Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Protein that destroys HIV discovered

loyolamedicine.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

21–30 of 72 posts

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#21

Post by ericd »

sprout wrote: post #19
Ardit20 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students. See http://arxiv.org .

There's still a scarcity of validation via reputation that is hard to get rid of.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#22

Post by Ardit20 »

sprout wrote: post #19
Ardit20 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students. See http://arxiv.org .

Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student.

A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld.

If you do not pay for it, well not you precisely, but the professionals who work in that field, then the funds would be taken either away from research or from students. I would rather someone who is in their thirties, and thus able to afford merely £10 for an article, or £30 for a monthly subscription, or however much it is, pay for it, than the students, amongst whom may be many poor ones and amongst whom almost inevitably the next Einstein come from.

There are problems with the system for certain. Personally I think such research should not be beyond a firewall for those who can not afford to pay for it. There is no reason that those who can should not, for if they do not, then the poor will pay.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#23

Post by Ardit20 »

jonknee wrote: post #20
Ardit20 wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Good luck with that. Barriers to professions - which includes access to research - is what keeps the professionals well paid and thus perhaps allow them to fund more research. Isn't that infringement of copyrights by the way? Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for?

> Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for? Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article: > The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution fo…

I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld.

I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge sufficiently for a fiver or tenner, then maybe you should not gain it.

The thing is that this goes beyond a random user like you or me. It is not hard at all to see vast distribution of such articles on free websites. You only need to buy a subscription to the distributor, and then copy and paste and upload each and everyone of them. Then, the people who actually find it necessary to read such articles, which is quite different from a random viewer, and who are the actual people who support the system, would simply not need to provide the funding for the system, and thus the system either collapses, or it evolves stupendously fast.

I would rather give them their time. This is not music or film. This is knowledge. I would thus rather be conservative and give them the freedom to adapt and adopt to the new technology and innovate within their own space and time.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#24

Post by jonknee »

Ardit20 wrote: post #23
jonknee wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Do you think it is fine too if I start distributing freely an application for which you have worked for years and decided to charge for? Sure, as long as I developed the application with taxpayer money I think it would be fair game to have it freely distributed. From the article: > The study was supported by a grant from the National Institutes of Health. I wish the NIH and others would require free distribution fo…

I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld. I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge suffici…

Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#25

Post by InclinedPlane »

Ardit20 wrote: post #14
InclinedPlane wrote: post #13

This isn't news, nor is it necessarily even exciting. There are thousands upon thousands of chemicals that destroy HIV (bleach is a good example), the tricky bit is working within the confines of the human body. Delivery, dosing, etc, etc, etc. As far as drug efficacy is concerned, those issues far outweigh anything else. Unless you are a drug researcher, ignore news of this sort, when you start seeing drug trials th…

I have not heard of any experiments being carried out in monkeys with bleach which showed positive results. I do not see what your point is. Is this not something new, hence news, but something well know to the mysterious field of drug researchers?

Ah, precisely, the lab is not the human body. The fact that you can kill HIV with X in the lab is meaningless. Bleach does a quite adequate job of that. However, we care about in vivo efficacy, and that's qualitatively a different problem. For every thousand drugs that seem promising in isolation in a petri dish (e.g. killing cancer cells and not damaging human tissue) perhaps only a handful make it to human trials, and then not all of those prove effective (or completely safe).

If every new substance that killed HIV or cancer in the lab made the news then you would not have time to read about anything else, there are more than you could imagine. Substances at the "kills X in the lab" stage are generally only of concern to researchers, because the chances that they'll turn into a "cure" are extremely low.

Buying a lottery ticket isn't news. Winning the lottery is. This sort of thing is the former, not the latter.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#26

Post by mhb »

Ardit20 wrote: post #16
mhb wrote: post #12

Is a $225K microscope supposed to be expensive or inexpensive for achieving this? Seems weird to mention that in the introduction. Why not include that they work in a $10M research building?

Because we have not heard of a $225K microscope before - thus the microscope must be well good - but have heard of $10M research building and actually expect the latter.

I'm sure the vast majority of the readers of this article have also not heard of a $10K, $100K or $700K microscope either which is why it's incongruous to have the price in the first sentence of the article without any context.

