Neat.
I wonder if that hints whether the conjectured role of clays in biogenesis might have some basis in fact.
In separate news: "Every living thing on Earth stores the instructions for life as DNA, using the four genetic bases A, G, C, and T.
"All except one, that is.
"In the San Diego laboratory of Floyd Romesberg?and at a startup he founded?grow bacteria with an expanded genetic code. They have two more letters, an ?unnatural? pair he calls X and Y."
Quite likely. That or Turing's diffusion limited hypothesis in a static mud or gel (which has also recently been demonstrated experimentally). Amazing just how many disparate good ideas ahead of his time he had!
I hadn't seen that one. My brother in law did research into making potatoes that glow in the dark (to understand gene expression).
-- Regards, Martin Brown
Ideas are cheap; the prize goes to those that /convince/ everybody the idea is correct.
But you knew that :)
The vast majority are. You get the odd bad apple but peer review usually weeds out excesses (eventually). Remember that modern statistics suggests that Mendelev probably faked his peas results slightly as they are a bit too perfect but it doesn't affect the validity of his work.
Pharmaceutical companies have a bad habit of finding the odd doctor who can be bribed to prescribe their particularly expensive new drug. But even in medicine most of the doctors and consultants I have ever met are genuinely trying to do the very best that they can for their patient.
They are often working with imperfect information in a complex environment and so they can't always get everything right. But in my experience they try damned hard in what can be difficult circumstances.
Most of the really corrupt so-called scientists are owned by US free market think-tanks that shill for big tobacco, oil and coal.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
Scientists are humans too (well, most of them are). They make mistakes, and they can be corrupted or fall for temptations. Like any other people, if there is a lot of money involved, or there is serious reputation matters at hand, you need to be sceptical.
What science has - in a way that most other types of human endeavour do not - is peer review. (Open source software is perhaps an other example.) Before an idea or a hypothesis can progress towards being a scientific theory or accepted scientific knowledge, it needs to be published in peer-reviewed journals, and it needs experiments and results that can be independently replicated by others.
There are some areas where comprehensive testing and reproducible results are impractical, unethical, or unquantifiable. Some things in medical research can be done scientifically, but others cannot. If you want to test the effects of mother's tobacco smoking on children in a solid scientific way, you would want to start with a large sample of twin mothers, take twin foetuses and implant one in each pair of mothers, then have one of the mothers smoke heavily throughout the pregnancy, and the child's childhood. Everyone would be living in some sort of Truman Show world with continuous monitoring and controlled environments, for perhaps 80 years. Obviously, this is not going to happen - medical science has to make do as well as they can with imperfect experiments.
From what I've read of medical research most of it is wrong. I've only read very little psych research, it was garbage.
You can take your pick as to why. This is one person's take:
NT
From what I've read, most researchers simply don't have the necessary skill to work from start to finish without screwing up somewhere. A minority do. It makes a mockery of p values.
that is nearly always the case with medical research
it's a shame peer review doesn't work well in medicine. Those that can refute papers a) are too busy to refute all the junk they read b) would ruin any chance of a future in research if they kept criticising their peers c) responses from the ones whose knowledge comes from work with patients or whose qualifications are not accepted aren't printed at all.
Peer review i's a fine idea, but doesn't work much in practice
certainly isn't true in medicine
and some areas where it can but isn't, psych springs to mind
There is that, but it's mostly not the issue. The unfortunate truth is that an awful lot of bunk is generally accepted as science. And an awful lot of people that don't know enough about a subject insist all in the garden must be roses.
NT
The people who design viral marketing campaigns would beg to disagree. Facebook also exploits inherent narcissistic tendencies in humans to great effect. (Anti)social media has a lot to answer for.
He is overstating it. Results that are almost indistinguishable from chance events are certainly more likely to get published in the life sciences - they are nowhere near as meticulous about experimental design and data interpretation as astronomers or high energy physicists.
It is also true that pressure to publish these days means that a lot of dross goes into print that will never be checked or looked at again just to meet targets. Same sort of thing happens in corporates where there is an edict that scientific researchers must generate N patents per decade.
I don't doubt that drug companies cherry pick their data to some extent and publish only the most favourable drug trials. It is not really any different to VW gaming the laboratory standard emissions testing or compiler writers gaming known compiler benchmark tests to come top.
Medicine scare stories get picked up and the flames fanned by red top newspapers with emotional stories in a way that doesn't happen in the hard sciences. Worse the public will continue to believe charismatic charlatans long after their scare story has been fully debunked.
