Arete

Let's take a known mental illness like schizophrenia as an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schizophrenia#Symptoms are you saying that no one actually suffers the symptoms? or that the known causes of those symptoms are different to those demonstrated to be so? What evidence beyond "nameisthebabe says so" do you have?

So I'm guessing you invented the computer, right? And the combustion engine too? Wow. Funny cause it looks like a woman wrote it? Really? Aside from the inappropriate nature of the comment, it's also about as incorrect as possible. The list itself was a survey result (i.e. determined by multiple individuals), additionally right under the title the author's first name is "Tom". They also included "athlete" as a category, and it didn't make the top 10.

I am having a tough time trying to follow the logic of your argument. Are you trying to say that the only reason science education is important, is so it can be applied as a tool, and that modern medicine is an example of how it is ineffective and therefore unimportant, because if you don't have access to medicine it can't help you?

There's already a considerable number of issues with the argument, including but not restricted to: a) As CharonY points out, the first organism is extremely unlikely to have only had 3 base pairs of DNA.http://www.biog1105-1106.org/demos/106/unit04/3b.rnaworld.html b) Mutation rates vary in both time and across organisms, so you can't logically apply a uniform mutation rate. http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v8/n8/abs/nrg2158.html c) The calculations ignore large scale mutations such as recombination and gene duplication events.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutation#Classification_of_mutation_types d) More complex eukaryotes don 'tnecessarily have larger genomes that less complex eukaryotes.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Genome_Sizes.png

You're shifting the goalposts. You originally said that scientist are less respected that sportsmen or singers. Now its astronauts and vets ( who are arguably scientists themselves)? This is a non sequitur. In order to use the tool of science you need an understanding of how it works. E.g a pilot needs to understand Bernoulli's principle to understand how to fly a plane. Just because someone without access to modern medicine doesn't get medical treatment does not make modern medical treatment ineffective. It's an illogical premise.

So tell me, how does one go about using a tool effectively with no understanding of how the tool functions? Also: False. In the US the top ten most admired professions are 1. Firefighter 2. Doctor 3. Nurse 4. Scientist 5. Teacher 6. Military officer 7. Police officer 8. Clergyman 9. Farmer 10. Engineer http://www.forbes.com/2006/07/28/leadership-careers-jobs-cx_tvr_0728admired.html

As a postdoc, I work in a pretty similar environment. We actually have an informal seminar series/happy hour Friday afternoons for the grad students and postdocs, where someone presents their work, and we all have a beer together - which we organized and works great. If I am constantly finding myself procrastinating I generally get up walk around and make a coffee, then sit down to another task. I tend to get in the groove and then switch back to what I was avoiding in the first place, and usually make some progress. Sometimes it doesn't work though.

I currently work at a well known private R1 university near MIT. MIT has about a 92% rejection rate overall, which ramps up to over a 99% rejection rate for international applicants for undergraduate acceptance. So realistically, you'd need your CV to obviously be in the top 1% of applicants from a cursory 30 second look. I.e. your perfect academic record, major awards and accomplishments which are exceptional at a global standard are on the front page. The second thing I would consider is that the US system differs from others in aiming for your undergraduate degree to be more general than other places - i.e. you don't go straight into a medical or law degree, you get a general undergraduate degree with a major, then go to graduate school and get a law/MD/etc degree. MIT offers majors in architecture; engineering; management; science; humanities, arts, and social sciences. While an engineering major might do a lot of computer/software engineering, you'll come out with a bit of paper that says your major was engineering as opposed many other countries where you can get an undergraduate degree in "Bachelor of Software engineering" or "Bachelor of law" etc, which may or may not matter in your home country/where you intend to work. The third thing I'd consider is visa requirements. Many countries have a return policy on student/exchange visas to the US, in that once you finish you studies you need to go back to your home country for a period of time (usually 2 years I think) before you can relocate overseas again. If you wanted to eventually work overseas this might affect you decision. The fourth thing I'd consider is cost. MIT, for example is a 4 year undergraduate school. 9 months of tuition is $42,050, add summer term tuition at $13,920, add books and other expenses $2,772, and finally room and board at $12,188. So you're looking at about $70,930 a year for four years - $283,720 for the degree, unless you can land a scholarship. http://web.mit.edu/facts/tuition.html All that without going to grad school. That's a lot of money for an undergraduate degree. It might be more effective to do your undergraduate in your home country then shoot for MIT/Caltech for graduate studies - 60% of MIT students are graduate students, and 40% of those are international (as opposed to 10% of their undergrads). So in terms of probability of getting in are higher - it won't be as expensive, and you'd still have an MIT degree. Personally, I'd probably enroll at UPD and look at US schools for graduate studies.

