daughart

You don't have to wonder, it's a scientific study. https://clinicaltrials.gov/show/NCT00543543

Sponsor: Merck Sharp & Dohme Corp

Official Title: A Randomized, International, Double-Blinded (With In-House Blinding), Controlled With GARDASIL, Dose-Ranging, Tolerability, Immunogenicity, and Efficacy Study of a Multivalent Human Papillomavirus (HPV) L1 Virus-Like Particle (VLP) Vaccine Administered to 16- to 26- Year-Old Women

Health Authority: United States: Food and Drug Administration

Are the quote marks, which are not present in the article title, really necessary here?

What fields do you find having an academic "echo chamber"?

Seems like a great plan, formalizing the well trodden and generally successful strategy of letting early adopters play with new tech early so that it's robust when mom and pop get their hands on it.

I can't remember the details of this either, but as I recall it was done in liver because when you inject DNA into mice the liver basically filters it all out, so you get very high efficiency in the liver, but no where else!

Sorry for the delay - there are many aspects of this that can be patented. Consider all the following inventions:

- Alterations of the RNA that guides cutting (natural system uses two RNAs, which researchers fuse and alter for efficiency of the mechanism)

- Alterations to the protein for efficiency and specificity (e.g. making it nick instead of cut both strands)

- Methods/strategies (how to express the various features, tethering multiple together, how to select only cells that have the changes you want, etc.)

- Applications (use of this system to do something novel)

However, the largest and most central is the use of the system itself for something that does not occur in nature and is non-obvious. This is a system bacteria use as an immune system against foreign DNA. That is not at all related to genome editing. So if people have a problem ("How do we engineer the genome of this cell?"), and then they come up with a novel strategy ("Let's combine these pieces together, using Cas9/CRISPR to cut, then introduce another piece of DNA in a certain way to serve as a template that hijacks the endogenous DNA repair mechanisms to introduce engineered changes."), that is pretty clearly a process of invention to me.

You can't just patent something existing in nature, and as you can see from the examples above that's not at all what is happening here. There is tons of innovation that is novel and non-obvious.

It's not yet clear who will ultimately own this IP, of Doudna, Zhang, Church (in the US, the European patents have other contenders). Last I heard, Doudna and Zhang were set to have dueling lab notebooks. I wouldn't underestimate Church's position either given his record of visionary patents (e.g. Nanopore sequencing). Disclaimer I work in the Church lab.

I image reviewers would typically know who the author is, or be able to discover it quickly, if they are in fact familiar enough with the field to meaningfully review the work. Similarly, authors can often guess who reviewers are based on the nature of the review. I don't think a double-blind strategy really addresses the problems with modern peer review.

I can't believe they have the nerve to call this professional writing.

I believe they're actually trying this as well.

Just because they sell a 16GB version doesn't mean you had to buy it. Needing lots of space to record video is a niche anyway, like needing the iPod classic for large audio libraries. People store images, video, and music on cloud services now.

Your Luddism at the end seems reactionary.

Proteins misfold constantly, prion diseases are very rare, and creation of a novel prion would constitute a massive gain of function for a protein, therefore it is very unlikely to occur.

Food shortage is a real problem that affects a billion people.

We should weigh potential risks against this.

I agree with what you say about pesticides -- note I said BPA is not comparable with GMO, not that BPA is not comparable with pesticide. In this case, the genetically modified organism would be safe, but chemicals used to treat the organism could be harmful.

> If for no other reason than they can produce a lot of a completely unknown and unresearched chemical.

I don't think this is true. Metabolic engineering is really hard. In other words, getting an organism to produce a new small molecule is really hard. If it weren't, we would have large scale biosynthesis of lots of stuff, instead of relying on chemical synthesis or isolation. Most enzymes have very specific functions. E.g. an enzyme will add a carbon at a particular location on a very specific substrate molecule. There's not really the possibility for unforeseen byproducts.

What you describe isn't really plausible, which is why biologists agree GMOs are safe. A plausible hypothetical for how something bad could happen, and then not be noticed until the product is fed to millions of people, probably doesn't exist (based on the fact that one has yet to be proposed).

The only exception I know is allergenicity, but this is a general risk. People are allergic to stuff. Any new product is potentially allergenic. All of a sudden quinoa is in vogue.... people could be allergic to quinoa. No unique risk.

The toxicity of _Hedysarum alpinum_ is an evolved trait, like most toxicities, that confers some benefit to the host organism. It's hard to accidentally create a beneficial new trait in organisms. It's even an academic problem in the field--evolution of novelty. Most genetic changes you make either break stuff or if you're lucky do one specific thing.

The connectome project is interesting, useful, and ambitious, but the method they are using to generate these measurements, atomic scale microscopy (AFM, electron microscopy) are simply not scalable to the size of the human brain. We should be investing in fundamentally new technologies that can scale. It's like the human genome project but worse. By that I mean they could have saved a lot of time and effort using next generation sequencing a la Venter rather than older technology which was less scalable.