Here are many other microscopes the prices of which you may not have heard. Is it enlightening?

http://www.technicalsalessolutions.com/

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#27

Post by Ardit20 »

jonknee wrote: post #24
Ardit20 wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think there is a difference between the substance of the content and its distribution. The way that the article can have any validity and authority is for the current time through a peer reviewed system which requires plenty of money to be upheld. I like the system, with all its flaws. Why should you be free to cheat it? If you are poor and can not afford it, then fine, but if you do not value the knowledge suffici…

Then there should be grant money set aside to cover peer review. I'd bet most of the subscribers are already doing so with public money in some form, it doesn't make sense to lock up all that information behind a pay wall.

Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review? Just ask yourself honestly and try to be unbiased, is that not a very selfish proposition?

This is only one article, amongst thousands of which we do not care of. We do not care of them because they have nothing to do with the field we have chosen to focus on, be that computer science, medicine, history, physics, law, or artificial intelligence. I would rather the money goes into research, than to provide some randomer with the pleasure of reading something they hardly can understand anyway.

I did not read the peer reviewed journal, I do not care to read it, I know little about medicine besides what I was taught in school. The terminology used is different, one word contains entire concepts, there is an entirely different way of thinking in that field, and frankly, it adds no value to me personally. If it did and I could afford it, I would buy it. £30 is what one spends on a Saturday night!

Now if we wished to live in a paranoid world where we do not trust the experts in their field and wish to validate everything our self, then that is a personal choice of perspective.

One can well choose to spend his entire life to learn of every field in this earth. Most people, if not the vast majority of people, if not 99% of people, sooner or later, focus on one field, and perhaps focus further on that field, especially if such field is medicine, or computer science, or law. That is how we work, that is the best system we have found of operating.

I personally do not see anything wrong with the way the system currently works, not wrong in such a way as to justify throwing it out entirely. If you are a doctor, you subscribe, if you are not, then buy the one article you want to read, if you do not want to buy it, then you do not need it.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#28

Post by tocomment »

freesciencenow wrote: post #11

Paywalls for scientific research are evil. http://209.20.67.195/misc/sastri-identification.pdf (I intend to do this regularly; see bio.)

If you really want to free research you should do this:

Investigate whether there is an inverse correlation between the freeness of the journal a paper is published in and its popularity (number of citations?). You should control for the reputation of the journal since that could throw off the results.

If you find such a correlation and get it publicized, perhaps that would encourage more researchers to submit to free journals.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#29

Post by c1sc0 »

Ardit20 wrote: post #22
sprout wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most researchers haven't really chosen to charge for their papers. It's the only way to get published in the journals, and it's based on an old scarcity where the distribution of quality journals was a difficult task. Now a social network of scientists could handle it for almost nothing. Barriers to research do nothing but make life difficult for poor college students. See http://arxiv.org .

Common. You probably are a college student, or the original poster is, or both were thus know full well that you get free access to the journals you need when you are a student. A journal has editors, some choose to have their journals in print which requires much money, and some journals have sub editors, and assistant editors, and chief editors, and a whole infrastructure which demands much money to be upheld. If y…

I'm sorry, but there is no excuse whatsoever for that old bloated system for distribution to continue to exist. Sure, editors have value, sure, peer review should be rewarded. But trying to create artificial scarcity by bringing an outdated distribution model to the online world doesn't make sense. Any pdf is just a few hops away on most social networks anyway, so it's not like their paywalls are stopping anyone.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#30

Post by Ardit20 »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #25
Ardit20 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have not heard of any experiments being carried out in monkeys with bleach which showed positive results. I do not see what your point is. Is this not something new, hence news, but something well know to the mysterious field of drug researchers?

Ah, precisely, the lab is not the human body. The fact that you can kill HIV with X in the lab is meaningless. Bleach does a quite adequate job of that. However, we care about in vivo efficacy, and that's qualitatively a different problem. For every thousand drugs that seem promising in isolation in a petri dish (e.g. killing cancer cells and not damaging human tissue) perhaps only a handful make it to human trials,…

I am sorry, perhaps you are allergic to monkeys, but I did mention them, and I did mention that bleach was not tried on monkeys and succeeded. Monkeys that is, not labs.
Post reply on HN