It's a good question. It seems the answer is "probably". "Available data are consistent with the idea of pain in some invertebrates and go beyond the idea of just nociception, but are not definitive." http://www.vliz.be/imis/imis.php?refid=212638

Ants make up 15% of the living organisms on earth. By Weight. Which is pretty amazing, and also about ten times as much as humans make up. So you'd have to be standing on a God awful number of ants to make a measurable difference to the ecosystem as a whole. Physically killing insects by squashing them is probably highly unlikely to make any differences to even a local scale - spraying insecticide everywhere would be a different story. http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2007/08/ants/did-you-know-learn http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biomass_%28ecology%29#Global_biomass

Ok, so this experiment is not evidence that antimicrobial peptides can clear a T. brucei rhodesiense or gambiense infection in humans: Humans have natural trypanolytic factors in their blood - predominately apolipoprotein L-1 (ApoL-1) which causes trypanosomes to lyse and clears most trypanosomatid infections in humans (http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/pdf/10.1146/annurev.mi.48.100194.001035). This is why the Trypanosomatid animal parasites - like T. brucei brucei, T. evansi, T. equiperdum, T congolense, T. vivax, etc can't infect humans. The strain used in the experiment - 427; is a T. brucei brucei strain susceptible to lysis by ApoL-1 and not infectious in humans.http://tryps.rockefeller.edu/DocumentsGlobal/lineage_Lister427.pdf The problem with extrapolating experimental results from a T. b. brucei experiment to the human infectious trypanosomes - i.e. T. b. rhodesiense and T. b. gambiense is they have evolved mechanisms for evading lysis by ApoL-1. T. b. rhodesiense through the inclusion of a serum resistance associated (SRA) gene http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPAR%2FPAR131_02%2FS0031182005007560a.pdf&code=b6f6341d66d6ed2a7ed3eff3d6c22b2f unique to that subtype and T. b. gambiense through a mechanism associated with reduced uptake of ApoL-1 enbaled by a modified Haptoglobin-Haemoglobin receptor protein (HpHbR) http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.529136 Resultantly, lysis of trypanosomes susceptible to human innate immunity in mice by the addition of suite of human derived peptides is both unsurprising, and not informative for HAT treatment (as the parasite tested doesn't cause HAT, and the model used has no innate immunity to trypanosomatids). We know it works, and it is why most trypanosomes cannot infect humans. Also note, that all of the infected mice did die - they just took longer to die than the control mice. Also note, this isn't necessarily a critique of the study you cited, which was published before much of the characterization of human innate immunity to trypanosomatids and the subsequent mechanistic determination of how the human infective forms evade it. It is an explanation of why it doesn't prove the point you are trying to make with it. Next, I think you need to read your own link on root causes. No one ever questioned the fact that malnutrition is a contributing factor for both genetic and infectious disease. However, suggesting that for example - the root cause of trypanosomiasis is vitamin A deficiency and not a parasite is as previously stated, fundamentally incorrect. A person without a vitamin A deficiency (like a European tourist http://cid.oxfordjournals.org/content/34/1/e18.short) can still contract trypanosomiasis.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Placenta#Functions I think you may have the functions of the umbilical cord confused with the functions of the placenta.

