One of my pet peeves is science journalism abusing the active voice, often in ways that almost anthropomorphize the process. The absolute worst are phrases like "Nature designed this protein to...", which I have seen otherwise reasonable, rational writers toss about carelessly. (It's like the inverse of the passive voice used to describe police shootings: "the suspect was hit by gunfire", etc.)
Last year Bill Gates talked about doing exactly that (I don't know if this actually happened):
https://www.businessinsider.com/bill-gates-factories-7-diffe...
The fact that someone like Gates is throwing the idea around suggests that it's not really incompatible or inconsistent with our civilization. (EDIT: saw your other comment with the follow-up, sigh.)
He's been writing on these subjects for years, and nothing in this article would be a surprise to anyone who has read him before or has even a passing familiarity with the pharma industry. (Also, he's always been totally up-front about his conflicts of interests and political views, and acknowledges when pharma companies screw up.) I think there are fewer serious long answers to this problem than you expect - they tend to hinge on "wave hands and solve central planning problem".
Microfluidics is a fantastic area of research that more people should get involved in. My impression is that it's very difficult to make it work and expensive to scale up, but that means there's plenty of room for improvement and business models to be created. Too late to help with our current pandemic though.
The only "disruption" required is for funding agencies, especially governments, to mandate immediate open access as a condition of grants. Milder approaches such as the NIH's current policy have been spectacularly successful, because nobody turns down that kind of money. The main problem has been intense lobbying by publishers, including some academic societies. But open access is not an issue where it should be difficult to assemble a large bipartisan coalition in favor, even in the US!
I think pre-emptive enforcement of something like this is extremely difficult without getting downright creepy and invasive. The best you can do is drop the hammer on anyone greedy and dumb enough to get caught - and I'm sure there will be some of these! But personally, I prefer vaccines where the chain of custody didn't require massive bribery and risk-taking.
If that is the case everyone involved is playing an exceptionally dangerous game and I can't imagine that this would be the norm, especially since I suspect the thieves will get greedy and screw up quickly.
I took a different route to working in software, but I certainly spent many years wishing I knew enough to write something like EV. (Now the problem is insufficient time and energy, of course.)
I work in scientific computing so I definitely don't miss SGI workstations either. My complaint is just that even the simplest tasks, like word processing, end up taking orders of magnitude more computing power (or just don't work very well). The average commercial web page is an extreme example of this - I'd rather go back to mid-90s layouts and animated GIFs than endure most news sites. (I wonder how much of the demand for steady increases in computing speed was simply driven by the need to slam the consumer with as many advertisements as possible.)
But yes, it is impressive that my $500 phone blows away the $50,000 workstations I started on.
Any chance some of the copyright holders would be interested in open-sourcing the code? Escape Velocity in particular. EDIT: especially since these games are no longer playable without registration, ouch. Hope I still have my EV Nova code somewhere.
Yes, the telephone is also superior in every way to the computers I used until well into adulthood! But it's difficult to break the persistent feeling that while those antiques were very limited, the software was much better optimized for what it did. Like most Mac users in my generation, my word-processing productivity peaked on Word 5.1a and everything since then has been a disappointment.
I've seen anecdotal claims that attendance at restaurants and theaters has been way down even in states or regions that had no restrictions. Would be interesting to see some actual data for this.
I am (unusually!) an optimist here, based on current vaccine status: I think the second half of 2021 will be a period of exceptional economic growth. I don't know how anyone below the poverty line is supposed to wait that long to draw a paycheck again though.
I have yet to see anyone suggest donating to food banks. Anyone can complain that the government should do something, but if you're not willing to volunteer your own disposable income, you shouldn't expect others to. The average software engineer can probably feed an additional family of four with no effort.
I always thought the reason Brahms stands out among his contemporaries is that he's the first post-Beethoven symphonist who actually came close to Beethoven's level. But I've never been a big fan of the early Romantic era compositions.
I'll add that to my playlist, but I'd argue that the difference between 12 minutes and 5 hours counts for a lot! (Although I guess maybe opera audiences are primed for sitting in place for that long? I just don't have the attention span for anything longer than Figaro.)
I thought the combination of Zimmer's score and Nolan's editing in Dunkirk basically turned it into an enormous minimalist composition - I mean that in the best possible way.
In my experience - as both a player and listener - minimalism is really difficult to do well! It's a lot of work to avoid becoming repetitive white noise. But to be fair, even Mozart and Beethoven had their occasional duds.
Einstein On The Beach is definitely on the extreme end. On the other hand, Itaipu (my personal favorite) and many of his symphonies are about as close to mainstream as modern "classical music" usually gets.
My take is exactly the opposite: since 3D structures of proteins alone are almost never the bottleneck in drug discovery, this won't actually change anything. Knowing how the drug is going to bind, and knowing how it'll behave in vivo, are not something you can predict from deep sequencing data.
The other point missing in most of these discussions is we already know how most drug targets fold, even if we don't know the exact structure at atomic detail. It's everything else about their structure, dynamics, and in vivo function that remains very difficult. The real promise in AlphaFold IMHO isn't that we can magically solve protein structures without experiments (most really interesting structures are beyond what it can do anyway), but the more general application of these AI methods to human health.
I hadn't heard that one, but the freedom-loving Pilgrims executed Quakers for proselytizing in Massachusetts. Not really an environment founded on respect for individual autonomy or other ethical considerations.
In the very best case, it is indeed easy! I've seen the entire process take less than a month for a completely novel structure - those were extremely lucky cases of course, but my point is that it costs very little to set up some screens and see what happens. (Small globular proteins of course, not ribosomes or ion channels.)
I won't lie, I was thrilled the first time I saw the holes in aromatic rings in electron density from my experiment. But until the very end of last century, X-ray crystallography was still difficult enough to be a full-time occupation and a single crystal structure was a PhD thesis. In my experience that kind of narrow focus becomes self-propagating whether or not the method generates beautiful figures.
17th century American settlers were fleeing an environment where the child mortality rate was at least 1/3rd even for the upper classes, nearly all land and wealth was controlled by inbred gangsters, and the penalties for petty theft or incorrect religious worship included public hanging. From that perspective, the risks associated with colonization may have seemed much more attractive than the best-case scenario of spending several more decades of poverty in the same village. At least once you were in America, voting with your feet and moving west was always an option, something that was already recognized by 19th-century European socialists as a unique factor in the development of the US economy.
Of course I'm also assuming that the majority of the colonists were not only dirt poor, but also ignorant and uneducated and shamelessly lied to by the promoters of colonization.