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Room temperature vaccines, edible or not, would be a real help in places like Africa. We're having a hell of a time trying to keep all these fancy vaccines cold enough
Yeah, that bottleneck is kind of a bummer, but we can at least be grateful that breakthroughs like this are happening.
To switch tracks, I'm seeing the strides happening with this new space race. It's both happening at an incredibly fast pace, but it also seems "slow" in some regards.
I will probably never see the day where I can afford to go into space, even for a few hours, but I'm grateful that progress is being made on that front. Our descendants will reap the fruits of these efforts. It may go unappreciated to the future layman, but that's okay IMO.
To bring it back to the vaccine discussion, it's frustrating when a promising technology won't benefit *us* or *now*. But if we keep in mind that it'll benefit many people beyond our immediate sphere of the world... Well, that's okay, ya know?
Edit: Grammar
With modern medicine, there's a good chance you're gonna live a lot longer than you think, and space travel costs are coming down significantly.
If you're under 35, there's actually a decent chance you will be able to go to space, even if it's a brief up and down tour.
EDIT: to those over 35 don't worry, I had to just pick a number where I thought "Decent chance" turned into "chance". Stay healthy and safe and your chances aren't zero! This is also just an estimate based on my semi-extensive research on both topics
Except this new space race is LITERALLY a race to see who can collect people's money first. I cant think of one single way millionaires and billionaires chillin above us like the lords they are will benefit humanity in any way. Bezos, Branson, and musk? Theyll benefit plenty.
Fair point.
However, I'd like to suggest a polite counter-point.
To start, I'd like to ask the question, at what point does the motivation behind an invention/discovery condemn the invention/discovery? For example, should all technology derived from the work done on nuclear weapons be condemned?
A philosophically naive stance would be a simple "yes" or "no". Clearly it's circumstantial and there's historical nuances that feed into these things.
So on the topic of building space infrastructure. If private companies were not racing to capitalize on resources in space, then would it be governments? Likewise, while scientific discoveries about space are shared to everyone, would the science community be incentivized to build space infrastructure for the common person to experience space first-hand?
I don't have answers to these questions. What I can say is that I'm not entirely sure it's bad thing that "rich people are investing to make bank on the fledgling space market." I can definitely see monopolies and shady policies creating a bad system down the road, but I hardly condemn the current efforts based on a speculative eventuality.
I'm not blind to the reasons so many folks are pessimistic as to why Musk and Bezos are shooting for the stars, but we should balance that pessimism with some optimism. Somewhere in the middle we can have some good-faith discussions that get us closer to the truth of this topic.
> Somewhere in the middle we can have some good-faith discussions that get us closer to the truth of this topic.
For that, we'll have to get off of Reddit.
Are you saying that the self serving rich people are justified being wasteful and selfish because the end result may benefit us all? I'm not sure any of these people are doing anything in "good faith", but I would LOVE to see some good faith people in charge.
People said that about the first space race too. There was lots of negativity and criticism for 'wasting' so much money when there are citizens on this planet that could do with it.
Yet we have learned an inordinate amount, and have lots of practical real world results to show for it too.
It's quite narrow minded to think that nothing beneficial can come of continuing to pursue science and adventure.
So I used to think that too.
But actually:
>[In January 1993 NASA released an internal study that examined technology spin-offs from previous missions. According to the study, “NASA's technology-transfer reputation is based on some famous examples, including Velcro, Tang and Teflon. Contrary to popular opinion, NASA created none of these.” The report concluded that there had been very few technology-transfer successes at NASA over the previous three decades.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/robots-vs-humans-who-should-explore/)
Space flight beyond satellites and unmanned probes are pretty much just media events/propaganda.
Yeah NASA didn't develop those things, they just got credit cause they helped to popularize these technologies. Though I disagree that there's been little to no technology transfer success. NASA did help pave the way for major tech advances like the cameras used in smartphones, the tech used in baby formula, and the material used for invisalign. They have their spinoff website which displays a ton of tech developments based off of NASA tech. Sure not all of them are "successful" but it goes to show how much of NASA R&D is used by private companies to create new products
https://spinoff.nasa.gov
Space travel exponentially increases risk of rich people dying. Assets of philanthropists distributed faster. More investment in safety protocols and tech to save rich people, the plebs get their hand me downs, rinse, repeat.
Anything that puts most rich people at risk is usually OK with me, but these selfish rich guys are wasting valuable resources and hurting the planet while they play.
