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Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

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121–126 of 126 posts

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well said. Another failing arises from just how complicated biology is, and how little we understand of it. Unlike in computer programming, in biology reliable layers of abstraction do not yet exist. The equivalent of changing one line of code in a cell's program (through a drug, gene, whatever) in a sense has unknown side-effects on every other line of code. A programmer's approach to working with or trying to under…

in biology reliable layers of abstraction do not yet exist. In biology, reliable layers of abstraction do not exist. Period . Biological technologies may arise with enough flexibility and processing power to deal with this situation. But situation itself won't change. Life simply evolved without fixed boundaries to its layers of abstraction. Every bit of evidence we have points to the genetic code as being more akin…

It seems inconceivable that, with random combinations of biochemistry and no "layers of abstraction", that anyone survives. Spaghetti code generated at random always fails, period.

I imagine "layers of abstraction" may not exist, but common nodes of behavior, clusters of biochemical solutions bound by genetics, MUST exist or we would all be still born.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#122

He should put the project on kickstarter and let the people speak :) I'd throw in some money, as would every type-1 I know.

As the husband of a Type I, I would gladly donate a portion of my income if it would go directly to finding a cure.

BUt how do we know this is "a cure", and not just the favorite project of bitter researcher who's funding was cut off?

The stringing along of desperate people is WHY the FDA exists.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#123
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article claims, without evidence, that Nature and Science didn't publish Marshall because of ties with Glaxo. Even if that's true, there are a lot of other journals out there. Are they ALL in Glaxos pocket? I doubt it. But they're all reviewed by his peers, who made a living by giving endoscopies and prescriptions to patients every year or so.

Peer review is usually by scientist peers, and not professional peers. I doubt that most academic researchers in medicine were prescribing anything, really.

MDs do research all the time. Some MDs are also phDs. Marshall himself was a doctor/researcher.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#124
post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not talking about voluntary compliance to government regulation. I'm talking about regulation and government freely agreed to by people when they decide to engage in an activity in an area. And these rules should be decided upon by those whose property is at stake, not by people who just collect tax revenue off in Washington. The problem is that no system of property has been worked for territorial waters. So no…

What you are implying is that because nobody owns the Gulf of Mexico, BP had no reason not to kill it . I call that insanity.

no, I implying that if there were owners with a much more direct interest in the future well being of what they own than some distant short-term oriented politician, had set the rules instead of the government, they would have done a BETTER job of regulating what was going.

The government regulates tightly after a disaster and less tightly as memories fade and lobbyists start manipulating them. Politicians will never be as consistently interested in the wellbeing of the gulf or anything else as those with a more direct interest. Which is why the government agree to a ridiculous limit of $75 million on total liability for drilling, something an owner never would have done.

Its the same story over and over, in industry after industry. Government ignores the risks, disaster strikes, they overreact. And then gradually over time the lobbyists erode every restriction, good or bad.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

in biology reliable layers of abstraction do not yet exist. In biology, reliable layers of abstraction do not exist. Period . Biological technologies may arise with enough flexibility and processing power to deal with this situation. But situation itself won't change. Life simply evolved without fixed boundaries to its layers of abstraction. Every bit of evidence we have points to the genetic code as being more akin…

It seems inconceivable that, with random combinations of biochemistry and no "layers of abstraction", that anyone survives. Spaghetti code generated at random always fails, period. I imagine "layers of abstraction" may not exist, but common nodes of behavior, clusters of biochemical solutions bound by genetics, MUST exist or we would all be still born.

Read the above post carefully:

"Life simply evolved without fixed boundaries to its layers of abstraction."

Biological life absolutely does have many layers of abstraction. Many of layers of abstraction can appear to be fairly reliable for most people. This indeed is necessary for life to function. The problem is that there alway a chance of a given boundary not respected for some people and some processes. We have a brain and we have an immune system. They intersect in a number of broad ways - they're both information processing systems. Skin, organs and fascia are distinct to an extent but there's odd intersections. Some animals can generate vitamin D internally. Human beings must generate from sunlight on their skin for whatever quirky reason of evolution. Some people actually have their Thyroid gland on the bottom of their tongue but for most people it's at the base of the neck.

Similarly genetic coding is definitely not random coding. It's very tight, highly optimized coding but coding that doesn't necessarily have reliable boundaries and abstractions. Functions? Objects? Variables? Why should those exist in these circumstances.

I'm not saying it's total chaos. Indeed, A biological system can seem simple enough. The problem is these system are just chaotic enough on enough distinct logical level that engineering principles break down as they are applied to create complex systems for diagnosing and curing people. Suppose you have ten generalizations. Each is true for 90% of the population. Suppose you have a system that depends on all of the generalization being true. The system work for only about 30% of the population. The problem is raising reliability past 90% on any one generalization becomes very hard because you outliers on every single system. Suppose in a different population, some of the generalization are true 80% of the time rather than the 90% of your original population - your system becomes less reliable without it being terribly obvious why. Biology involves more paradoxical statistical effects than anywhere else - that's only the part why you can reliable statistics.

Once you look this stuff, you can go from thinking you'll get a complete handle on a given process to realizing it can only be partly dealt with by ordinary engineering - it certainly can be partly dealt with. Adding ten more assumptions to our original system would make it completely unreliable. Given that each step is uncertain and failure is costly, there's an incentive to make each step manual. The amount of human done, manual labor in health and biology makes every step from research to implementation literally a thousand times more costly than something like chip design. Of course progress is being made but its within the context of these paradoxical effect. I suspect that synthetic life, nanotechnology and better AI will be needed before things get better.

There's video on synthetic life that discusses the genetic-code-as-assembly-language stuff.

Re: Scientist who cured type I Diabetes in mice was denied funding for human trials

#126

Hacker News reminds me of my first year of med school. Everyone is smart and fundamentally clueless about human pathophysiology. It's a wonderful thing, learning about the fruits of devilishly challenging science. But it's also a conspiratorial time. I suspect the reason is that first year med students suddenly feel empowered by the small amounts of knowledge that they have gained. HNers probably feel empowered for a…

There's one area where variations on Conspiratorial Thinking happens regularly and much of the population has their minds bathed in the result every day.

These ideas, conceived in the medical domain, apply, in some way, to the wider world of media reports.

Ever notice that when you really know an area, news reports about it nearly always get it wrong. Completely misunderstand what's going on. Often interpret it as one of a few stock, basely motivated, scenarios.

(You can debate whether the authors are all smart. I think that some of them are, but those still do it.)

So we have a society where the blind lead the blind down blind alleys as a matter of course.

Thank goodness that we have resources like Hacker News, to sometimes give a peek at more thorough thinking. (Chaotic though it may be!)

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