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Joined 9 months ago
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Cake day: October 12th, 2023

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  • Again, and I can’t emphasize this enough, this is not my area of study and seems like you have better handling of the subject. But when I read his quote, this part sticks out to me:

    much of the exquisite control over these proteins is held offstage, nested within the noncoding junk.

    Additionally, the article calls into question the role of code and protein production as the only role for DNA.

    Still other noncoding stretches may be buffers against precipitous change, serving rather as flak jackets to absorb the impact of viruses and other genetic interlopers that infiltrate an animal’s chromosomes. Without all the extra padding to absorb the blows, viruses or the bizarre genetic sequences that hop and skip from one part of the chromosome to another – mysterious genetic elements called transposons or jumping genes – might land smack in the middle of a crucial gene, disrupting its performance.

    So there maybe stretches of DNA that don’t participate in protein construction, but still has a role. So I question I idea of centering one type function over another.





  • Good enough for high school biology. But not when you’re doing influential cancer research. The following is from Subanima’s article on the same subject:

    One of the most influential papers in cancer biology published in 2000 was the “Hallmarks of cancer” by Douglas Hanahan and Robert Weinberg. It outlined six of the main capabilities of cancer and laid out a rough program for studying the disease ointo the 21st century. To date, it has over 39,000 citations which, in academia, is officially known as a shitton.

    It was so successful that they released a sequel in 2011 which has over 62,000 citations - also known as a metric shitton.

    But at the heart of both papers is the machine metaphor and the idea that if we just map out all the functions of proteins in one ginormous map, we’ll just have to run some maths and we’ll know everything we need to know to cure cancer. In 2000 they wrote:

    Two decades from now, having fully charted the wiring diagrams of every cellular signalling pathway, it will be possible to lay out the complete ‘integrated circuit of the cell.’

    He also notes the same thing you noted, that it’s a good metaphor for high schoolers.


  • I don’t know too much about the subject, but maybe this almost 30 year old article can help. There’s more specific examples in the article, but this quote captures the direction:

    “I don’t believe in junk DNA,” said Dr. Walter Gilbert of Harvard University, a pre-eminent theoretician of the human genome. “I’ve long believed that the attitude that all information is contained in the coding regions is very shortsighted, reflecting a protein chemist’s bias of looking at DNA.” Coding regions may make the proteins that are dear to a chemist’s heart; but true biologists, he added, know that much of the exquisite control over these proteins is held offstage, nested within the noncoding junk.





  • The amount of people not reading the article or the study is astounding.

    This is not about Trump.
    This is not about your conservative uncle.
    This is not about America only.

    This is about off label prescribing in ICU and ERs early in the pandemic with low evidence (theoretical pathways) in six countries which either gave explicit approval or unclear guidance that was interpreted as approval. It goes on to suggest that in a similar emergency future, the state agencies sould do better.

    In the absence of restriction, the number of expected HCQ-related deaths is likely to be directly related to the promotion of its prescription by scientists, physicians and health agencies. In February and March 2020, the use of this treatment was widely promoted based on preliminary reports suggesting a potential efficacy against COVID-19 [80]. For instance, the use of HCQ markedly increased from mid-March to mid-April 2020 [81], [82] in France before a temporary recommendation supporting its use by the State Council was rapidly rejected [83]. Similarly, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) granted a temporary emergency use authorisation for HCQ on March 28th 2020, which was finally revoked on June 15th 2020 [84]. In India, HCQ was also prescribed as a curative treatment to patients with COVID-19 and as a prophylactic treatment for front-line workers based on public authority guidance [85]. Conversely, the British government promoted HCQ use only within clinical trials, explaining the absence of cohort studies reporting the use of HCQ in the United Kingdom in the present study [86]. Consistently, a cohort of a multinational network showed a wide variation in the use of HCQ between countries, with 85% in Spain, 14% in the USA and less than 2% in China [80]. The rush to administer this treatment caused supply shortages in community pharmacies, forcing the implementation of dispensing restrictions [82]. Finally, the results of observational studies and randomized trials in May and June 2020, respectively, convincingly demonstrated that HCQ was ineffective and led to an increase in adverse events [4], [5], [12], [66], [73].


  • I agree with your overall thesis but your characterizations of the three tyrants are casually backwards.

    Mao was a leader of a militant group first. He won political power in that group and that group won a large following of people over several decades. His status as tyrant emerges from that history and cultivated in a desperate militaristic role which is already predisposed to authoritarian rule.

    Hitler was similar, his authotarianism, is on display much earlier in the process, and part of his charismatic attraction. It was clear early on that Hitler was going to mow down anyone in his way. Still, he needed to acquire popular and then political power. He leveraged existing sentiment and thuggish groups such as the Freikorp.

    Stalin was just a bureaucrat.
    Just kidding. I know very little of Stalin’s rise to power except that it was internal to a party that already had seized power.