Month: July 2002

My Odd Week

The past seven days have been very odd. First my car died. Died as in when the mechanic comes out and tells you that he can fix it, but the cost to fix is going to be more than the car is worth.

Then my web sites disappeared from the face of the Earth thanks to a mixup between the telco. company and my web host. Here’s my big lesson from that — a week without constant weblogging sucks.

And it also became obvious that we needed another computer — my wife was trying to finish her thesis and ran into a lot of problems thanks to the relatively old machine I had her working on.

Oh, and I discovered that thanks to the lack of oversight by my predecessor in my position at work that the department I manage is actually running a deficit about twice as high as I had originally thought (I know where you’re coming from about the high cost of T1 connectivity, Seth!)

Fortunately, this is the United States where pretty much any problem can be solved by an influx of cash and credit. New car, new computer, new ISP for the web sites (though still handled by Macrobyte despite the outage — more on that later). They say money can’t buy happiness, but what else are you going to use it for?

Is Cryonics a Worthwhile Investment?

With the bizarre legal wrangle over whether or not Ted Williams really wanted to have is body cryonically frozen, Alcor and other cryonics comapnies and advocates were suddenly in the news. Does cryonics represent anything but a Quioxitic effort to cheat death?

I doubt it. I suppose if you’re wealthy enough and don’t mind the idea of havingt your body forzen in liquid nitrogen it might not be an unreasonable idea. After all, the odds of science being able to someday revive cryoncially frozen people is certainly a positive number — but, I suspect, a ridiculously low positive number.

The main problem I see with cryonics is that I don’t want my body to survive, but rather I want me to survive — to make cryonics worthwhile, I would want my consciousness, memories, etc. to be preserved.

But most cryonics advocates seem to have a horribly reductivist view of human consciousness. Certainly consciousness is a biological phenomenon, but cryonics seems to presuppose that it is also an incredibly mechanisitic phenomenon that can be stopped at one state and started decades later like some sort of extremely complex clock.

When looking at what is currently known about how the brain works, however, the evidence seems to be overwhelming that consciousness is largely a process.

Source:

Cryonics: Freezing for the future? The BBC, July 18, 2002.

Could Stem Cell Transplants Extend Human Life?

Researchers at the University of Kentucky report an intriguing finding in mice that one day might offer a way to extend human life spans.

The researchers examined bone marrow stem cells from several different strains of genetically modified mice. The researchers bred the mice, examining which mice had bone marrow stem cells that were the best at resisting cell damage. In this way they were able to identify that part of the mouse genome responsible for the strongest stem cells.

That turned out to be a specific gene on a chromose that had previously been lnked to longevity in mice.

The next step for the researchers will be to create genetically modified strains of mice that have extremely strong stem cells in order to see if it increases their longevity. Researcher Gary van Zant told the BBC, “We hope to show that by making stem cells more hardy we can extend the life span (of mice).”

If they do indeed find further evidence for a connection between strong stem cells and longevity, then this finding might have applications in extending human life span.

Source:

Cell transplants ‘could lengthen lives’. The BBC, July 19, 2002.

Developing an Impossible Vaccine with Animal Research

The Scientist recently published a long look at the development of a vaccine for staph infection — a vaccine that as recently as the 1960s was considered impossible to develop by most reputable authorities.

Without going into too much detail about the chemistry of it all, for a variety of reasons researchers in the 1960s concluded that the outer layer of the staph bacteria lacked polysaccharides.

In fact, the staph bacteria do contain polysaccharides. Researcher Walter Karakawa demonstrated this and then went on to develop a vaccine for staph that takes advantage of this. The vaccine has proven relatively successful in initial human tests on people with compromised immune systems, and should prove to be a boon in the routine protection of surgical patients against staph infection (patients are currently given antibiotics, but the staph bacteria has increasingly developed resistances to many antibiotics).

