Isn't Flowers for Algernon required 7th-grade reading anymore? This isn't going to end well, people.
I was thinking Understand in Ted Chaing's Stories of Your Life and Others. Just the same set-up: new drug that can heal a person's damaged brain, turns him into a super-intelligent psycho.
What's the difference between healing a brain and just generally improving a brain?
A semi-facetious question, perhaps? Healing at least is a return to a baseline, "generally improving" is more subjective. I would tend to expect that changing any system as complex as the human brain would have the potential for improving some things, while impairing others. Not that it would impossible to find a compound that only produced changes we considered positive, without any we considered negative - just unl…
Not facetious at all.
If I take that molecule and find that I can acquire perfect pitch as an adult or easily learn a new language, was my brain "damaged" prior to taking the drug?
> I would guess that you are right simply because most drugs that initially show promise in mice fail during clinical trials in humans. What about the contrapositive... How many substances fail in mouse studies (and are discarded), yet would have been viable in humans? Any known examples of this?
I don't know off the top of my head of any drugs that work in humans but have intolerable problems in mice. I do know that some substances are much more toxic to other mammals than to us. For example, acetaminophen is very toxic to cats. Theobromine is much more toxic to dogs and cats than to humans. 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is rapidly lethal to guinea pigs at a level that might only cause skin problems an…
Permethrine is highly lethal to cold-blooded animals and cats.
> I would guess that you are right simply because most drugs that initially show promise in mice fail during clinical trials in humans. What about the contrapositive... How many substances fail in mouse studies (and are discarded), yet would have been viable in humans? Any known examples of this?
I don't know off the top of my head of any drugs that work in humans but have intolerable problems in mice. I do know that some substances are much more toxic to other mammals than to us. For example, acetaminophen is very toxic to cats. Theobromine is much more toxic to dogs and cats than to humans. 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is rapidly lethal to guinea pigs at a level that might only cause skin problems an…
Not exactly a drug, but during animal testing of saccharin in the 1970s, saccharin was found to induce bladder cancer in mice in high doses. However, the mechanism of action was later found to be specific to rodents and not applicable to humans.
> I would guess that you are right simply because most drugs that initially show promise in mice fail during clinical trials in humans. What about the contrapositive... How many substances fail in mouse studies (and are discarded), yet would have been viable in humans? Any known examples of this?
I don't know off the top of my head of any drugs that work in humans but have intolerable problems in mice. I do know that some substances are much more toxic to other mammals than to us. For example, acetaminophen is very toxic to cats. Theobromine is much more toxic to dogs and cats than to humans. 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is rapidly lethal to guinea pigs at a level that might only cause skin problems an…
Minoxidil, the active ingredient in Rogaine, is lethal to cats.
A semi-facetious question, perhaps? Healing at least is a return to a baseline, "generally improving" is more subjective. I would tend to expect that changing any system as complex as the human brain would have the potential for improving some things, while impairing others. Not that it would impossible to find a compound that only produced changes we considered positive, without any we considered negative - just unl…
Not facetious at all. If I take that molecule and find that I can acquire perfect pitch as an adult or easily learn a new language, was my brain "damaged" prior to taking the drug?
Different, clearly, but the 'damage' (or 'healing') would be subjective, wouldn't it? Since most of our organ systems return to the mean, I still suspect it's more likely that taking it when you have no reason to would be more likely to cause negative changes, rather than positive ones - but brave people are apparently willing to make that gamble.
I don't know off the top of my head of any drugs that work in humans but have intolerable problems in mice. I do know that some substances are much more toxic to other mammals than to us. For example, acetaminophen is very toxic to cats. Theobromine is much more toxic to dogs and cats than to humans. 2,3,7,8-Tetrachlorodibenzo-p-dioxin is rapidly lethal to guinea pigs at a level that might only cause skin problems an…
Minoxidil, the active ingredient in Rogaine, is lethal to cats.
Curiously, felines are apparently among the most resistant mammals to prions, maybe second to pigs.
Some "life extension" site forum had a group buy for the stuff apparently. People posted some of their results: http://www.longecity.org/forum/topic/68589-isrib-group-buy-n... One quote: So far I'm very much surprised about the effect on the overall cognition. My personal experiences are, that ISRIB definitely has it's effects on memory consolidation, but in my experience it doesn't only influence the long term memor…
Sample size of 1, no blinding, no verification of the substance received. Quite worthless. Placebo effect is strong enough children recognised as more intelligent by chance do act and measure smarter.
I don't know if it's strictly necessary to write this after every personal experience. It might be better to save this comment for when people compare anecdotes against studies.
Note this comment is also applicable to literally the entire body of software engineering knowledge.
I would guess that you are right simply because most drugs that initially show promise in mice fail during clinical trials in humans. But it's also worth remembering that the trope in fiction of $REALLY_GOOD_THING turning out to be $BAD_THING in disguise is just that, dramatically convenient fiction. There's no natural "game balance" to the universe. Yet popular entertainment is very small-c conservative about human…
> I would guess that you are right simply because most drugs that initially show promise in mice fail during clinical trials in humans. What about the contrapositive... How many substances fail in mouse studies (and are discarded), yet would have been viable in humans? Any known examples of this?
Not sure if it applies though because it being severly harmful to rodents hasn't prevented us from looking into this substance closely. Quite the opposite.