JunkDNA

Still waiting for the peer reviewed publication in a prestigious medical journal that demonstrates doctors using Watson get better outcomes for their patients.

I would argue that drowning is likely a pretty important form of selective pressure in the evolution of these animals. Marine mammals that are able to avoid predation and hunt for extended periods without surfacing would outcompete peers who lack those abilities. It's not hard to imagine incrementally larger lung capacities and incrementally better CO2 tolerances happening over millions of years and arriving at the current state.

In a lab that does clinical work, replacing a single instrument could mean having to re-validate all the tests the lab does, update protocols, get inspections from regulatory bodies, etc... it requires people to spend large amounts of time not doing their "regular" jobs.

Pharmaceuticals are a great example. The actual chemical compounds are mostly trivial to manufacture. This is the central reason generic drugs are so cheap. Once you know a particular chemical is useful as a drug and someone else has done the legwork of proving it to regulators, copying that drug is simple and cheap.

The field of study that most directly relates to what you describe is Medicinal Chemistry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Medicinal_chemistry)

It's a fascinating discipline. Typically for any given drug, large numbers of candidates are made. Those candidates are trivially different and go through a battery of tests for toxicity and efficacy. While there's a lot of science to it, the amount we know about biology is too primitive for it to be a pure engineering discipline. There's a certain amount of art to it because it's not enough to make the compound. You need to consider that if it works, some day a person is going to have to make it at scale, so it needs to be easy to make too. Finally, biology is surprising and messy so sometimes a gut instinct tells you to go a certain way.

I once was in a talk where one of the medicinal chemists who developed Amoxicillin described his excitement when they discovered the drug they had made had no taste whatsoever. The standard of care oral antibiotic that preceded it for brief period was horribly bitter (I forget the name). Kids hated taking the liquid form as a result. The team realized that with no innate flavor, the liquid form of Amoxicillin could be flavored with something more subtle than the typical grape or cherry flavors that they were accustomed to using to mask the flavor of drugs. He chose bubblegum.

I disagree with your statement "in some cases". It's "most cases" and where it is not, those are the ones that get the attention and screaming headlines. Shrekli is in the news precisely because this behavior is not normal. But generally, much like other goods, drugs are priced based on how much the consumer values them. I will also add, that for really big ticket things like oncology drugs, I believe every company offers payment assistance programs which often have very high income cutoffs that provide co-pay help or outright free drugs when insurance doesn't cover it.

Marketing is a red-herring. Sales and marketing should bring in more money than you spend on them or they're not worth doing. They exist to drive money This makes the company more profitable in the near term than R&D expenditure which can take decades to materialize.

Because it's not about how expensive it is to actually make the drug. To use a software analogy, Oracle doesn't price their database software by what it costs in bandwidth for you to come to their site and download the latest version. Or in the days of shrink-wrapped software, the cost of software was far from the cost of the materials (cardboard and discs).

Books similarly aren't priced based on the cost of printing and distribution.

The cost is directly related to recouping R&D costs as well as the clinical trials. In addition, with these therapies specifically, you actually have pay lots of highly trained people to administer them in the first place.

Feels great because my 90's self can look into the future of the early 2000's and see what Windows was like when malware first erupted on the scene and ordinary people were totally unprepared to handle it. I am happy to trade my freedom to tinker for that to not be a problem so I can do actual things I need to with my phone.

See this article from the scientific journal _Science_ from 2001 (not endorsing the linked website, it was just the first non-paywalled location of the article): http://garytaubes.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/08/Science-The...

The fallacies around dietary guidelines have been known to the scientific community for over 15 years at least. I read that article when it was in the original issue and I was dumbfounded by the slapdash way nutrition guidelines are established with minimal proof.

Boy this site makes me understand why the wirecutter exists. Just tell me which is the best so I know.

This thread is fascinating to me. I watched the whole movie thinking that they had found an amazingly good Cushing look-alike. I had no clue it was CGI until I came home to read the spoilers. Curious if the people that thought Tarkin looked fake saw the movie in 3D?

