Sapere Aude
Tag: medicine
thanks, puritans.
Even as the CDC now recognizes the decisive benefits from moderate drinking, each such announcement is met by an onslaught of opposition and criticism. Noting that even drinking at non-pathological levels above recommended moderate limits gives you a better chance of a longer life than abstaining draws louder protests still. Yet that’s exactly what the evidence tells us.
given enough DNA manipulation, you can get yeast to do nearly anything. rob carlson has pointed out the connection from homebrewing to diy biotech for years.
anyone with access to the yeast strain and basic skills in fermentation would be able to grow morphine-producing yeast using a home-brew kit. Because yeast is easy to conceal, grow and transport, criminal syndicates and law-enforcement agencies would have difficulty controlling the distribution of an opiate-producing yeast strain
the craft medicine marketing exists already
Pfizer Releases Vintage Cask-Aged Robitussin. The new up-market blend has a sophisticated flavor profile of cherry, codeine, pseudoephedrine, and hints of citrus.
the problem with nutrition research is that it isn’t rigorous, due to funding problems. the NIH spends very little on these studies, a missed opportunity now being fixed by a new consortium.
If somatic mutations are common in healthy bodies, then biomedical researchers can no longer assume that DNA aberrations point toward the causes of disease. Doctors won’t be able to trust that the DNA found in a blood or saliva sample actually reflects the gene sequences in the heart or the liver. Should somatic variation turn out to be not just common but also good for you, it will undermine the longstanding presumption that the healthiest genome gets replicated with perfect fidelity. The most highly functional bodies may be the ones that permit a little mutation, that encourage a certain amount of genetic wildness and disorder within
not only are you 90% bacterial, but the human parts of you can’t get their shit together.
within our bodies our cells are not all created equal at the genomic level. In other words, we are mosaics.
soon it may even be possible to make evolutionary forecasts. Scientists may not be able to predict what life will be like 100 million years from now, but they may be able to make short-term forecasts for the next few months or years. And if they’re making predictions about viruses or other health threats, they might be able to save some lives in the process.
a procedure to predict influenza mutations every year with 90% precision, helping to produce the right vaccines for that season.
We can analyze any mutation, even those that haven’t been identified yet. This allows researchers to predict whether a novel mutation is likely to be dangerous or harmless — in essence, performing a screening test
and another one
10 years of work at Johns Hopkins has yielded a computer program that predicts, with far more accuracy than current methods, which mutations are likely to have the largest effect on the activity of the “dimmer switches” (which alter the cell’s gene activity) in DNA — suggesting new targets for diagnosis and treatment of many diseases.
The person on the left decided against fast track. Is that what tenure looks like? The sparkle is a nice touch too.
a new front on the war on quacks. i wish this bright student good luck.
Mazer brought a policy before the Medical Society of the State of New York—where Dr. Oz is licensed—requesting that they consider regulating the advice of famous physicians in the media. His idea, Treat health advice on TV in the same vein as expert testimony, which already has established guidelines for truthfulness.
During a new infection, the bacterial DNA was found to mutate at 40-50x the average rate. All of the bacterial DNA mutated quickly, but the changes manifested most prominently in the cell’s outer membrane proteins, helping them avoid detection by human defense cells.
i’m not one for moral panics, but this pathogen research is troubling:
The scientific benefit of making viruses more pathogenic is debatable: research tends to use old strains (may not be applicable to our current situation), there is a bias towards more spectacular and lethal virulence because it gets published and funded, there is no reason to think evolution will move in the same way (it is highly contingent, and hence what is learned may not help make vaccines or drugs), and the key experiment (doing it with humans) is unethical, and hence unfalsifiable. The ethics is also really problematic, since the rate of lab releases is not negligible and a flu outbreak can easily kill people – it has a skew distribution with a heavy tail.
a lot of experiments will have to be redone due to
Exposure of mice and rats to male but not female experimenters produces pain inhibition. Experimenter sex can thus affect apparent baseline responses in behavioral testing.
Gregor J. Rothfuss 