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Protein that destroys HIV discovered

loyolamedicine.org

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Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#61

Post by sprout »

Ardit20 wrote: post #58
sprout wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was a student (now graduated). And I was not alone in lacking needed resources. I had numerous friends in other departments who complained of lacking needed journal articles.

Desirable and necessary resources are different. The entirety of the night in regards to hacker news however has been quite revealing. This place is no less a waste of time than telly. Your insistence simply proves so. Anyone who has been in a university just knows that they had access to the journals they needed, but perhaps not some they might have wanted to. Yet regardless, neither helps us in our endeavour. Wheth…

>Desirable and necessary resources are different.

That's a bit of a retreat from where your argument was.

But yes, I'm sorry HN is becoming such an echo chamber with no regard for honest discourse. In a lot of ways I prefer Reddit, since there's no pretension that the downvotes are anything other than a mindless disagree.

Honestly, I think that pg probably has it backwards, and that comments should be flag-only while posts should have downvotes. Of course, any system is vulnerable to abuse given enough time.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#62

Post by aphyr »

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 really wanted to write a reasoned rebuttal, but the more I read your posts here the less I can figure out exactly what you've intended to say. Maybe some of this disagreement is due to a misunderstanding over writing.)

There are quite literally thousands of relevant journals for a college to subscribe to, and institutional access is fantastically expensive. In fact, the cost of journal access here in the US has expanded year over year far faster than inflation or any other information resource, and now consumes the majority of library budgets at many colleges.

That "free access" you were talking about for students? Physical Review alone runs from $17,000 to $32,000 annually. Now imagine maintaining a few hundred of those subscriptions.

On the other side of things, I have published in Physical Review Letters, and was disillusioned with the editorial/peer review process. You're hopelessly constrained for length, but asked to remove key sentences while expanding abbreviations. Because it's extremely difficult to explain your work in such a short space, your reviewers can focus on details you know deserve explanation but simply can't include for brevity--or worse, misunderstand your research entirely.

Let's face it: this is only a problem for dead-tree publishers. We could double the page limits for online articles at negligible cost, and I would argue, decreased difficulty for reviewers and referees.

Some people have raised more political concerns about the review process, but I don't understand those as fully.

[edit] I should make it clear that I greatly value the work being done by APS and journals in organizing, qualifying, and sharing high-value correspondence. I simply believe there may be a space for open-access journals as well.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#63

Post by mhb »

Ardit20 wrote: post #55
mhb wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Readers of a peer-reviewed article are, I think, willing to stipulate that the authors of the article are using adequate equipment. Probably most of the researchers of submitted articles which the reviewers criticize or reject use the same equipment. The price of the equipment is not a factor in the credibility of the work. It does not make it more or less credible or flawed in any way. It is unusual to see the price…

We were not reading a peer reviewed article.

No. But Virology is and its inclusion there is deferred until the third paragraph. If the point you are trying to make is that you are a representative audience member for this article and you find it more compelling that they used expensive equipment than that their result was featured on the cover of a peer-reviewed journal, I think we can agree that the the writer of the Loyola Medicine press release has taken the full measure of his readership.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#64

Post by aphyr »

Ardit20 wrote: post #27
jonknee wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why should there be grant money set aside to cover peer review?

Because we're already paying for it in journal subscriptions , memberships, and publication fees paid by public institutions. We might as well pay something other than a for-profit organization. Elsevier, for example, does something like $600 million in pre-tax profit per year.

That profit comes, in part, from your tax dollars via research grants and public education funding.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#65

Post by mathgladiator »

Ardit20 wrote: post #48
Ardit20 wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ohh right cool, geeks feeling awkward when sex is compared to pleasure? Dude, sex is pleasure, indeed it is one of the highest pleasure! It is not just poor African orphans who get aids. In fact the reason why so much effort is put into it is because it is not just poor African orphans in a far away land. It is you and me and anyone else who could potentially get aids in a drunken night in a club, or park, or maybe e…

Ok, this is a reply to mquander on this thread http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1628106 (unfortunately I do not know how to link directly to the post and the reason why I am not replyin there is because I can not. I would not like to see this community as a place where I can validate or discredit the thoughts I already hold. I am only 22 and wish much to grow. In those areas where I might not provisionally want to…

I've unfortunately revealed myself for the inappropriate person that I am... Whilst it is not fair, it the rules that those with influence make as they hold the communal metric of quality and content value.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#66

Post by joeyo »

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…

They do. The catch is there is (up to) a 12 month lag.

http://publicaccess.nih.gov/

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#67

Post by freesciencenow »

sprout wrote: post #60
Ardit20 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"But yes, reason has little purchase in this place. The community has very strong biases and refuses to give time to opposition." What exactly do you mean?

You're being downvoted purely because people disagree with you. HN is supposed to be above that.

While I didn't downvote him, I agree with the downvoters. His substantive claims about how the research/peer review system works -- upon which is entire argument is based -- are factually incorrect.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#68

Post by InclinedPlane »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #41
Ardit20 wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This is a protein that monkeys produce naturally, humans too, except HIV has evolved a resistance to the human version. There has been no research involving giving any animal this protein (even monkeys) and seeing results. This doesn't represent any great progress toward a "cure". You can't administer proteins orally because they will be broken down by the immune system. If people start injecting monkey proteins into…

Minor correction: I meant to say "broken down by the digestive system" with regards to administering proteins orally.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#69

Post by akshayubhat »

Ardit20 wrote: post #15
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.)

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?

     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.
>> No, Public interest in research is what keeps funding higher.

     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?
>> Researchers publishing papers dont earn a penny, the only thing that they get is free (no charge to researcher) dissemination. In fact a lot of researchers post a free version on there own web site.

I have published two papers in journal published by American Chemical Society and authors are allowed to put up pre-publication / non edited copy of their papers on their own website. ACS also provides a link from which upto 50 visitors can download the authors paper for free in first year and there is no limit after first year.

E.g. http://pubs.acs.org/cgi-bin/download.pl?ie0704647/P8Lu is free link to my first paper, the article is behind the firewall but if you use above link, you can get it for free.

Re: Protein that destroys HIV discovered

#70

Post by muriithi »

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…

You may be right. More info in this reddit comment; http://www.reddit.com/r/science/comments/d4lhp/protein_that_...
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