There are some dodgy high profile claims made that take a while to get shot down but peer review does eventually catch up with anything that actually matters - the rest quietly turns into coal on a library shelf.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
a rather different area to what I'm talking about
24
There is certainly a wide range of meticulousness from high in some areas t o zero in some. Psychiatry is about zero, medicine just low.
that has no effect, the problem is the stuff that does.
lol. Each new drug can make them billions and you don't think they do whate ver plausibly deniably they can to profit?
that's no secret
of course it is. Dubious medical research kills on quite a scale.
if only. In what I do 80 years of peer review has not resulted in any incre ase in reality. Millions have died in that time.
A lot of research findings turn into an accumulates mass of 'scientific kno wledge' too much of which is bunk.
We'd all love to believe your 'it's all pretty good in the garden' thing bu t the reality is not that way. Medical research is largely about profit and building profitable careers, and inevitably so. Such is life, the problem is the child-like naivety of those who insist that the latest piece of bent research Must Be Good.
NT
It is still psychology though.
I can't comment on psychiatry in general not known any. But all the medics I have ever known have been genuine and diligent YMMV.
Yes, but it is up to the drug licensing authorities and nice to catch them out if they are up to no good. Nice does a fairly good job of filtering out new drugs with zero patient benefit for the NHS.
It will be interesting to see how the off license use of Avastin goes.
I have no illusions about what they do.
I would prefer that they were obliged to publish all drug trials since you can never tell what other useful information is hiding there.
The most famous experiment of the ninteenth century was a failure to find the ether drift (a failure), followed closely in the twentieth by the thermal noise of the Big Bang that just wouldn't go away. If those researchers had failed to publish those unexpected results it would have delayed scientific progress.
I think you need to back that claim up with evidence. Most medical research ultimately saves lives. Modern cancer treatments are way better than they were a few decades ago likewise with organ transplants and more staggering face transplants. The only place where we are losing ground is antibiotics where resistance is growing ominously rapidly and no really spectacular new ones have been found for a while.
There is a commercial imperative not to bother looking since the new antibiotic would be held in reserve and used as little as possible but would still have all the development and licensing costs.
There are now a few bug strains resistant to the antibiotic of last resort but thankfully they are still rare.
What do you do that has made you so cynical about medical research?
If it is bunk then it is up to you to refute it if you are working in that field. Headlines come and go but they invariably don't reflect the actual research paper that inspired them - journalists are lazy.
I think you are going to have to give a concrete example before I am prepared to accept that all of medical research is dodgy. All the researchers I have know have been trying to solve real complex problems. You are beginning to sound like a conspiracy theorist.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
Genetics is now about where electronics was in 1910. Expect amazing things, things that change the world, unless you dislike considering possibilities. Sounds like you do.
I often have trouble dealing with people who don't actually believe in evolution. Or progress. But I do well taking business away from them.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
I don't think these could be called the /most/ famous experiments of those centuries - but they were certainly very important.
And you are absolutely right that negative results, or unexpected results, should be published - for the good of everyone.
However, there are three important reasons why scientists are reluctant to publish such results.
One is their own reputation - many see negative results as negative for their careers. This is especially the case if the results show flaws in the experiment - who wants to publish results saying "We did this massive experiment to collect lots of data. Unfortunately, it turns out we forgot to put a blank USB stick in the machine, and nothing got recorded" ? Such write-ups would be useful for other scientists, but not for the one who screwed up!
Number two is the time and money. If an experiment turns out to show no useful results, the priority is usually to move on to something new, rather than spend more time and money writing it up.
Number three is the way the great unwashed will react. There will always be some half-witted tabloid journalist who will misunderstand and use it for a sensationalist piece about how scientists are wasting tax-payers' money. The religious nutcases will take it as "proof" of their particular type of pink unicorns, the global warming deniers will say that since the Cern folk failed to find a faster-than-light particle it proves scientists are wrong and therefore global warming is a Chinese conspiracy. And so on.
As you can see, it is a people problem - not a science problem.
The two statements are not contradictory. Dubious, or knowingly faked, medical research costs lives. (Andrew Wakefield is, IMHO, one of the worst mass-murderers in modern history due to deaths caused by vaccine scares.) But most medical research is done with the best of intentions, and with at least reasonable quality results - enough that it gradually leads to steadily better medical treatment and public health.
I think drug research (and indeed, a lot of research in general) should be done using public funds, as a cooperative effort, with all results (good and bad) being published. It should be an international body with every country contributing a certain fraction of their GDP, and any company that wants to use the results for manufacturing and sales can do so. (Research into production methods would mostly be handled by companies.)
