I think it's the difference between suspicion of the pharmaceutical vs the pharmaceutical company. You can criticize the company without criticizing the treatment.
In fact this is exactly how they set the price for these curative treatments. Gargantuan sums but hypothetically on average cheaper than the overall lifetime costs of living with the disease. Lots of recent debates on this in the world of Hepatitis C.
I'll echo that it's a tremendous amount of work to appropriately format data and metadata for upload to a public repository. It's not as simple as just mass uploading raw data files. It's no surprise that people skirt around this requirement when possible, especially as the size of files and number of samples per paper continues to balloon.
That's not to say that it's not important, but the labor required is vastly underappreciated. I say this as someone who has completed the task for many papers.
Another anecdote: I felt my mental health declining from being sucked into "academic Twitter", which frequently devolves into unnecessary soapboxing in response to preprints or journal articles. I unfollowed all humans and now only follow institutional accounts. It really helped me.
They speculate that the harmful component of e-readers is the blue-shifted illumination. I’d be curious if newer e-readers with temperature controllable backlights set to “warm” mitigates some of this sleep harm
It’s honestly so bad. No matter how hard I try, I find myself re-downloading TikTok or Reddit (Apollo) every month and then wasting away all my free time for a week or two before re-deleting them out of disgust. I truly don’t know what the solution is. I would just get rid of my smartphone if life wasn’t quite inconvenient without it.
Curious as to why no one is recommending just paying for Google Workspace? $6/month for Google vs $5/month for Fastmail seems similar enough to avoid the hassle of transferring email servers.
I'm doing my PhD on topics related to mRNA and took a seminar class with Meselson in college. Really crazy how quickly our field has gone from obscure to mainstream this last year.
I don’t have the best answer for you, but there are a number of considerations apart from the synthesis of the active molecule itself. Delivery vehicle can alter the physiological impact of the active substantially, and so the overall “package” needs to be tested even though the active is already approved.
To my knowledge, generic trials aren’t as involved as their non-generic counterparts for obvious reasons. But they are still non-trivial logistical undertakings.
This is cool, but what they're claiming is puzzling. Perhaps someone here can clarify.
Making generic drugs is non-trivial. The medicinal chemistry may be decades old, but you still need to do trials to demonstrate efficacy equivalency to the non-generic version. Are they really saying they'll do 100 of these trials by the end of the year?
While this is cool, I'm thinking that this type of initiative should be done by the federal government. A generic drug "mint" if you will.
This sentiment is not unique to biomedicine. It's pretty often you see people finger elitism or capitalism for screwing people over because "I can make it myself."
Ethically, you are more than welcome to experiment on yourself. That's your prerogative. But, as has already been expressed here, the issue is once you start giving your creation to others. Even when the science is conceptually very simple, like in the case of nucleic acid vaccines, a huge number of variables can impact the safety and efficacy endpoints for the recipient. That's why trials and regulation are essential.
Are these regulatory systems perfect? Absolutely not (they are in dire need of reform). But they form an essential safety barrier for the general public. Decrying them as class warfare is incredibly naive.
Having spoken to a lot of doctors during medical school, it really does feel like a generational thing. Physicians who were trained in the pre-EMR times have a really hard time transitioning. This is partially a UX design failure on the part of EMR companies.
The newer crop of physicians have a much better time using EMRs. Don't get me wrong, they are acutely aware of the ridiculousness that is modern billing-centric medical records. But having been trained in that atmosphere, it definitely appears less painful to their day-to-day.