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Making Vaccine

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Re: Making Vaccine

#181

Post by Imnimo »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #154
Imnimo wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would grant that it has a lot of the trapping of the scientific method, and uses a lot of the terminology. But I think we're kidding ourselves if we pretend that there's much knowledge to be gained here. It's a non-controlled trial with n=2 using ingredients of uncertain purity and a loose experimental protocol ("We’ll add the other three peptides, take another few weeks of boosters, maybe adjust frequency and/or d…

Okay, I love "scientific method LARP"! Granted it is a bit elitist but still, conveys a solid point. As a counter point, was Edward Jenner[1] a LARPer or a scientist? Follow up question, was his net contribution to science "big" or "small"? [1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1200696/

Jenner was living in the 1700s and was doing the best he could with the tools of the time. Still, his report included 20+ people, included challenge results in which subjects were exposed to smallpox to verify their immunity. If the role models for this exercise are all from the 18th century, that should ring some alarm bells.

Re: Making Vaccine

#182

Post by wtallis »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #179
wtallis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't agree that is technically falsified. > I know you used "pretty strongly" as sarcasm, but it's not falsifiability is absolute - and this is not. I'm having a very hard time parsing what you're saying. At this point, it looks like you're trying to make an argument that "falsifiability" must mean that it is both possible and practical to reject a hypothesis with 100% certainty, and if you can't then you're not…

My point was to back up the grandparent. This is equally science as going into the woods, picking some berries and roots, grinding them and put them up your nose, doing an antibody test, and writing your conclusions up in a blog post. There's no difference. (But, yes, I think that writing hypotheses with 100% falsifiability, before challenging them practically, is quite a good definition of "scientific method", based…

> (But, yes, I think that writing hypotheses with 100% falsifiability, before challenging them practically, is quite a good definition of science)

It seems like you're still not making the necessary distinction between whether it is possible for an experiment's outcome to falsify the hypothesis, vs whether it is guaranteed that the experiment will falsify the hypothesis if it is in fact wrong. The latter is an unreasonable requirement to make part of your definition of science.

Re: Making Vaccine

#183

Post by flobosg »

subrat_rout wrote: post #158

I completely agree with fabian2k. It's incredibly risky to throw all random sequences peptides into the blood stream for evoking immune response. What happens if a sub-sequence of peptide matches with one of our own's body proteins and our immune system starts building antibody against it? That's what happens in most of autoimmune disease. In addition, most of the peptides that can be synthesized from a protein struc…

> What happens if a sub-sequence of peptide matches with one of our own's body proteins and our immune system starts building antibody against it?

The peptide sequences are listed on the whitepaper, so it’s a matter of BLASTing[1] them against the human proteome to check for possible matches. I just did it and there doesn’t seem to be any statistically significant hit.

[1]: https://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/Blast.cgi

Re: Making Vaccine

#184

Post by LinuxBender »

maxerickson wrote: post #136
LinuxBender wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reflecting back on vaccinating my own animals, several of the vaccinations involved injecting a liquid into their noses. I don't recall which vaccinations exactly, it's been a long time. This was the method tested and approved by veterinarians.

My quibble isn't with the method of administration, it's with this being essentially a one off experiment each time it's done, vs the work that goes into proving immune response and effectiveness and consistent manufacturing of commercial vaccines.

Makes sense. I have conflicting thoughts on biohacking. One one hand, the people doing it often have little scientific background and have very dodgy testing methods. On the other hand, if people are open to self experimentation, they could accidentally stumble onto something great. Or bad. Or random unintended findings or consequences. I could also see businesses being intimidated by these practices, as these people could render some chemicals obsolete, also by mistake. So many pros and cons.

Re: Making Vaccine

#186

Post by wtallis »

throwaway2245 wrote: post #179
wtallis wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I don't agree that is technically falsified. > I know you used "pretty strongly" as sarcasm, but it's not falsifiability is absolute - and this is not. I'm having a very hard time parsing what you're saying. At this point, it looks like you're trying to make an argument that "falsifiability" must mean that it is both possible and practical to reject a hypothesis with 100% certainty, and if you can't then you're not…

My point was to back up the grandparent. This is equally science as going into the woods, picking some berries and roots, grinding them and put them up your nose, doing an antibody test, and writing your conclusions up in a blog post. There's no difference. (But, yes, I think that writing hypotheses with 100% falsifiability, before challenging them practically, is quite a good definition of "scientific method", based…

> there are no circumstances whereby the author has to accept that their hypothesis was False.

The author described such a circumstance, but then explained that he did not have access to the necessary lab testing to actually do so. The hypothesis is falsifiable in principle even if the researcher does not expect to have the equipment necessary to measure falsification by that outcome.

Re: Making Vaccine

#187

Post by cromwellian »

This article could have been written by Gwyneth Paltrow and it would have had the same level of authority. There's a reason vaccines require staged trials. This seems play playing not with fire, but with nitroglycerin or maybe Nitrogen triiodide.

Re: Making Vaccine

#188

Post by JunkDNA »

It’s not a vaccine if you don’t have efficacy data. You can go snort all kinds of peptides all day long, that doesn’t mean you’re going to actually have something useful happen.

Do you know why we’ve developed all these complex rules about how to test whether drugs and vaccines work? It’s because humans have reliably demonstrated over and over that we have no friggin’ clue how our bodies actually work. I worked in drug discovery. The one thing that all failed drug candidates had in common was that they all looked like surefire bets right up until the point where the data came rolling in. The reason all these complex studies and checks and balances are in place is because ~200 years of human experience making vaccines and medicine has given us some small amount of humility.

Re: Making Vaccine

#189

Post by namesbc »

maxerickson wrote: post #180
namesbc wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or, do the standard vaccine safety and efficacy testing, deploy the vaccine to the people who need it most first, and save more lives. Optimizing deployment of the virus to bored 20 year olds may be popular among bored 20 year olds, but it isn't the best public health strategy.

There is no reason to expect a challenge trial would slow down the standard branch of the trial. If it gave an earlier result, the differences would be good ones! The production would have worked through initial scaling and a bunch of people would be vaccinated. Do you think the vaccines being distributed right now were manufactured more than a few weeks ago or something?

Maybe, or you developed and scaled up production of a vaccine that only worked on young healthy adults who don't need it that much, and kills or maims everyone else. Wasting a ton of time, resources, and good will that could have been better spent saving lives instead of getting 20 year olds back to bars.

Remember it wasn't a given that mRNA vaccines were going to work, we were lucky.

Re: Making Vaccine

#190

Post by bobcostas55 »

refurb wrote: post #142
jcul wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea of personal science reminds me of Alexander Shulgin and his experiments in PHiKAL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PiHKAL

A little different no? Shulgin was a formally trained scientist (Harvard, Berkeley, UCSF), did research at major academic and private institutions.

>Preston Estep, Don Wang, Alex Hoekstra, Ranjan Ahuja, George Church, Brian Delaney, and over 100 others

Pretty sure George Church is a "formally trained scientist"!

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