Who cares even if it's not well controlled and changes many things? DNA mutates all the time with little effect. Every human born has a few novel mutations. There's no argument from this to a comparison with bioactive small molecules.

Thanks for the down-vote, but seriously do you have an argument here? Even Monsanto's "Roundup Ready" GMOs merely express a modified version of an enzyme that allows them to synthesize essential amino acids even in the presence of the pesticide. There is no rational argument for why modifications to the DNA region that regulate production of the enzyme or modifications to the enzyme could be dangerous in any way... Even when ingested, these macromolecules would be digested rather than absorbed, as in the case of a bioactive small molecule that is readily absorbed from consumer plastics (e.g. BPA).

FUD...

Chemicals like BPA and GMOs aren't equivalent in any sense.

I wonder what kinds of particles are re-introduced to the air between the 0.5 um size this vacuum filters and a traditional HEPA filter which excludes particles down to 0.3 um.

If you think college will be any better, you're dead wrong. It will be worse, because the punishments are greater, the rules are more ad hoc, and the administrators are both more knowledgable and more likely to be embarrassed in the more hierarchical and bureaucratic institution.

I learned in college not to fight with administration, just focus your efforts on improving yourself and doing something great with your talents. This will someday hopefully put YOU in the position of power, and then it's your responsibility not to be a hypocrite.

Hey, no problem. My issue is one of language itself. As someone who takes the english language very seriously, I don't ignore when someone makes the choice to use a particular word. Between our two comments, we have used the following set of words to roughly address the same concept (advancement of LGBT rights): [agenda, movement, purpose, goal]. Of these, only "agenda" has a secondary definition referring to underlying intentions or motives (even consider the word motive - "a reason for doing something, especially one that is hidden").

Writing is an act of art, and reading is an act of interpretation. These secondary definitions come into play when determining what someone means. Agenda is not purely pejorative, and it's true LGBT groups have agendas - they have plans of things to be done - they have motives - reasons for doing something. However, these attributes of LGBT groups could also be described with words that do not have any negative aspects, such as goals, plans, purposes, etc.

>If you want to understand people...

I assume people understand the words they use and intend to use them. If people use words without precision, how can they expect to be understood?

As for etiquette... no idea ha. Made the same mistake myself.

People don't call civil rights or women's rights "agendas," they call them "movements." Agenda is pejorative, pertaining to "underlying intentions"; whereas movement directly refers to the act of changing, and in other fields such as music indicates a progression or forward dynamic. Portraying gay people in media could have an advertising "agenda" (e.g. they have an intention of selling things by appearing gay friendly or progressive with respect to modern culture rather than an intention of advancing gay rights), but are still progressive in that media portrayals of gay people actually is a change, or forward progression, for a minority group.

The title strikes me as sexist, given the paper the author is discussing was first-authored by a woman.

As for your first point, shotgun sequencing was not invented by Illumina. Shotgun sequencing, or sequencing many small fragments and then computationally reconstructing a larger contig, was first done in 1979, and later used by many groups (most famously by Celera Genomics in their quest to beat the human genome project). Shotgun sequencing can be done using any short sequencing reads, so this is neither a breakthrough nor even an advantage for Illumina.

Illumina's chemistry was better than the others, and they marketed their advantages better. The Illumina machine produced longer reads than SOLiD (Life Technologies), and produced more reads than 454 (Roche). They produced reliable instruments that were relatively easier to use than the others also, which made them favorites for core facilities.

Was it really "well said"? It was a personal judgement followed by an unjustified assertion. It seems you merely agree with the comment, and have mistaken that with the author saying something well.

There's nothing to identify - it's a serum containing three monoclonal antibodies. These antibodies bind some viral proteins, preventing the virus from infecting new cells and spreading. To my knowledge there's no path from this to a vaccine, which prepares the human immune system to recognize and fight viral infection itself. Unfortunately, monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) are still very expensive to manufacture, distribute, and use as treatment for disease, meaning this will not broadly impact outcomes in rural Africa (barring advances in mAbs technology).

Anyone who says a full model of the brain is right around the corner is either a fool or a charlatan. The BRAIN initiative was a first start to _develop the technologies_ needed to take the measurements that would underly potentially explanatory brain models.

In Conneconomics (http://dx.doi.org/10.1101/001214) we try to estimate the cost and time needed to map the connectome alone (only one component of a holistic brain model).

It doesn't help me at all, but that's because I'm not confused about this issue. If you drank large quantities of ultra pure water as defined in the article, without compensating for the loss of essential salts that would result, you would die. What you are talking about here has no relevance to anything as far as I can tell.

But not salts like calcium and magnesium, which are essential. As far as I know sodium is the only salt that influences blood pressure.

In papers published yesterday in eLife and Science, Harvard scientists including George Church reveal how Cas9/CRISPR genome editing tools can be used to create powerful "gene drives" to artificially shape the evolution of populations.

Source articles: eLife: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.03401 Science: http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1254287

That toddler has already processed lots of visual image data, examples of objects, nonliving and living, animals, mammals, etc. Don't you think that constitutes a large, important dataset for the problem of elephant recognition?