Sure, there would be a certain amount of corruption and wastage, and endless arguments about who should get funding - but there would be many orders of magnitude more useful research done overall, with much less duplication, and people could build on each other's results (including negative results). Commercial imperative would no longer be an issue - drug researchers could be concentrating on finding cures and preventions for problems, rather than on high-profit drugs to be taken for a lifetime.
That is both ignorant and meaningless.
Of course I like considering possibilities - but I prefer to concentrate on sensible ones, based on fact, rather an invented ideas based on ignorance and your own person religion.
I "believe" in evolution in the same way that I "believe" in gravity, or cars, or cheese sandwiches. They are all amazing things, and very useful - all exist without any doubt. All can be studied more or improved upon. But none are some sort of hidden magical mystery that is beyond our understanding.
Genetics is at about the point where electronics was in the 1960's all the main building blocks have been identified but we don't yet fully understand how they go together to make useful combinations.
You manage to sound like you don't believe in evolution or science.
-- Regards, Martin Brown
It's not a law of nature, and it's too often wrong.
Why would an organism not use an efficient and complex mechanism just because you can't understand it?
Obviously, organisms use multiple, extremely complex mechanisms that people don't understand.
OK, you are adverse to speculation and discovery and progress and wonder. And probably design.
Too late. It is complex.
Try designing a mechanism that can optically track a 120 mph spinning tennis ball and hit it with a racket, to within inches of a skinny line, using only millisecond-speed majority-logic gates and meters-per-second transmission lines.
The ball is moving about as fast as apparent nerve propagation velocity. The spin really matters.
I once played table tennis with the world's 17th best player, and badminton with the world's then doubles champion. Both were astonishing, doing things that looked physically impossible.
The badminton guy never made it as a singles player; he was never able to score a single point on the #1.
And the 17th best table tennis player was a not-very-good EE.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
Make that the 50s or 60s, and I would agree.
If I was a schoolkid I would be looking for a career in the life sciences, for the same reason I chose a career in electronics and software: amazing things are rushing towards us.
OK. But sometimes the language you use makes it feel like you don't believe in evolution, for reasons that might be based in one of the religions.
It's not in the middle. Graph yours: it's easy. Your left and right blind spots don't overlap.
The human retina is very strange, arguable upside-down and easily damaged/detatched. There must be some reason for its structure.
If you think it's bad engineering, you don't believe in evolution. Few people really believe in evolution.
Failure to speculate locks out design and invention.
Or entirely different chemistry on, say, a gas giant. Dogma now insists that life needs water, but nature may not follow our rules.
Not even aphids are obliged to reproduce according to your rules.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
In other words, they use more complex mechanisms than random mutation and selection.
Certainly horizontal transfer is critical to spreading valuable mutations (or other valuable genetic and non-DNA machanisms) among a species. Or between species. Given a valuable change, standard reproduction is too slow and too risky a mechanism to preserve the advantage.
The neo-Darwinists and the Central Dogmaists denied all sorts of now-known mechanisms. Expect even more astounding mechanisms to be discovered... if you allow yourself to consider that maybe we don't know everything quite yet.
Yes, the things that we will learn about life would now sound like Magyck.
-- John Larkin Highland Technology, Inc lunatic fringe electronics
As I wrote, it is a TOOL, not a law!
I find it difficult to understand what's behind that question. Most organisms, and all simple organisms, don't "use" anything. They just are.
Yes. But that statement has no bearing on evolution.
I really don't see how you can draw that conclusion from what I wrote, and indeed it is completely false.
So, doing things on the limits of what is possible with poor material (human beings) is evidence that there must be A Great Designer(s)? I think not.
Evolution in tiny steps, each step through a local maxima.
Other eyes evolved independently (IIRC at least 8 times) and unsurprisingly went through different local maxima. Some are distinctly better than others.
If it was engineering, it would be unnecessarily bad engineering. That's an argument for either the non-existence of an almighty creator (or alternatively for a capricious bastard that doesn't deserve worship).
But the engineering reference below is the punchline of a standard joke, e.g.
I speculate that it is all the result of the omniscient and omnipowerful Flying Spaghetti Monster, as implemented via his noodly appendages.
You need to keep an open mind, but not so open that your brain falls out.
I think the dogma is in your mind.
Many people have speculated about alternatives, but there is no evidence for any alternative - yet.
When evidence for one is discovered it will be studied, understood and become part of orthodox knowledge.
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