CharonY

Ooh I hate that. Mostly because STDs are on the rise in many places. And increasingly multi-resistant versions.

It should also be noted that the specificity is far from absolute. Liver is a bit easier as it is the space where most stuff gets metabolized. I.e. when you almost any drug, they end up in the liver, which is why so liver and kidney damage are frequent side effects of many drugs. Many decorations of these encapsulations as StringJunky mentioned can be used to make enrichment in liver more efficient. This can be further enhanced by moieties that target receptors that are a bit more frequent in certain cancer cell types. Could be as simple as a folate or more complex like certain peptides. But again, these receptors are also found in other cells.

Yup. Dunning Kruger has become a vibe now.

Nanoparticles are just things that are, well, the size in the nanometer range. In terms of pharmaceuticals, nanoparticles can be used to encapsulate drugs or vaccines. Recent mRNA vaccines use lipid nanoparticles to encapsulate and stabilize the mRNA, for example. Specifically for cancer, the idea is to encapsulate the drug, which is typically cytotoxic, in a way that it will preferentially taken up by cancer cells. I.e. the idea is to use them for targeted delivery (e.g. with special coatings) so that the drug kills cancer cells more than normal cells.

Parents are part of it, but I think the school system has not kept up with this trends (especially up to and increasingly including university). They are still using metrics and methods where the use of the internet can entirely circumvent learning processes while still providing false sense of success in form of high grades. More money alone would not help that much, it requires a re-thinking of how to learn how to learn in the 21st century. We used to think that available information facilitates thinking, I believe we are arriving at an inflection point, where this is no longer true. Add to that the almost constant distraction by social media, it results folks in leaving little mental overhead to actually do any level of thinking or legwork related to that (e.g. source analysis). It is not that the students do not put in the time. But since they do not learn how to acquire the knowledge properly (other than memorization- and even that is getting rarer), even simple tasks feel much harder to them than it should be. This, in turn often leads to frustration, as many do not realize that spending time is not the same as being productive. /rant off

It is getting pretty bad rather fast. And I am not entirely sure where but we are definitely failing the younger generation in terms of teaching critical thinking and media literacy. Even in the past you might have the odd kid in class who believes weird things because they saw it somewhere on the internet. Now almost half the class doesn't believe me when I tell them that viewing an unsourced video is not doing research. And the rate increases rapidly.

Which would assume that someone is still able to read.

Interestingly recently folks started to wind down surveillance efforts. Great timing.

I think we have not really defined what we mean with value here. Glass of water might have an intrinsic value, but may be low where water is freely available and very precious where it isn't. And if we are not talking about monetary value then basically anything that anyone might enjoy at some level can be considered a value. Everything else is basically a judgement what one might consider more or less valuable.

To 1) it doesn't even need to do that. Art exists in many forms and certain types (music, movies/TV, books etc.) are very big industries.

He is more likely to do a chess pigeon move.

I have underestimated stupid and have learned that is a very durable condition.

I mean, I think all of us here will have experienced a couple of pandemics (at least within the borders we live in) over the past decades. Though COVID-19 was the most dramatic (in terms of deaths in short amount of time). Others, have been more devastated to other communities. But due to increasing travel, diseases spread globally much more commonly.

A very interesting question. I am curious about that, too. But OTOH I am afraid to see it being tested. I have the creeping feeling that the stupidest response will win out in the end.

They didn't. It is a multi-omics study with samples taken over a period of a few years from healthy individuals. So the longitudinal data per person is fairly short (but for these types of studies still a bit more extensive, as most only have single time point per person). Adjustments were, I believe mostly with regard to factors such as BMI, insulin resistance and so on. However, due to the cohort, the data in necessarily aggregated for a view over time.

I think that is to various degree true for most things. I suspect one could argue that e.g.. life sustaining things (say food or water) have intrinsic value as they have purpose, but the value placed on it would be extremely different based on situation. In that context, is there anything that one could think of that has a clear intrinsic (as opposed to situational) value?

The WHO has (again) declared the rapid spread of mpox across 13 countries in Africa an emergency over fears of a global spread.

There are also studies corroborating this, such as changes in energy metabolism, which happens in stages. There are likely tipping points of processes that contribute to that (and which we do not fully understand yet).