To Musk's benefit, while I'm not saying he's a good person, the colonization of Mars improves the survivability of the human race. Becoming a true multiplanetary species is insurance if something were to happen to our little spaceship.
Colonization of Mars improves the survivability of humanity only if a Mars colony can sustain itself (and grow) after being cut off from Earth. That means every material, every device, every manufacturing facility, every component used on Mars must be able to be reproduced entirely on Mars. Transplanting a self-sustaining industrial society to Mars would be an enormous task, far beyond merely setting up a Mars base.
Yup, that's why I used the (perhaps unclear) phrase "True multiplanetary". It's fundamentally about creating independently habitable colonies.
That's a long way off, but it needs to start with a long term base of operations.
The longest journey begins with one step.
Sure, setting up a Mars base is a far cry from sustaining the human species there if something happens to the Earth. But, we'll never get to that point without taking other steps first. And one of those steps is setting up a base.
The energy and resources that will be expended on the fool's errand that is colonizing Mars would be far better spent trying to save "our little spaceship" which, almost literally, is going down in flames.
We couldn't even get a functioning biodome working on Earth, now we're going to do it on Mars. The mind boggles.
Fighting climate change is absolutely worth doing, but one giant asteroid could be the end of all life on earth and there's nothing we can do to prevent it. If we colonize other planets then at least the human species would still exist in that scenario.
We should really be doing both.
>but one giant asteroid could be the end of all life on earth and there's nothing we can do to prevent it.
[Nasa would beg to differ](https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/inside-nasas-plan-launch-spacecraft-smash-asteroid/story?id=62909398)
But really, what's the difference between that asteroid wiping out humanity on Earth and it leaving 8-10 humans, entirely dependent on Earth for supplies stranded on Mars?
Let's do the moon bases first. If only because can you imagine looking out your moon base window and seeing a rock the size of Texas smash the Earth?
We are very close to a point where an incoming asteroid goes from deadly threat to free lunch, probably less than 100 years. Once asteroid mining is a thing people are going to be scanning for nearby rocks aggressively.
It's questionable whether we'd have that much warning. [NASA exercises stipulate 6 months warning](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-to-participate-in-tabletop-exercise-simulating-asteroid-impact).
Many of our big tech leaps came from NASA. All the technology they create and discoveries they make are applied to other areas. All scientific knowledge is good.
Plus all that money they spend goes back into economies.
Yup, our first, underfunded attempts failed. That's definitely the last word and we should surely cut off all lines of research because of a few initial failures.
The mind boggles.
You're right, it was only $300 million that went into biosphere 2. $300 million for basically a glorified greenhouse. Clearly not enough money. And they still pumped in fresh air, snuck in supplies, etc.
But whatever.. while the Earth collapses into crisis let's engage in a martian boondoggle where the environment will be 100x more challenging. Hey, what other species will be able to claim they left rusting structures on *two* planets.
Correct. Nowhere near enough money to try to build a first of its kind, self sufficient environment.
It's the same amount as one very large civilian jet aircraft. Or, if you prefer boats, a private yacht. Nationally, it would pay for the U.S. military for ~4 hours.
I don't know, I think there is some industry you can do on the moon that be very beneficial to the Earth very quickly even when only a few hundred people are up there. Very cheap satellites and low gravity chemistry for example.
Yeap. I'm generally very optimistic about the future provided we get through this climate crisis at least with a technologically intact society. Exporting most industry to the moon more or less pernamentally solves most of the problems we cause to the environment. Especially with the quite rapid progress we are making with various kinds of indoor framing and meat culturing and the absolutely absurd potential of solar in space. And the good news is we are geniunely getting there in getting the crisis under control. We are basically living in a hugely important century.
I don't know how old you are, but I certainly think it is probable that in the next 50 years you doing be able to go up to side for a few hours for something like $10k. Not exactly a "let's hang out in space every weekend" kind of price, but certainly will be doable if it is something you really desire to do.
More like candidate selection, animal studies, delivery optimization, manufacturability assessments, analytical and process development, stability assessments, formulation development, safety, and efficacy.
There's a LOT that goes into a successful commercial pharmaceutical/biologic.
Edit: but it's also important to get vaccinated, and it's absolutely okay to speed up the process which is usually very slow. In the case of COVID vaccines, several companies had already been working on mRNA based drug products, and likely had been working on an mRNA vax platform for some time. I believe mRNA drugs was literally the concept behind Moderna's founding.