There's a veritable smorgasbord of logical fallacy in that post. 1. Non sequitur. So the argument goes as follows: "Scientist will probably never know everything about X." "Then science is like a religion because it doesn't know everything about X and therefore just makes stuff up." The bolded section is not a logical extension of scientists not knowing everything about X, unless you can provide examples of a scientific conclusion which is "made up". 2. Plain fallacy All disease cannot be prevented/cured simply by eating a diet rich in plants. You might notice that vegetarians are not immortal, and therefore diet cannot prevent all disease. 3. Plain fallacy The root cause of pathogenic disease is pathogens. A healthy human cannot clear all pathogens on its own. E.g. African trypanosomiasis is 100% fatal is not treated by drugs http://msf.openrepository.com/msf/handle/10144/114145 and the cause is trypanosome transmission by tsetse fly bites. 4. Special pleading. Oncological chemotherapy is not typical of all medications. The side effects are not generalizable to other drugs. 5. Strawman. I've already shown that germ line engineering is not synonymous with genetic engineering. 6. Shifting the goalposts. The discussion was: about Xscid, not cancer. You claimed that X-Scid sufferers are "mutated". I demonstrated that humans are all "mutated". Whether or not all mutations cause cancer is irrelevant to the premise of the discussion. 7. Shifting the goalpoasts AND Confusing cause and effect. A) Your initial claim was "Diet and environment have everything to do with cancer." My contrary claim was : "Of course environmental factors play a role in cancer genesis and the activation of oncogenes, but to try and exclude the genetic elements of oncology is absolutely nonsensical at the most fundamental level." Your article, in the abstract acknowledges a genetic component to cancer risk - contradicting you initial claim and supporting my counter. Your own evidence disproves your initial claim and your subsequent statement is a shift of the goalposts. B) Go back to your article: contributes to ≠ "causes". Involved in ≠ "causes". Implicated in ≠ "causes". Environmental factors are contributing factors in cancer development - and are almost universally variable in the formation of cancers. E.g. some smokers will never develop lung cancer. Some non-smokers will. The mechanistic cause, common to all cancers is unregulated cell division.

This is fundamentally wrong. The root cause of cancer is unregulated cell growth caused by gene malfunction. The reasons that genes malfunction to cause cancer is multifactorial, including genetic predisposition and environmental factors. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cancer#Pathophysiology

I did. The current predominate method of treating disease is through the use of chemotherapeutic agents, i.e. drugs. We do not, and probably cannot know what every single drug interaction in every single person will be, much as we do not and probably cannot know the outcome of every single gene interaction in every single individual and environment. Ergo, if not knowing every single gene interaction makes gene therapy unethical, by extension of logic, this also makes the treatment of disease with drugs/vaccines also unethical. If so, you'd have to consider virtually all modern medicine unethical. This sweeping generalization is blatantly false in most circumstances. A vast multitude of chemotherapeutic agents cure disease - for example, the use of antibiotics to cure a tuberculosis infection. Also, most drug therapies do not come with "horrendous side effects, like death." Here's a list of 5,000 drug side effects. The majority do not have fatal side effects. http://www.drugs.com/sfx/ Gene therapy is egotistical, but deciding based on your personal, subjective ideals who deserves medical treatment and who doesn't is not? And if we apply this, well, interesting logic in an objective way wouldn't you have more of an issue with say - bypass surgery to treat angina, or gastric banding to treat obesity than gene therapy to treat inherited illness which are entirely not a result of lifestyle choices? Every single human being has a "mutated" germline. On average, you have 60 novel mutations, in comparison with your parents. http://www.sanger.ac.uk/about/press/2011/110612.html Given that your premise that genes do not play a role in cancer development is explicitly contradicted in the abstract of the article you are citing as proof of that statement - it might be an idea to take you own advice.

