11–20 of 93 posts
...in mice. It would be nice if we spent as much time, money and attention on figuring out prevention. Inadequate hygiene infrastructure (like toilets) in developing areas is part of the problem here. But addressing that isn't as exciting to people as finding a cure for a super bug. If we really want to fix this, that needs to change.
This paper shows what can be done when you carefully run an ML program alongside a wet lab experimental program tailored to feed back into the ML program. The results end up far more interesting than some recent "ML aided drug discovery" papers in that they actually discovered a drug that functions very differently than known antibiotics (AB). Even though the structures that came out look AB-like, they work different…
Not just in drug discovery but in most interesting industries. Using ML as either a human/cyborg aid or ML+real world ground truth is a secret superpower that I'm surprised more people don't know about. I'm glad they don't.
...in mice. It would be nice if we spent as much time, money and attention on figuring out prevention. Inadequate hygiene infrastructure (like toilets) in developing areas is part of the problem here. But addressing that isn't as exciting to people as finding a cure for a super bug. If we really want to fix this, that needs to change.
We do.
Open defecation costs $US260b globally
https://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/open-defecation-...
Price to pay: Antibiotic-resistant infections cost $2 billion a year
http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/03/price-pay...
We basically know how to solve open defecation: build toilets and sewage systems.
I think we could largely solve open defecation in five years if we really wanted to. But we aren't throwing resources at it like crazy because it isn't a "sexy" issue and because first world wealthy people don't see it as directly relevant to their lives. They see it as "being nice to poor people in developing nations," not as an urgent global priority because it's fueling the creation of antibiotic resistant infections which can be exported within 24 hours to their country by someone jumping on a plane before they are symptomatic.
And I really can't recall ever seeing a headline explicitly linking the two things. But they are linked.
http://resistancecontrol.info/2017/prevention-first-tackling...
Perhaps a super smart bug.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do.
I can't think of the last time I saw a headline on the front page of HN about the importance of solving open defecation. I see headlines about creating new treatments for super bugs pretty regularly. Open defecation costs $US260b globally https://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/open-defecation-... Price to pay: Antibiotic-resistant infections cost $2 billion a year http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/…
Thank goodness it was "aided by machine learning". Otherwise, would anybody be reading this article ;)?
Thankfully, it doesn't matter a whit whether or not a bunch of programmers read about medical advancements on their lunch break.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
We do.
I can't think of the last time I saw a headline on the front page of HN about the importance of solving open defecation. I see headlines about creating new treatments for super bugs pretty regularly. Open defecation costs $US260b globally https://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/open-defecation-... Price to pay: Antibiotic-resistant infections cost $2 billion a year http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/…
This paper shows what can be done when you carefully run an ML program alongside a wet lab experimental program tailored to feed back into the ML program. The results end up far more interesting than some recent "ML aided drug discovery" papers in that they actually discovered a drug that functions very differently than known antibiotics (AB). Even though the structures that came out look AB-like, they work different…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't think of the last time I saw a headline on the front page of HN about the importance of solving open defecation. I see headlines about creating new treatments for super bugs pretty regularly. Open defecation costs $US260b globally https://www.news.com.au/world/breaking-news/open-defecation-... Price to pay: Antibiotic-resistant infections cost $2 billion a year http://www.cidrap.umn.edu/news-perspective/2018/…
That's probably because Bill & Melinda issued their grants a few years back. You can see a list of all of the high-tech outhouse makers here [0]. Many of the designs are out in the field for long-term testing. [0] https://stepsforsanitation.org/innovation-center/
I can find two. One from two years ago and one from six years ago.
https://hn.algolia.com/?q=open+defecation
If you search on toilet, there's a lot more articles that come up, but at first glance, most don't appear to be about solving open defecation, though there is one on the front page of the search about the Gates foundation funding toilet research.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
In contrast, you can put in antibiotic resistant and limit it to the past year and get pages of hits. Granted, they won't all be about the latest sexy research methods.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=pastYear&page=0&prefix=tru...
This paper shows what can be done when you carefully run an ML program alongside a wet lab experimental program tailored to feed back into the ML program. The results end up far more interesting than some recent "ML aided drug discovery" papers in that they actually discovered a drug that functions very differently than known antibiotics (AB). Even though the structures that came out look AB-like, they work different…