It is not just a programmed cell death (apoptosis) issue. Generally speaking, only a small set of cells are able to replicate, and are responsible for renewal and repair. The rest differentiates into a specific final form that is no longer replicating and which do their job until they are eliminated. In those cells, the telomerase (which, as a I mentioned, is the enzyme that elongates the telomeres) is inactive as part of a larger system that stops cells from replicating. In cancer cells, the telomerase retains activity and adds to telomere length, though the length is usually shorter compared to other actively replicating cells.

Fair enough. I must have misunderstood the sentence. Though just to be sure that we are on the same page- the issue with cancer cells is they do not properly shorten their telomeres (and thus keep replicating), yes?

In most cancers the opposite is the problem, they won't stop replicating. Again, depending on cell line and type, some look like reverting back into pluripotent cell status (but with weird modifications), for example. Remember, many cells, once differentiated, do not replicate anymore. One of the mechanisms involved in limiting replication (but again, this is really an oversimplification) is the telomerase. Or more precisely, silencing of telomerases (the enzyme that extend telomeres), so that the telomeres get shortened and the cell stop replicating. In fact, in most cancer cell types (but not all) the silencing of the telomerase is not happening or is reversed. So yet another way (aside from the immune system), we are looking at elements of cell cycle control and cellular differentiation and senescence. This is also why I am highly skeptical regarding many one-approach-solutions, such as targeting telomeres to improve longevity (my question is always what one would then do regarding cancer?). Conversely, AFAIK drugs aimed at silencing telomerases for cancer treatment have failed. Again, biology is stupid complicated.

Depending on what level of education you have, I would start with simple genetics textbooks and perhaps at some point add cell biology to it. I do not have a particular favourite but there are open source textbooks that you might want to google (just search for something like introduction to genetics). I think understanding the basics of genetics sets you up to better understand what DNA is and does.

While not wrong, it is IMO also a bit complex. There are significant overlap in many functions with the immune system, and there is often a somewhat myopic view regarding how they work (or fail to work) together to prevent certain conditions. Typically (and in part this is how funding and research works), research groups focus on a specific aspects from a specific viewpoint. And this is clearly needed to address any issues with some depth. A big challenge in biology is the how the many parts intersect with each other and you could look at any mechanisms from many different viewpoints (the immune lens being one of them, and that in itself is split into many sub-topics). At the same time, we need overarching concepts and narratives to understand and teach what is going on. However, cancer and cell biology tends to be maddening siloed (with highly specialized viewpoints). The reason is quite clear, the subject is too complex to be handled with a single narrative or viewpoint, but if you look at things at sufficient depth, the same mechanism can be discussed in wildly different contexts, frequently without acknowledging each other. Sorry for the rant, I got caught up in one my pet peeves again.

The main connection between DNA and life is probably evolutionary sciences. For the dynamic aspects of life (the living part) DNA is really boring and does not actively do that much. It is more a foundational blueprint which cells use to build the stuff they need (though I am likely very biased as I switched from genetics to cellular physiology and never really looked back). For evolution the Futuyma (Evolution) is still the seminal book, if a bit technical. But it does showcase the overall life aspect in the broadest sense.

Most you see in popular press is overhyped. There are few examples of truly awesome results. Almost all of them are preliminary with moderate to low effect sizes. And this is even without the very important issue that others have pointed out: animal models are always very limited. And companies also always have to figure out how much they want to invest into a given trial. In many cases they rather fund multiple phase II rather than recruiting over a 1,000 folks in one go, just to see whether it is worthwhile. For some diseases, it is not feasible to get a large group of participants. And in some rare cases the drug or therapy is so expensive that having hundreds of treatments at the same time are not going to happen. Very little of it is down to regulation, as certain folks like to claim. More important are aspects of cost and feasibility. The COVID-19 vaccines were developed fairly quickly as a) a lot of money was invested so that folks did Phase 2/3 essentially simultaneously, b) the vaccines were easy to produce and c) so many people got infected (which is necessary to assess vaccine efficacy) that they were able to get a sufficiently large infected cohort very quickly. Cancer, on the other hand is very difficult to treat for a many of reasons, typical drugs have to be toxic, so a lot is aimed at targeted delivery, others like immune therapies have to customized for each patient and so on. And in cases the challenge is to damage just the right cells, which is incredibly difficult. Even just cutting them out can leave cells behind that then start proliferating,so folks need to undergo toxic treatments to kill cancer more efficiently than themselves. Under these conditions, it is easy to see why no one has really fund a magic bullet yet.