No. We don't understand every possible drug interaction. That doesn't make the treatment of disease with drugs 'egotistical'. Not necessarily no. Sperm genes will only be altered if a) the patient is male and b) germ line cells are targeted. In your previous example of treatments for X-scid, the patient's own white blood cells are extracted and a virus is to insert a healthy adenosine deaminase (ADA) gene into them. These cells were then injected back into their body, and express a normal enzyme, curing the disease. No germ line modification occurs. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Severe_combined_immunodeficiency I would argue the opposite. There is an exponentially growing, large body of research which examines gene interaction. See a current copy of Genome Biology for examples. http://genomebiology.com/content. Your argument is also largely irrelevant - see drug therapy example above. What it is important to know in the introduction of a specific treatment, is how that particular change will behave in light of genotype/phenotype interaction. There will likely always be things left to understand about how genomes work, as they are constantly changing and so are the environments they exist in, like almost all natural systems. To single out genetics as somehow abhorrent seems extremely hypocritical. Germ line engineering and genetic engineering are not synonymous terms. Equating the two results in a strawman argument. See x-scid example above. No. "Mutations in nine different genes have been found to cause the human severe combined immunodeficiency syndrome." http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15032591 Both statements are false: Defective cell replication (i.e. cancer) is caused by genes, at the most fundamental level. Cancer can manifest simply due to certain allelic combinations without environmental interaction (i.e. in the absence of external carcinogens). http://www.cancer.org/cancer/cancercauses/geneticsandcancer/oncogenesandtumorsuppressorgenes/oncogenes-tumor-suppressor-genes-and-cancer-mutations-and-cancer Of course environmental factors play a role in cancer genesis and the activation of oncogenes, but to try and exclude the genetic elements of oncology is absolutely nonsensical at the most fundamental level. It's a ridiculous argument. Can we drop the personal statements please? It would also seem that your initial statement in that context is irrelevant to the thread completely.

I did not suggest it had double meanings, nor am I angry. I said it was ambiguous, and endeavored to get you to clarify. A task at which it seems I was unsuccessful. Do you mean that we don't understand what all of the genes code for? How they are expressed? How they are differentially regulated? How the same gene can result in a variety of phenotypes? How does this lack of understanding inhibit our ability to modify the human genome? Given we've been able to successfully modify a range of other organisms, including other vertebrates (e.g. http://www.glofish.com/) are you suggesting there is a fundamental lack of understanding of the human genome in comparison with other genomes that have been successfully modified? As I stated, among a multitude of other things, genetic engineering can potentially cause cancer. Both your citations quote a single, anecdotal case. Blanketly stating "gene therapy causes cancer" is logically fallacious. From your own citation: "Scientists in the United States have warned that some forms of gene therapy may cause patients to develop cancer." Now this might have made sense if we had of been discussing heart transplants or gastric bypass surgery, but in discussing treating genetic predisposition to certain medical conditions, it is nonsensical. The root causes of genetic diseases such as the disorder discussed in the article you yourself cited (Severe Combined Immunodeficiency Syndrome (X-Scid)), are genes. Genes also play a fundamental role in predisposition to cancer. See oncogenes You mean like my wife? Personal attacks aside - and putting you initial statement back in context, it seemed as if you were suggesting that DNA is not fundamental to life. I would be interested to know if that was the initial context of the statement and if so, are you able to qualify it.

He has quite the conglomerate of knowledge, it quite comendite-able.

