Crowd-funded HIV vaccine project sparks debate
nature.com
nature.com
You can also have people who are bad at science and are good at obtaining NIH grants. In my professional opinion, this characterizes a LOT of researchers out there. Which is the greater injustice?
Dis?claimer: I happen to think that I'm good at science and indeed I failed at a crowdfunding attempt.
Just in case people don't put two and two together or don't click to see your HN profile.
"They’re preying on people who are desperate for a vaccine,"
As a contributor (and a scientist) - I don't feel like I've been preyed upon, at all.
And I'd still be pleased as punch if it worked.
I read over the white paper, but honestly, my expertise is way down the road from where you guys are right now.
If there were offering a cure, then I could see a complaint where they were preying on people with the disease who were desperate for a cure. Since that's not the case, do they mean the contributors, wanting to help develop the vaccine, are desperate, and being preyed upon? Because I hardly think that applies.
Imagine if the pace of medical research moved at the pace of javascript frameworks.
We would all be fucking immortal. There would probably be some mutants though. But you gotta crack some eggs.
We need more open source science!
I agree. You give the kids a PCR machine and suddenly everyone is dead.
Better stop now before it's too late.
It depends. A lot of people are already losing their lives through inaction.
This is slightly tangential, Alex Tabarrok's book Launching the Innovation Renaissance is good on the subject of FDA inertia and spending too much time trying to prove efficacy and too little emphasis on experimentation and rapid iteration: http://www.amazon.com/Launching-Innovation-Renaissance-Marke... .
I'm willing to chance death for perpetual regeneration. No pain, no gain.
And when you're evaluating science, the paper itself, in the literature, is the only real way to evaluate it's quality.
This is incredibly short-sighted. Overvaluation of the literature is exactly why people pollute the literature with fraudulent results. It's why paper reviewing process and citations are polluted with political machinations. Ultimately, science is the entire corpus, from experimental design, through data collection, and presentation of work as papers. Reification of the publication process quietly enables researchers who keep everything up to publication a black box.
Moreover because some NIH grants fund clinical trials doesn't mean that all (or even the average) NIH grants have that level of scrutiny
Am I to magically observe their experimental design and data collection? Or do I evaluate their work like I do all others - through the literature they present?
And then yes, do squishy stuff like "judge their character", "talk to their postdocs", "ask around about professional opinions". It's a conceit to operate as if science isn't a human endeavor.
Also you are now conflating the specific case of this project with the general case. Read their INDA, if you are really itching for details.
I'm really not conflating anything. I'm very skeptical of any project getting this much attention that doesn't have some papers published. It's not the only step, but it's a step, and one that hasn't been done yet.
But, as an infectious disease epidemiologist, I'd be thrilled if I were wrong, and they were somehow paragons of vaccine research operating in stealth mode.
That was a complex project that required a lot of special technology, much of which we developed ourselves, to make and characterize micro-particles.
CV Herst, Pete Lloyd and I (all part of the Aradigm founding team) have been working together at Immunity Project since the beginning - Pete is an ME (UC Berkeley and Davis) who built and operates our precision spray drying system for sphere manufacturing. CV got his MPH at Berkeley in Med Micro and his PhD from North Western in Mo Bio later doing a post doc at MD Anderson. He has extensive experience working with HIV in both the diagnostic and lab research setting requiring handling the virus in cell culture.