Combination therapy vs single-target therapy
I feel that single-target drugs are getting harder to make. I remember years back, when there were three AIDS drugs going through clinical trials. We were all s...
Category: Links of note
Ideas are not unique, no matter how far-fetched – a personal story
Last Christmas-time, I was driving to go get my parents (they live a few states away) and was listening to a Science Friday about Mars. The guest was an advocat...
Saturday morning thoughts on the evolutionary history of IBD in Eastern European Jews
Of course, as is usual with me on the weekend, I started reading all my open tabs in my browser. And the first one I read was a paper where they crossed two pur...
Mixing meaning into disease research – Treato
I wasn’t so sure how to describe Treato. It’s really interesting – mixing semantic analysis, social media, medical records, and analysis ̵...
Finally got around to reading Sterling’s “An Essay on the New Aesthetic”
“That is my thesis; that’s why I think this matters. When I left the room at the SXSW “New Aesthetic” panel, this is what concerned me most. I left with t...
We interrupt our usual program …… Down With Everything
Thomas Friedman recently wrote about a discussion he had with Frank Fukyama on the two-volume opus Fukyama is working on “The Origins of Political Order.&...
Repeated evolution in sticklebacks, and adjacent possibles
“Researchers have documented repeated evolution in other organisms, but the sticklebacks are unique because the freshwater transition has occurred so many...
The wacky world of horizontal gene transfer, genomic variants, and what we think are microbial species
“The main difference from eukaryotes is that prokaryotic reproduction is independent of DNA acquisition and recombination. Instead, DNA is obtained from f...
Another article on “Patterns of Early Gut Colonization Shape Future Immune Responses of the Host” in PLoS ONE
“In conclusion, a time window exists that enables the artificial colonization of GF mice by a single oral dose of caecal content, which may modify the fut...
New Old Publishing and “The New Value of Text”
“Finally, the text still requires context. As publishers spin up their digital and print-on-demand backlists, more and more is published with less and les...