1) There's a fatal flaw with the idea of "perfection" in genetics/evolution, in that phenotypic/genotypic variation is the fundamental insurance against extinction for a population/species. When you artificially select individuals in a population, you reduce the population's genetic diversity. Not only can you bring out a bunch of undesirable recessive traits (such as selective breeding in dogs has done http://www.theage.com.au/national/its-a-dogs-life-being-so-pure-20081121-6e5a.html) a phenomenon genetically engineered organisms are not immune to (http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2007/11/only-the-cloned/) but a genetically invariant population is at an elevated risk of extinction in a fluctuating environment (http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/2410812). There aren't any free lunches in evolution, specializing to be "perfect" in one set of environmental conditions leaves you vulnerable to inevitable fluctuations in those conditions 2) Your article seems to gloss over the fact that gene therapy is still very much a developing idea. Whilst clinical trials are providing some extremely positive results for some genetic diseases in some circumstances, we are still a very long way away from the treatment of these diseases being trivial - it would seem that no gene therapy treatments have made it past the clinical trial stage yet (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gene_therapy#2012), meaning that the widespread applicability and long term efficacy of such treatments is still an unknown. To trivialize gene therapy as already achieved and use it as a logical leap to engineered "superhumans" would seem, at best, highly speculative. 3) Genome wide association studies are showing that many seemingly "simple" traits have complex genetic origins - in that small contributions from multiple genes, in association with developmental and environmental cues result in profound phenotypic changes (http://www.nature.com/nrg/journal/v9/n5/abs/nrg2344.html). This means that altering loci can have unpredictable and inconsistent outcomes for the end phenotype of a modified organism. In many cases, the environment you are exposed to may be far more important in the phenotype you end up with than the particular set of alleles you have at a given site. For example, adequate nutrition during childhood has a much larger effect on IQ than genes (http://journals.cambridge.org/download.php?file=%2FPNS%2FPNS68_04%2FS0029665109990188a.pdf&code=5b9630c5d823b15f8a9e7b504bdd5319). This means that genetic engineering alone would be inadequate to generate "superhumans", dependent on how you define it. This statement is ambiguous enough to be meaningless. Do you mean all the genes in a genome? Which genome? What type of interactions? Again, this is an ambiguous false dichotomy - the ethics of an action are independent of whether or not the action is egotistical. Did you mean to say "It is unethical and egotistical?" Staying with the theme of ambiguous statements, it might lead to a countless number of things, including cancer treatments. http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/medical_examiner/2006/09/killer_tcells.html Like?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Artificial_gene_synthesis "Based on solid-phase DNA synthesis, it differs from molecular cloning and polymerase chain reaction(PCR) in that the user does not have to begin with preexisting DNA sequences. Therefore, it is possible to make a completely synthetic double-stranded DNA molecule with no apparent limits on either nucleotide sequence or size. The method has been used to generate functional bacterial chromosomes containing approximately one million base pairs."

Conducting counts or taking measurements would typically be considered to be data collection rather than analysis. I.e. making the counts from the slides would be data collection, determining that the count from treatment A was significantly different from the count from treatment B would be data analysis. Plenty of measurements can only be taken by a human - i.e. taking/recording patient blood pressure or body temperature, checking bands on an electrophoresis gel, scoring genetic fragment analysis traces, meristic counts, colony counts, etc. but they would not typically be considered "analysis" as such.

All of it is done by humans - a computer is simply a tool that humans use to analyze data. At least in my field (evolutionary biology/genetics/genomics) there's few practical ways left to analyze data that entirely eliminate computers. They're comparatively cheap (compared to say, a slab gel setup) and extremely effective. Is there a motivation behind not wanting to use a computer at all? Presumably you have access to one - as you are using one now...

A more tangible way in which certain humans in US congress are impeding scientific progress, by limiting its funding:

The question is a bit vague, as any calculation a computer can do, a human can too. It's simply easier/more practical to do most statistics using a computer - I can do a basic linear regression with thousands of data points on a calculator, or I can do it with a single line of R code. On the other hand, any statistical analysis requires a human component to actually answer a hypothesis - you can do a whole bunch of complicated, but either assumptively incorrect or meaningless stats without a directive from a human. A bigger concern for a research project involving medical research would be HIPAA (http://www.hhs.gov/ocr/privacy/) and internal ethics compliance. Any actual data collection, or bench-work relevant to human patients is going to require clearance. Unless you have an adviser who already has clearance, or data mining publicly available databases (ergo - needing to use a computer) you'll need ethics approval, which can take an impractical length of time for an undergraduate (or even some graduate) projects.