From that discovery Ali Fattom of Nabi Biopharmaceuticals worked to develop a vaccine for staph, which again many researchers said was impossible even if staph did contain polysaccharides. The major factor in Fattom’s proving that a vaccine would work was his development of an animal model of staph in mice. When Fattom looked back at previous efforts to locate polysaccharides he found that researchers had never created an animal model for the disease. According to The Scientist,

This brush with termination [when his vaccine project was almost cancelled] marked a turning point, for it convinced Fattom that he needed to demonstrate with an animal model that antibodies against polysaccharides protected against infection. This had not been done earlier because the NIH and Univax [who had both done polysaccharide vaccine development] researchers did not develop an animal model. [NIH vaccinologist John] Robbins’ goal had been to get the vaccine into the clinic quickly and safety, not to research the molecular basis of virulence. So animal model development had been deferred.

. . .

In 1996 Fattom finally developed a mouse model in which a reasonable innoculum caused infection. With this model he was the first to demonstrate that conjugate vaccines protected against lethal injections of Staphylococcus aureus. Knowing he would need corroboration, he then invited Jean C. Lee of Harvard to test his vaccines in her endocarditis model with rats. A year later the results were just as predicted — the vaccines protected Lee’s rats. Now, at last, skeptics started to come around. Maybe the vaccine would work.

And work it apparently does. A clinical trial of the vaccine in dialysis patients found the vaccine cut the rate of staph infections by 57 percent. The vaccine should perform even better in routine pre-surgical administration since the patients in that clinical trial had characteristics such as diabetes and high uric acid levels that inhibit production of white blood cells.

The vaccine is still undergoing further clinical trials, but barring any unforseen events should reach market within a few years. Not bad for a few people armed just with a hypothesis and some mice.

Source:

Impossible vaccine tames Staphylococcus aureus. Tom Hollon, The Scientist, 16[14]:24, July 8, 2002.

Blogging Software as Religion

John Hiler wrote an interesting roundup of the various blogging software that is out there. One of the problems with such roundups, of course, is that people are often looking for very different things from blogging software. Hiler’s piece is still helpful, though, because I think he’s pretty clear on what he wants and, therefore, what his criteria is.

I don’t agree, for example, with his assessment of the advantage of a database-driven site over a flat-page oriented site,

Why didn’t Hosted Weblogs ever really catch fire? I’m sure there are lots of opinions, but here’s my take: database-backed sites are just more complicated than their static cousins. You have to have more hardware and software backing them up, and they’re harder to figure out for designers who aren’t comfortable with programming.

That’s not to say that database-based dynamic blogging software isn’t a hot area: in fact, half of this survey is dedicated to Weblog Community software which falls in that category. It’s just that dynamic sites tend to work best when they promote community features that tap the power of having a database: comments, site tracking, community interaction…

Okay, on the first part I think he’s absolutely right. Database-driven systems are more complicated. But a database-driven system should give you a hell of a lot more than “comments, site tracking, community interaction.” Frankly, some database-driven systems don’t give much more than that, and I question what the point is of using a database system for such sites.

People already know my view of Conversant, but Movable Type is also headed in the right direction with more useful metadata features such as categorization and other features. It still can’t do everything I would need, but it’s a good system.

The odd thing is that people are apparently not happy over what Hiler had to say about their favorite blogging software. Hiler wrote today that,

Umm… some people take their blogging software pretty seriously. I am finding it helpful to think about each flavor of blogware as a separate religion faith. Depending on what software you’re using, you’re either a believer… or a heretic condemned to blogging hell.

How pointless is that? Blogging is not a one-size fits all activity, and there are as many different things people want out of weblogging as there are software packages.

For example, as much as I love Conversant, if all you want to do is make an update or two a day to a weblog and don’t care about comments or more advanced features, then Blogger or Blogger Pro is probably a better fit. Its limitations, on the other hand, caused me to abandon Blogger after just a couple months.

The more ways of updating a weblog, the better.