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Michaels first HOPE talk in 2016 is really worth watching - https://archive.org/details/livestream-130731041 . I was at his 2018 talk and the Vice article did an excellent job of summing it up. Usually the HOPE videos come online a few weeks after the conference (it was last weekend).
I was there too. I loved his talk, but I didn't get a good picture of the file hash or link he wanted us to download.
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I think it's pretty irresponsible to throw a handful of pills with nasty side effects into a crowd.
Why, on the off chance one flies into someone’s open mouth and the surprise triggers a swallowing reflex? I wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy for an adult who ate the homemade pills a guy threw at him and then suffered serious side effects.
He can't be sure what will happen with pills that people accidentally carry out on their shoes or clothing. Any pills that don't get cleaned up from the venue could be eaten by children or animals at a later date.
We're talking about a drug that we don't even let sick people buy until they've talked to a doctor and a pharmacist. Maybe someone in the crowd wrongly believes that they need it or rightly believes that they need it but doesn't know how to take it properly.
Also, if you don't have sympathy for an adult who eats homemade pills and suffers from it, then you're pretty much arguing that this whole plan is irresponsible from the start.
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this is the worst analogy ever
Not really. Pixar has to render a movie before you can download it. Pfizer has to develop the medicine before you can synthesize it.
I wish there was an equivalent of CI and peer-reviewed pull-requested contribution to their system, to ease collaborative improvement to the methods. You'd really want many sets of eyes able to look at all aspects of the drugs to vastly reduce risk.
I saw one of Michael's talks. They do share the data about their hardware and processes openly (though I don't know where/how, since it's not the kind of info I understand). But one of the things he mentioned needing more open information about is the chemistry. There are databases of chemical reactions that can be used to train AIs to find new, easier and cheaper ways to synthesize medications, but those databases a…
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You're right, they are doing something a bit novel, which is cool from a technical/hacker perspective. But clinical trials and efficacy aren't just 'another difficult part', they are the difficult part. Synthesis routes are an after-thought to any serious pharmaceutical company.
It‘s interesting to see how negative the comments are here, compared to the civil disobedience of SciHub — in fact it‘s much of the same thing. And while there is an argument to be made about how developing new medicine costs real money, the re-investment of profits into research is around 10%, we‘re talking about a deeply corrupt industry here. And while it‘s definitely still morally questionable to clone new drugs,…
Those things are worlds apart, in my view. Pharmaceutical companies add serious value to the world. They expend enormous amounts of money researching and testing drugs, and then shepherding them through the obscenely expensive FDA approval process.
Journal publishers like Elsevier do not fund research. They don't pay the authors of the articles they publish. They add literally zero value to the ecosystem. It's honestly a modern marvel that they still exist. They provide absolutely nothing of value to the world.
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Why, on the off chance one flies into someone’s open mouth and the surprise triggers a swallowing reflex? I wouldn’t have a lot of sympathy for an adult who ate the homemade pills a guy threw at him and then suffered serious side effects.
I'm surprised I have to argue about whether it's irresponsible to throw dangerous things into a crowd. It's irresponsible because they're dangerous. He can't be sure what will happen with pills that people accidentally carry out on their shoes or clothing. Any pills that don't get cleaned up from the venue could be eaten by children or animals at a later date. We're talking about a drug that we don't even let sick pe…
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Their point that the paternalist-legal argument falls in the face of life-or-death circumstances has merit though. How many unprosecuted crimes have been allowed in the course of war? Because it "had to be done"? Prohibiting access to highly addictive narcotics? Makes some sense. Prohibiting personal access to whatever you want to put in your body otherwise? Not such a strong argument. If people want to risk killing…
You assume people understand the risks involved. I dont think they are capable of understanding the risks without having a background in chemistry. It's myopic to give uneducated people the ability to do chemistry in an uncontrolled environment that does not have proper ventilation, disposal, and safety/sanitary equipment. Tobacco, alcohol, driving vehicles, and fire arms have all been regulated to limit use to preve…
Are you comfortable with telling a heroin user using dirty needles that "We can't allow you access to HIV retardants because we can't guarantee your safety"?
Concern for the public is valid, but it's a slippery slope that freedom often gets pushed down.
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I'm not sure I understand what harm was done here?
In that moment, representing the barriers to safe and effective medicine as something that one can throw from their pockets. In the long term, bring drugs to people without thorough testing and regulations. It's one thing for e.g. stage 4 cancer. It's another to let a Vioxx get through. Strict regulations around the development and testing of drugs exist because no human is capable of evaluating efficacy for themselv…
Perhaps they could get their point across while acting a bit more professional?
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You assume people understand the risks involved. I dont think they are capable of understanding the risks without having a background in chemistry. It's myopic to give uneducated people the ability to do chemistry in an uncontrolled environment that does not have proper ventilation, disposal, and safety/sanitary equipment. Tobacco, alcohol, driving vehicles, and fire arms have all been regulated to limit use to preve…
That feels like banning the good because it's not perfect. Are you comfortable with telling a heroin user using dirty needles that "We can't allow you access to HIV retardants because we can't guarantee your safety"? Concern for the public is valid, but it's a slippery slope that freedom often gets pushed down.
To answer your direct question though, yes, I am comfortable telling heroin users they cannot have access to HIV retardants until they have been proven safe, because you've made the false claim that this drug is actually an HIV retardant, when in reality it is untested.
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That feels like banning the good because it's not perfect. Are you comfortable with telling a heroin user using dirty needles that "We can't allow you access to HIV retardants because we can't guarantee your safety"? Concern for the public is valid, but it's a slippery slope that freedom often gets pushed down.
That isn't a legitimate scenario. They were asking the drug dealer(s) to cut their heroin with the drug. Now an untrained individual is responsible for mixing in the proper dosage for their clients (for a drug that has not been proven to be safe/work, and maybe certain ratios dont dissolve quickly enough, or maybe smoking the heroin causes the drug to under go a molecular transformation from the heat), which is compl…
