Interesting point RE the Snopes trial. You are right, evolution is not mentioned in the book as far as I can tell. Even though it is foundational to understanding the human body (in particular some weird features it have which any half-good creator would never design that way.)
The SJWs / woke cult are a bit of a personal hobby horse for me. I think it is important to mention, since woke ideology comes from academics at top universities, as well as journalists at top media outlets -- people who have a lot of power to shape the public discourse and influence public policy. The power of Christian fundamentalists over society and culture, on the other hand, has been waning, if one looks over the past few decades. Yes, they are in the ascendancy at the moment with the 2024 election and whatnot, but overall their influence is waning. Of course, both anti-science from the left and from the right are issues we should worry about -- I'm just giving an argument why we might want to be a bit more worried about anti-science from the left. How much either issue is discussed probably greatly depends on what circles you run in.
Note I did mention how there is no discussion of sexual health or women's health in the book. That is an issue with health textbooks that has been improved a lot but still exists to some extent today due to Christian conservatives.
I discuss three leading contenders for FDA Commissioner who are getting a lot of attention right now, Joseph Gulfo, MD, MBA, Balaji Srinivasan, and Jim O'Neill. Among these, my favorite is Dr. Gulfo, although I see a very strong case for Balaji as well.
"Cerebrolysin is an unregulated medical product made from enzymatically digested pig brain tissue. Hundreds of scientific papers claim that it boosts BDNF, stimulates neurogenesis, and can help treat numerous neural diseases...
A recent video of Bryan Johnson injecting Cerebrolysin has over a million views on X and 570,000 views on YouTube. The drug, which is advertised as a “peptide combination”, can be purchased easily online and appears to be growing in popularity among biohackers, rationalists, and transhumanists. The subreddit r/Cerebrolysin has 3,100 members."
HPLC and other evidence shows that rather than containing neurotrophic peptides, "Cerebrolysin is likely composed of amino acids, phosphates, and salt, along with some random protein fragments."
"Combining synchrotron x-ray microscopy with expansion microscopy may represent a feasible approach for whole human brain connectomics at the nanoscale."
"Assuming 1 byte per voxel, the amount of storage needed for an 11-fold expanded human brain with 300 nm physical voxel size (27 nm effective voxel size) is about 61 exabytes."
Full post title: "That time when a bunch of people all agreed to preserve each other's brains"
It's crazy that we spend thousands on expensive funeral procedures (avg cost $7000) when people could be using that money to preserve their brain for science instead.
Thanks, I included a footnote to elaborate on this. There's actually a paper on how Cephalon produces R-modafinil because they can't just directly synthesize one of the enantiomers. It seems the process does produce both enantiomers (but more R than S ?).. I don't fully understand the process but they have a way of crystalizing out the S enantiomer of modafinil acid and using HPLC..
We published something similar in spirit recently (although it ended up as a conference paper and not in Nature)... Notably, we did our study with much fewer data - instead of millions of patents we had the text of a few thousand patents and the text of a few hundred conference papers. We had a specific focus and we wanted to focus on texts about energetic materials (explosives and propellants).
We showed how chemical-application & chemical-property relations are captured by word2vec and GloVe. For instance we found rocket fuels where the chemicals appearing closest to “rocket” while materials used in air bags appeared closest to “air bag”. We were able to filter to chemical names using ChemDataExtractor and further to likely energetic chemicals by obtaining SMILES strings from PubChem and using a classifier to classify them as likely energetics or not.
You're not addressing the problem area the author is looking at though, which is lead generation (finding new molecules that either have high binding affinity to a receptor and/or might be useful for a given medical application).
Cloning seems pointless to me - they will be ahead of you time-wise. You need to have a good case you can do it better, then it makes sense. Just be prepared to be called a knock-off. Differentiation is normally what people do even if its pseudo differentiation.