I worked in a reasonably sized organization that was heavily invested in MS products. If I had used SQL Server I would have had access to DBA's and secondary apps we were already licensing for ETL, reporting, etc... I chose postgres because at the time, the Linux drivers for SQL Server were junk. The message from our ops folks was basically, "Knock yourself out but you're totally on your own."

So does this mean Disney will be able to keep making movies with Darth Vader's "real" voice until the heat death of the universe?

Not to go too far off topic, but I'm surprised at the number of vim users in this thread who still use the escape key and haven't mapped it to something that doesn't require you to move your finger to the most inconvenient spot of the entire keyboard. Sometime 10 years ago I took someone's advice and remapped jj to escape in my vimrc. By far one of the best changes I've ever made. the speed gain is significant (unless your name is JJ Abrams)

My uncle still does inventory for his business (small dancewear retailer) on an Apple II. I believe he recently "upgraded" to the IIgs because he started having trouble getting parts.

To all the folks in this thread suggesting 3D printing and all sorts of other ideas, keep in mind that Sanofi is not some fly-by-night or scrappy startup. They are a major pharmaceutical company with decades of experience manufacturing pharmaceuticals and the quality control that is required and even they couldn't get it right.

They actually had a very innovative product. It was much smaller than the EpiPen and used voice prompts to tell you how to administer the drug (people in the heat of the moment sometimes don't remember to leave the EpiPen in long enough for a proper dose to be fully administered). I'm frankly mystified how they botched things so badly that they had to pull the product.

In general antibiotic resistance is lost when it doesn't confer an advantage. In some cases resistance to antibiotics costs cells energy they'd much rather be spending on other things. When the antibiotic is gone, cells without the energy tax can outcompete ones that do and divide quicker. The population then reverts to sensitive cells again.

Even in a hypothetical case where a random enzyme mutation confers resistance with no real obvious cost or side effect to the cell, unless there is specific environmental pressure to keep that mutation, it can easily revert in subsequent generations.

You're right about incentives being wrong, but I disagree with the preference for chronic drugs being a primary factor. In my opinion, the primary incentive killer is that agencies like the FDA will not approve a truly new antibiotic for general use. It gets approved as an antibiotic of last resort. So for the time that a new antibiotic is under patent protection, the company can't recoup their R&D because they can only address a tiny part of the market. When the day finally comes when the wonder drug can be standard of care, it's well off patent and generic competition torpedoes any real profit. Why develop a great new antibiotic if the FDA forces you to keep it locked away? From the company perspective it makes no sense.

Didn't the Napster moment happen in the late 1970's when John Bogle started Vanguard?

The Amiga was so far ahead of its time it was truly remarkable. I would have friends over and show them my computer games and they would be stunned. The Amiga was a contemporary platform of the original 8-bit Nintendo and most people had PC's running DOS that maybe supported 256 color VGA (if you were lucky). To see an Amiga flexing all its crazy powers was truly remarkable. You got to experience the future way before everyone else.

One place where I ran into this was when I was building an ETL framework in Scala. The scenario was that I wanted to be able to move data from one database system to another and not have the end user of the DSL have to care about the types. The use case was essentially that you should be able to show up to an arbitrary database, run a query, and then pump that output somewhere else (e.g. another DB, flat file, transformation function, etc...)

I went around in circles and ultimately concluded no amount of type inference or other things in Scala's bag of tricks would let a user of the API avoid the dreaded type cast.

I have often seen this situation whenever I have tried to write generic code in a static language that needs to interact with a database.

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto, CA & Philadelphia, PA

Role: Senior Customer Solutions Software Engineer (Python/JavaScript)

Be a part of a team helping to cure cancer, stop heart disease, and deliver the right drugs to the right people at the right time with software for precision medicine.

Syapse software helps healthcare providers use next-generation genomic and molecular data, in context with complex clinical data (medical history, treatment, outcomes, etc.) to make the best decisions regarding patient care.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire a Senior Customer Solutions Software Engineer for the Philly office (http://syapse.com/about/careers/openings/?gh_jid=32512). So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance!

We're especially interested in people with Python experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

Learn more about what we're doing from our presentation at AWS re:Invent: http://www.syapse.com/blog/aws-reinvent-video-and-slides-now...

