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The Ebola Wars

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Re: The Ebola Wars

#21

Post by throwaway5752 »

jerf wrote: post #18
FD3SA wrote: post #10

Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway. As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate? To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide. P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in…

The CDC was and is plenty funded to deal with this threat. If you think they didn't spend it well, well, join the club. No amount of money is ever "enough" if it not managed responsibly. I'd really appreciate it if those who think the answer is always more government money would start putting more pressure on their goverment to spend it responsibly . I mean that quite straight, not as a snark. It would go a long way…

It is not. Sorry, $6B annual budget is not a lot in the context of their responsibility, which is substantially greater than ebola [edit: or even outbreak containment in general, for that matter]. In fact, ebola (as evidenced by the lack of transmission to Duncan's own family or any additional caregivers of his [edit: not to mention a lack of host reservoir in NA]) probably and appropriately very low on the CDC's radar, since it is _not_ a public health threat in the US.

late edit: To put it in perspective, approximately $3B was the total operating expenses for just Massachusetts General Hospital, alone, in 2012. Or just 50% greater than the 2014 budget for UCSF. Or just half of what Apple spent on SG&A in the 12 months prior to Sept 27.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#22

Post by Florin_Andrei »

rads wrote: post #14
ddlatham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.

Yeah, but don't forget the complexity of the hardware you need to run ebola versus a website. Our bodies provide most of the implementation details.

Right. It's so much context dependent that the "hardware" of a different animal may react very differently to it - perhaps even ignoring it altogether.

The genetic information is really the 4.8 kB of "code" PLUS the entire information already contained in the cellular hardware reading it. One doesn't make sense without the other.

At the very bottom, the whole thing depends on the laws of quantum mechanics in this universe, governing the minute details of molecular interaction. That, too, should be considered to go into the "code". Make a tiny change to the Plank constant, and the Zaire ebolavirus code will do something very different.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#23

Post by trhway »

Florin_Andrei wrote: post #20
throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.or…

There's something fascinating about looking at that code, even though I can't decompile it just by reading the characters. P.S.: It's 37918 bits, about 4.6 kB

the notes to decoded pieces itself fascinating :

/note="immunosuppressive region; other site"

...

/note="transmembrane anchor; transmembrane region"

Re: The Ebola Wars

#24

Post by JoeAltmaier »

rads wrote: post #14
ddlatham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.

Yeah, but don't forget the complexity of the hardware you need to run ebola versus a website. Our bodies provide most of the implementation details.

Thank you for saying that! Its so often repeated that our DNA contains the entire program for a human being. That's patently false. The cellular machinery provides almost all of the OS; DNA is just a script.

I liken DNA to a paper tape containing one of two punches: MAN or MOUSE. Feed it into a bio-replicator and get a man or a mouse. Does the paper tape define the man? Of course not.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#26

Post by ddlatham »

rads wrote: post #14
ddlatham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.

Yeah, but don't forget the complexity of the hardware you need to run ebola versus a website. Our bodies provide most of the implementation details.

Absolutely, but that's true of most information as well. For example, the information in the article is relative to the context of understanding our language and the body of assumed knowledge and references of a reader of the New Yorker.

My understanding of biology is very limited. I've heard how physically small microbes are in every article out there. But never how information-small they are. Fascinating from a software developer's perspective.

I wonder what code golf for a virus would look like.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#27

Post by hga »

throwaway5752 wrote: post #16
FD3SA wrote: post #10

Good thing we've been cutting science funding across the board! Doubt the NIH and NSF grants were helping science much anyway. As a matter of fact, science should be privately funded and privately run. What idiot thought it was a good idea to make scientific research a government mandate? To thy weary, I say: The market shall provide. P.S. Yes, I am bitter about the current state of science. I've written about it in…

Sorry in advance that this going a little off topic (though, I would argue it's somewhat pertinent given the historically notable scientific illiteracy in the Ebola coverage/public response). This is a political site, but the author is an expert in healthcare policy: http://www.balloon-juice.com/2014/10/17/resiliency-is-not-ef... I tend to agree with you and him on the topic that capitalism as practiced in the US cur…

Bleah. The author ignores the very real opportunity costs in preparing "too much" for low probability events.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#28

Post by dnautics »

trhway wrote: post #23
Florin_Andrei wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something fascinating about looking at that code, even though I can't decompile it just by reading the characters. P.S.: It's 37918 bits, about 4.6 kB

the notes to decoded pieces itself fascinating : /note="immunosuppressive region; other site" ... /note="transmembrane anchor; transmembrane region"

it's even more fascinating. (biochemist here) I think the immunosuppressive regions is a small protein called sGP which ebola causes the cell to produce a ton of. It's not attached to ebola virions, so in a way it's a DDOS on the immune system, by creating a foreign component that the immune system gets distracted by instead of going after ebola.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#29

Post by dnautics »

rads wrote: post #14
ddlatham wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oops, thanks for the bits to bytes correction. It is simply incredible to me that it could be so small (in an information sense). This article (gzipped) is 22KB, more than 4 times as much information.

Yeah, but don't forget the complexity of the hardware you need to run ebola versus a website. Our bodies provide most of the implementation details.

you could make that argument for certain hardware optimizations, too (like SSE, GPU, PPU, etc). A computer is not a raw turing machine.

Re: The Ebola Wars

#30

Post by CatMtKing »

throwaway_yy2Di wrote: post #7
ddlatham wrote: post #3

A sample of the Ebola now raging in West Africa has, by recent count, 18,959 letters of code in its genome; this is a small genome, by the measure of living things. Does this mean mean Ebola is essentially about 38 kilobytes?

38 kilobits = 4.7 kB, but yes. Here's the complete genome of the pandemic strain (scroll down a bit): http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/nuccore/KJ660346 Here's the paper sequencing it. ([edit]: I just realized the New Yorker article is largely about this exact paper -- I commented before reading, sorry). Note that five of the authors died before publication; there's a short tribute accompanying it. http://www.sciencemag.or…

UCSC has the sequenced strains loaded in their genome browser, too, if it interests you

http://genome.ucsc.edu/cgi-bin/hgTracks?db=eboVir3

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