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Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

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Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#191

Post by codethief »

bhouston wrote: post #58
duchenne wrote: post #50

I see many comments wondering why the original authors do not reveal their synthesis process. The reason is simple. They work for a private company. Not a university. Not a public lab. They do not reveal the process for the same reason than openAI does not reveal its process. It is because they are sitting on a quadrillion dollars opportunity and they want to grab it. Similarly as OpenAI, many initiatives are trying…

The lab has a patent though which a lows for disclosure while also profiting from it. Thus I am not totally convinced of your claims.

AFAIU, the patent is limited to South Korea.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#192

Post by codethief »

duchenne wrote: post #50

I see many comments wondering why the original authors do not reveal their synthesis process. The reason is simple. They work for a private company. Not a university. Not a public lab. They do not reveal the process for the same reason than openAI does not reveal its process. It is because they are sitting on a quadrillion dollars opportunity and they want to grab it. Similarly as OpenAI, many initiatives are trying…

> I see many comments wondering why the original authors do not reveal their synthesis process. The reason is simple.

Yes, but the reason is a different one: It's that they're busy writing / publishing a journal-grade paper and so they have postponed helping out other labs with reproduction efforts to the time after that. (Source: Hyun-Tak Kim said this in some interview.)

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#193

Post by entrep »

vhiremath4 wrote: post #28

It’s interesting to notice all unofficial institutions (bottom table) have a higher outcome of partial success. Unless the more legitimate labs are less capable, you have to wonder whether anything outside of an accredited institution can be trusted at all at this point. My guess is the allure of hype (more followers / engagement) is too strong for personal gain.

This could possibly be attributed to survival bias. I.e. the individuals are more prone to post their results only after a successful attempt.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#194

Post by krsdcbl »

throwawaaarrgh wrote: post #166

HN is such a weird place. Every so often it adopts these communities of people obsessed with something, and lately it's whatever LK-99 is. I wish they'd just go make a subreddit.

I find it much more odd that whenever noteworthy scientific or technical news are heavily discussed on this news platform that is pretty much for such content, some users are very quick to be needlessly dismissive of everybody's interest, citing the currently higher frequency of threads/links concerning said newsworthy topic.

Quite ironically though, individually policing & complaining about the relevance of specific subtopics indeed feels quite "Reddit", while one of the things that make HN so pleasant is exactly that it's user base usually abstains from arguing about such meta & leave moderating actual offtopic to the moderators.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#196

Post by krab »

lucubratory wrote: post #174
messe wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents aren't just an incentive to invest in research: it's (moreso, even) an incentive to also disclose that research. So yes, in a world with patents, private entities would still engage in research, but what would they gain from disclosing the details of their process?

It is extremely rare that actionable, reproducible information comes out of the patent process. In general, they provide as little information as possible in order to satisfy the office, which is extremely overworked and (by design) rubber stamps everything that has basically the correct headings and formatting and isn't too similar to an existing patent.

In the case of drugs, it works. The day a patent expires, you have generics that instantly lower the market price. Replicating a drug from a patent is not free but you know that the compound works and can be synthesized. It's much cheaper than doing original research where a drug candidate can fail after you invested a lot into it.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#197

Post by bhouston »

codethief wrote: post #191
bhouston wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lab has a patent though which a lows for disclosure while also profiting from it. Thus I am not totally convinced of your claims.

AFAIU, the patent is limited to South Korea.

That is insane and would be a major error if true.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#198

Post by neom »

samwillis wrote: post #183
n2d4 wrote: post #179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

According to Wikipedia, Q Centre was founded in 2008. LK-99 is called LK-99 because it was discovered in 1999, but they stopped working on it for the bigger chunk of the 21st century. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK-99#Compound_name

Ah, my mistake. A 1999 discovery while plausible seems like a long time ago. I wander if it really is exactly the compound as they found back then.

The Korean press seems to indicate that's when their mentor professor passed away and asked them to continue research on a theory he had, they've been slogging away on it since.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#199

Post by amluto »

sschueller wrote: post #129
mort96 wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

If this truly is the "Wunder" material no patent will prevent people from synthesizing it. Sure, commercially there would be lawsuits and blocking being able to sell a product based on it but many foreign governments don't care. Even the US would ignore such patents if it was useful for military usage.

I think it also depends pretty strongly on what the patent says.

For one thing, there doesn’t seem to be any strong reason to believe that the superconducting material (if any) is what the LK-99 team thinks it is. For another, lead is nasty, and, if there really is a room temperature superconductor, there will be plenty of interest in finding lead-free materials with similar properties, and those might not be covered by a patent.

Re: Compilation of claims/reports of LK-99 replication efforts

#200

Post by Retric »

mort96 wrote: post #97
Retric wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

20 years isn’t that long. The point of patents is to quickly get secrets out into the public while still incentivizing people to make them known. In this case this tiny company doesn’t have the resources to optimize production and has failed for years. They might eventually receive outside funding and figure it out, but they could also fail without releasing their secrets as has happened a few times.

[flagged]

Many ways of getting around patents, and if they can’t companies still need to sell the stuff to profit here. So the world would get room temperature superconductors if it works.

20 years really isn’t that long and more importantly it doesn’t prevent doing research or building assembly lines or customers designing systems to use the stuff. Nobody could start building assembly lines today, so the difference isn’t even close to the full 20 years here.

If LK-99 pains out they might profit from it for a decade or so while still actually manufacturing the stuff. But, the best case is companies perfecting their process and taking orders so they can start shipping on day 1 after it expires.

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