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto, CA & Philadelphia, PA

Roles: Customer Solutions Software Engineer (Python/JavaScript), Customer Solutions Project Manager

Be a part of a team helping to cure cancer, stop heart disease, and deliver the right drugs to the right people at the right time with software for precision medicine.

Syapse software helps healthcare providers use next-generation genomic and molecular data, in context with complex clinical data (medical history, treatment, outcomes, etc.) to make the best decisions regarding patient care.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire Customer Solutions Engineers for the Philly office (http://syapse.com/about/careers/openings/?gh_jid=32512). So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance!

We're especially interested in people with Python experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

Learn more about what we're doing from our presentation at AWS re:Invent: http://www.syapse.com/blog/aws-reinvent-video-and-slides-now...

"Never" is a pretty log time. Curious what reasons you have for making that statement?

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto, CA & Philadelphia, PA

Roles: Customer Solutions Software Engineer (Python/JavaScript), Customer Solutions Project Manager

Be a part of a team helping to cure cancer, stop heart disease, and deliver the right drugs to the right people at the right time with software for precision medicine.

Syapse software helps healthcare providers use next-generation genomic and molecular data, in context with complex clinical data (medical history, treatment, outcomes, etc.) to make the best decisions regarding patient care.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire Customer Solutions Engineers for the Philly office (http://syapse.com/about/careers/openings/?gh_jid=32512). So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance!

We're especially interested in people with Python experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

Learn more about what we're doing from our presentation at AWS re:Invent: http://www.syapse.com/blog/aws-reinvent-video-and-slides-now...

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto & Philadelphia, PA

Roles: Customer Solutions Software Engineer (Python/JavaScript), Customer Solutions Project Manager

Be a part of a team helping to cure cancer, stop heart disease, and deliver the right drugs to the right people at the right time with software for precision medicine.

Syapse software helps healthcare providers use next-generation genomic and molecular data, in context with complex clinical data (medical history, treatment, outcomes, etc.) to make the best decisions regarding patient care.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire Customer Solutions Engineers for the Philly office (http://syapse.com/about/careers/openings/?gh_jid=32512). So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance!

We're especially interested in people with Python experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

Learn more about what we're doing from our presentation at AWS re:Invent: http://www.syapse.com/blog/aws-reinvent-video-and-slides-now...

I've made my fair share of hairball networks over the years. but I don't think this fixes the issue. The problem is that biological network diagrams of sufficient detail to be accurate, are far too complicated to be useful. Plus, biologists are often sloppy with their data model for these things: mixing genes and proteins for example. In those cases, what does a line between two nodes even mean?

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto & Philadelphia, PA

You can build advertising networks, make tools for financial institutions, help retailers target buyers...the options are endless. But are you excited by any of these choices?

There is another option: you could be a part of a team helping to cure cancer, stop heart disease, and deliver the right drugs to the right people at the right time with software for Precision Medicine.

Syapse software helps healthcare providers use next-generation genomic and molecular data, in context with complex clinical data (medical history, treatment, outcomes, cost, etc.) spread across multiple systems, to make the best decisions regarding patient care.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire Customer Solutions Engineers for the Philly office (http://syapse.com/about/careers/openings/?gh_jid=32512). So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance! We're especially interested in people with Python experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

Syapse Inc -- Palo Alto & Philadelphia, PA

Syapse provides a precision medicine data platform that enables laboratories, registries, and providers to use molecular profiling to diagnose and treat patients.

See here for all the open positions: http://syapse.com/about/careers/

I'm especially looking to hire Customer Solutions Engineers for the Philly office. So if you're on the East Coast and always wanted to join a Bay Area startup, but didn't want to relocate, now is your chance! We're especially interested in people with Python and JS experience. Any experience with healthcare, electronic health records, or genomics is a bonus.

LOVED these as a kid. I loved building all sorts of fans and paddleboat things. Only bummer was that my mom who knew jack about electronics was hyper-paranoid that I was going to electrocute myself playing with them in water. I used to sneak them into the bathroom and put them in the sink behind her back.