jashephe's comments

The conspiracy theorist in me can't help but wonder if "leaking" forged documents of this nature could be an effective way for China or another foreign government to sabotage the leaders of the American research enterprise.

Of course, my inner cynic is leaning pretty heavily towards Occam's razor for this one.

Some folks have raised plenty of practical/medicolegal reasons, but it's also worth noting that patients are often not comfortable being told that they have an "anomaly" that their doc is going to sit back and do nothing about. There's a lot to be said for the psychiatric implications of being aware of benign MRI findings.

Even if you (or anyone, for that matter) might be comfortable with that, I think you'd find that a lot of patients wouldn't be.

Some of the comments here don't touch on the practical limitations of this, but here's one — I'm at a 1400+ bed top-10 US academic medical center, and even our outpatient MRI machines book patients until near-midnight because the scans take so long. I'm not sure if we even have the imaging capacity at this point to be scanning healthy people.

(for context) https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/11178449872934871...

Tangentially, it's interesting to see how Samsung's reveal video (at the top of the article) [1] is so uncannily similar to what Microsoft came up with a few years ago for the Surface Studio [2], right down to the music selection. Something about technology killing creativity, perhaps? /s

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7r_UgNcJtzQ

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifZXp2geVKI (apologies that this isn't a link to an official source; Microsoft doesn't seem to have it online anymore)

For lack of a rebuttal to the FDA dissolution comment, which I'm sure others are more qualified to respond to, I wanted to address the efficacy/safety remark:

A growing number of people have voiced objections to the burdens of the FDA's efficacy testing requirements, but it's worth at least thinking about why they're in place. The main issue is that "safety" in the context of pharmaceuticals doesn't mean "perfectly safe" or even "non-lethal" — it really means, "safe enough, given the benefits". Side effects of a chemotherapy drug that can completely eliminate a tumor, for instance, could be acceptably substantial, because it cures an otherwise terminal illness. Side effects of a drug mildly lowering cholesterol levels, by contrast, must be strictly limited, because many Americans may take such a drug for much of their adult lives, sometimes in combination if the effects of a single drug are too weak.

It's hard to know if the benefits outweigh the risks if you don't know what the benefits are. Obviously, this efficacy testing carries a huge time and monetary burden, but without it, contextualizing acceptable risk would be difficult, if not impossible.

The fact is, unfortunately, that Nanopore sequencing (and also, from what I’ve read, PacBio) has a dramatically higher error rate than Illumina sequencing-by-synthesis. In the near future, anyway, I would expect to see inaccurate PacBio/Nanopore long reads being used as scaffolds for accurate Illumina short reads (in fact, this is already happening). Illumina won’t be going anywhere any time soon.

Right, but none of the incidents on that list involved a nuclear missile silo. I read the author's sentence as "It would have been impossible (for Morris or other silo crew members) to start World War Three by accident."

It's important to note that aging is not so much a mechanism to protect against cancer as it is a method to avoid cancer (that is, by dying before cancer develops).

It may not have been expressed the most clearly, but the intention was not quite as you describe. Shelter, clothing, and modern medicine all confer enhanced fitness — I was attempting to suggest that increased lifespan does not.

Indeed. From a biological standpoint, it's important to realize that an indefinite lifespan, as a life history trait [1], does not confer evolutionary fitness. The fact is that organisms do not appear to evolve to a maximal lifespan — they evolve to an optimal lifespan. Humans are already considered to be K-selected [2], and increasing lifespan appears to necessarily decrease fitness in other areas, as has been seen in worms [3] and flies [4] (e.g. reproductive fitness decreases and age of maturity increases, when lifespan increases).

More importantly, "near-infinite" lifespans reduce the efficacy of natural selection — longer-living organisms evolve at a slower rate. While, perhaps, unappealing, the culling of species members well past reproductive age is necessary to allow for more resources and potential for competition and selection in their offspring. And humans are certainly still undergoing natural selection in many arenas; just look at sickle cell trait [5] or or CCR5-Δ32 [6].

Death is a feature, not a bug.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_history_theory

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R/K_selection_theory

[3] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8608934

[4] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601460

[5] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11965279

[6] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8791590

While this is the default behavior, you can, at least in Xcode 7.2, check "Automatically trim trailing whitespace" and "Including whitespace-only lines" under "Text Editing" in Xcode's preferences.

Not sure why you're being downvoted; this seems like a totally legitimate concern. Depending on the efficiency, you might end up just moving the pollution to a different location.

The Nat. Neurosci. paper lists author contributions at the bottom (Gariépy is J.F.G).

> S.W.C.C and M.L.P. designed the research and wrote the paper. S.W.C.C. and J.F.G. performed the research and S.W.C.C analyzed the data.

> It's very hard to Figure out what a random piece of DNA will do just from the sequence.

While it's certainly true that it's hard to determine the function of a DNA sequence from scratch, it's considerably easier to compare that sequence (or the sequence of the translated polypeptide) to other homologous sequences to see if it matches something dangerous.

I previously worked in a lab that studied Bacillus anthracis, and we had a bit of trouble getting a major gene synthesis company [1] to produce a plasmid with a variant of atxA [2], and atxA isn't even a toxin, it's just a transcriptional regulator. We presumed that they just BLASTed [3] the sequence we gave them and threw up a red flag when it matched anthracis. So this sort of sequence-checking already occurs.

[1] https://www.dna20.com/

[2] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8577251

[3] http://blast.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/

> "Do you really think these extensive intelligences do stop terror?"

I was under the impression that stuxnet had a demonstrably negative impact on the capacity of the Iranian nuclear program to enrich uranium. Of course, there's a whole different argument on whether or not that's in support of "terror".

From your own statement, I think we can deduce that the NSA isn't too happy with having its picture taken.

It's a pity that I can't source this specifically, but I vaguely remember reading in either James Bamford's "The Shadow Factory" [1] or his "Body of Secrets" [2] that the NSA once leased an entire office building that had been built near the edge of Fort Meade, simply because the top floors could see onto the campus.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Shadow_Factory [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Body_of_Secrets