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Comment by hprotagonist | Hacker News Reader

98% of the time, "i had a neat idea 15 years ago, but we still need to test it through phase I, II, and III" does _not_ become "I am the man who probably cured all viral infections".

and he has exactly one paper, and it's in PlOS One.

Yawn.

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I wouldn't dismiss this work that quickly. The idea is sound and came out of the MIT Lincoln Lab and has been worked on for many years. If it's still around, it probably does something

https://www.ll.mit.edu/news/DRACO.html

The Wright Brothers were just 2 guys in North Carolina...

that's fine, but their publication count with this guy as an author is exactly 1. In 15 years, that's called "an idea that doesn't work."

Not exactly true. http://science.sciencemag.org/content/301/5630/213.long

Furthermore, this man worked on bio-defense stuff-- very likely a large majority of his work is not published for security reasons, as well as in startups.

There are plenty of people working in science, that don't make their career goals to publish in prestigious journals.

Real discoveries are rarely made at the pace required for securing tenure-track positions in academia.

That is another publication of his, yes. It's not clear that it's got much to do with DRACO. In his science paper, they engineer B-lymphocytes to fluoresce when they bind to target pathogens. 300-odd citations, which isn't too bad for that field.

I don't understand how having that one hypothetical paper published in PLOS One instead of another journal would be negative.

PLOS One is relatively minor-leagues as far as biomed journals go.

Hate for impact factors, while perhaps fully justfied, doesn't remove the fact that people act like they matter, and an impact factor of 3.2 is ten times less than Nature or Cell or Science.

It's mostly that it doesn't use the typical peer-review process. It is only reviewed for overall soundness of experiments (though there are some bad omissions of controls in this case), not for impact to the field, a compelling story, or even believable results. And this is not meant to be a negative comment by any means, but PLOS ONE is a great place to publish potentially interesting negative results, so that people don't keep trying things that don't work.

Anyway, if this was as big as he has trumped it up to be, it wouldn't be in PLOS One, there would be more than one pub, and both the defense department and pharmaceutical companies would be falling over themselves to get this tech developed for humans.

It's this kind of false-hope hype ( I CAN CURE EVERYTHING BUT NO ONE WILL GIVE ME MONEY ) makes people sour on science.

Are you aware of ANY other studies that achieved similar results? Even if the probability of it working on humans is low, the results are so amazing that it would be stupid not to pursue it further.

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