seeing the really horrendous PR generated by the skylab-crash-phobes would make anyone want to make these crash in the ocean away from land.
As it is, watch the news covering this.They'll put some teasers out there and we'll have a few people selling "Iridium Shelters".
And it is important for those of us opposed to these types of censorship to learn from your experiences. Because these same people are coming to all of our neighborhoods if they aren't already there.
The groups that wanted these filters are not stopping. I am sure they are not even done with Holland, MI (what they can't get done with voters, they then usually try to get with legislators, and vice-versa).
Enjoy your victory, but don't forget the price of freedom really is eternal vigilence (and overcoming apathy).
It was put up in appreciation of his work on getting hydroelectric power plants up and running.
Park rangers like to tell the story that Tesla's lap is all shiny from kids climbing up onto the statue to have their pictures taken!
A links for some info on Tesla and NF:
http://www.neuronet.pitt.edu/~bogdan/tesla/niagara .htm
As reported by "This Way Out" in 1998, CyberPatrol listed the AFA as a "hate group" and could block their homepage out. I remember this getting them all bent which was plesant to read about. Must be why they did not want Cyberpatrol! The link is here: http://www.qrd.org/media/radio/thiswayout/summary/ newswrap/1998/532-06.08.98 But to make it easy, the text of that news blurb is: And finally ... Donald Wildmon's American Family Association has been an enthusiastic advocate for Internet filtering software as a means for parents to censor their children's web-surfing, in large part to prevent children from learning about gays and lesbians. In fact the AFA has a business agreement whereby it promotes one particular filtering package, X-Stop. But suddenly the shoe is on the other foot, as the most popular filter software, CyberPatrol, is now filtering out the AFA's own website ... because its homophobic content violates CyberPatrol's standards on intolerance.
And if the phone and power stayed on out here in bush two hours west of Brisbane, than NOBODY has an excuse for losing power *anywhere* in the world. Guess the TV stations and Y2K survivalists will have to keep our attention someother way.
This is at least the third or fourth keyboard I've seen for the Palm Pilot. Currently, I use an old Apple Newton keyboard (and a utility called "PiloKey") for my Palm III. It's smaller than some of the keyboards but it is DEFINITELY not as cool as one of these folding keyboards! That's a big selling point of this. And the price really isn't bad. For those of us used to lugging around notebook computers for work, doing the occassional short email, being able to carry just a PalmPilot is wonderful. But on the palm, entering short text is fine but using a keyboard to get a more lenthy text is really handy and only having to carry around one of these babies is sweet and the price isn't too bad considering the others in the field. Just hope it's a stable interface. PiloKey tends to lock up every now and then and require a full reboot and then reinstalling the extension that lets it recognize the keyboard. And having used a HP palmtop also, the Palm Pilot is still the best one because it doesn't try to pack everything and the kitchen sink into these things. Does it work with all the Palm models or just the most recent ones? They don't put that in their specs that I could find.
This assay depends upon PCR amplification of the MTB sample. You're completely correct, there would be no use waiting for the sample to grow up and then use this assay (it would then take as long as it does now!). But this assay is like all the other microarray ones used for DNA sequencing by hybdridization (we use them now too!), they have to PCR up the baby first. And that poses additional problem as you mentioned along with cross contamination (something we always find in other labs when we screen their stuff as part of our gov't duties).
Even a survey of physicians who had to undergo TB prophylaxis showed that almost half of them couldn't even complete the full treatement!
Another recent, not slashdot-kind-of-news article a few months back reported the trials on an anti-TB treatment that could be done in 2 WEEKS.
Last problem has been coaxing pharmaceutical companies to invest in antiTB drug research. 3rd world countries aren't able to pay $200/pill for something. So keeping drug resistance from spreading and treating it completely to cure is the goal of both the CDC and WHO right now.
These glucose monitors I guess *do* control a person's actions but only to the extent of if they need a shot of insulin or eat a cookie. :)
These chips CANNOT be embdedded into a human. They aren't like computer chips at all. That's just an analogy that makes them sound cool. The chips just have synthetic pieces of DNA bound to them which you hybridize the sample from the patient's strain of TB. You could swallow one of these babies and it would do nothing.
There were actually two chips announced this last week. The drug diagnosis chip from Argonneand a research-based expression chip from Peter Small's lab at Stanford.
The Argonne chip is a competitor to Affymetrix/BioMerioux's TB chip which is also still in development. What these gizmos are designed to do is DNA sequencing by hybridization. The TB genome is sequenced and we roughly understand how many of the antituberculosis drugs work and what genes mutate to confer drug resistance (mostly). The traditional (and only FDA approved) way is to grow the patient's TB specimen in the presence in each of these drugs and see if growth is inhibited. For strains that are multi-drug resistant (MDR), that can take many weeks or even months to correctly diagnose. In the early days of the MDR outbreak in NY city in the early 90's, many of the patients were dead before the results were available (aggrevated by HIV/AIDS in the pre-protease inhibitor days).
Peter Small's chips are designed to understand which genes are turned on/off under different conditions. Their paper in the Oct 26th issue of PNAS is their results using these chips on TB treated with isoniazid (the first anti-TB drug).
So molecular diagnostics is a goal of everyone's. Here in our lab we use both the traditional methods and then direct DNA sequencing as an experimental program. Direct DNA sequencing is a bit tedious and can get expensive for each hunk of the TB chromosome you need to sequence to cover all the potential sites for drug-resistance conferring mutations. Arrays let you "do it in one shot".
And Argonne's reported ability to reuse these things 50x would be a huge thing. George Soros is probably footing some of this bill since he's been donating a ton of cash to try to check the expansions of TB in post-cold war Russia. Their prison system is a real nightmare and their "tough on crime attitude (much like the US!) doesn't mind if these prisoners give each other TB and they end up dying. But at least a few of these prisoners do get released and then the problem goes into the general population. The TB we're seeing from Russian immigrants now is really strange. It's not always resistant to the first line of drugs used (safer and more effective) but resistant to many of the second line drugs (full of nasty side effects, less effective, and much more expensive). Wealth individuals in Russia seem to be assuming they have drug resistant TB and just starting in the on the second line drugs.
Our prison system was caught a bit off guard when TB resurfaced in the 80's. They've *vastly* improved now and while TB is still diagnosed in prisons, the transmissions seem to be checked. Here in NY about 20% of our prison population is HIV+ so keeping TB checked is really important.
Problems with these chips arise when you have mixed populations of TB in a patient. Some cells have the mutation that causes resitance, and some don't. Since all these arrays start off with a PCR amplification reation, if the susceptable cell's DNA gets amplified over the mutant ones, you might get the wrong diagnosis. Or if a patient has two different strains of TB in them (can happen but mostly in immunocompromised individuals). But this is much less a concern than in the situation of HIV where these molecular diagnostics sometimes run into trouble.
With 1 billion people in the world infected with TB (and here in NY, it's nearly 1 out of 15...though most will never come down with "active" disease even untreated), don't assume it's a Russia/third world/poor thing!
Cheers!
As a molecular geneticist who's actually used some of these types of devices (like Affymetrix's GeneChip analyzer...with an amazing HP laser scanner www.affymetrix.com), they are nothing short of amazing. The engineering problems are not so much the mechanical (designing silicon surfaces, circuits, etc.) but biological (i.e. the proteins, DNA, cell gunk get in the way, clog those micro-channels or the flouresent tags used in detection have to be so far apart to avoid misreads). Also, you need a REALLY high confidence level for the data they generate. Still, they are a marvel in the way that diagnostics will be able to utilize the load of information from all the genome sequencing projects. These devices are also planned for use as "biosensors" to be used as fast screening methods for biological terrorism (right now any idiot on earth can clog up tons of local, state and federal agencies by sending a fake anthrax warning out). And a tidy sum of money is being made available to make devices like this available (for example, today's announcement by the CDC to give another $40 million in grants for anti-bioterrorism efforts--http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/19990915/ hl/bio10_1.html). Cheers, JD