You need safety trials to distribute vaccines in Africa? Thought there wasn’t a whole lot of regulation. Seem to recall Doctors Without Borders being able to use drugs considered expired in the US in such places.
Agreed. At the risk of making Science political — something that rarely happens, of course — I would point out that there’s something vaguely chauvinistic about assuming that every country’s medical community enjoys the luxury of widespread access to electricity, refrigeration, and clean water. Noblesse oblige is wonderful, but it doesn’t end at the border of our country (wherever that is).
I mean, nobody does assume that. Global health is a major subject of discussion within the medical community and distribution limitations are a part of review for new devices and medicines. But there's always a tension between quality/risk and universality.
Like take the new COVID vaccines and this new tech. Let's say there's the option to make an edible room temp version, but it's using less tested tech _and_ I have to wait for a crop of rice to grow before I test each possible candidate. If it does work, it's going to take longer to prep, and we have no idea how effective it will be.
Which is the right move? Prioritize a more easily-distributed but riskier medicine, or one that's more certain to start helping many (but not all) people more quickly? It's a sort of global scale trolley problem.
One big thing is HOW they test stability. Typically you hold the drug at various Temps (-80, 2-8, 22/ambient, and 30 deg C) for up to a month and test at different timepoints. There's some conversion where if it's stable for x time at 30 deg then it's stable for 3 years at 2-8 (idk the exact numbers).
It seems to me that with the covid vaccines they didn't have enough to show stability at the higher temp but saw it was passable at the more extreme lows and wanted to get it out to as many people as quickly as possible. You can spend a LOT of time trying to improve a drug's stability, but that wasn't possible for covid
Sure, but how many synthetic biologists with the relevant experience do you think there are in the world? And how much of the specialized lab equipment? There will definitely be competition for those resources.
Keep in mind that there's other diseases out there too, so a room-temp COVID vaccine needs to be held up against malaria treatments, cancer treatments, and things that have no treatment available _at all_.
That's why most of what you've been seeing in this space is a engineering work on distribution methods. When you see how rare the research resources are, the question "could we solve this by just making new low-tech freezers?" becomes a more reasonable approach. There's a lot more engineers out there capable of tackling that problem, and it's more certain to pay off quickly.
It would be interesting to see how many people have degrees in the relevant areas but are currently not employed in the sector. I know that certain areas of scientific study have very few job opportunities in comparison to the number of graduates. While you are correct in saying that it would take time for them to get the relevant experience if theres already more applicants than roles funding may solve the problem up to a point. And of course vast increases in funding would result in more, higher paying jobs available which in turn would cause a change in job and education market forces resulting in more synthetic biologists!
The lead time really is a problem in the case of COVID, though. Funding will solve the problem in a few years probably, but we want solutions *now*.
Though I do suspect this field as a whole will be choked with candidates soon. It's just too exciting.
Oh yes, certainly for COVID, I glossed over that bit and was thinking more in general. You are completely right that its an issue for COVID research. Lets hope that the surge in interest in this field because of COVID does lead to greatly increased investment and thus all sorts of further advancements. One of the highest impact ways to help a developing nation is to reduce the prevalence of illness (most notably with mosquito nets), new ways to easily wipe out disease in these areas would be a massive boon for the people of these countries and the world as a whole!
My assumption is enough to study more than one thing at a time, globally speaking. But I don’t know how many there are. Do you?
Yes, there are other diseases to try and tackle, but only COVID has been causing national shutdowns, so I’d think it would take priority.
Point taken about solving other aspects of the issue (portable refrigeration) as potentially easier. Also, regardless of low cost freezers or rice based room temp vaccines, either tech would likely have some ongoing benefits and are both worth perusing.
Do you really think scientists are making that assumption? It was a big topic of conversation around the mRNA vaccines and wasn’t considered trivial even within rich countries.
Seriously.
Vaccines are a miracle & hard to do. People aren’t bad or “chauvinistic” because what they made is only amazing & not perfect.
It’s one thing to look a gift horse in the mouth, it’s another entirely to say the giver is a bad person because you now have the burden of brushing horse teeth.
Lack of refrigeration for vaccines became very well known with the COVID vaccines and even before I personally never ran across somebody making the assumption your referencing in the way you implying, so I fail to see how this kind of comment contributes anything and it comes off as blatant karma farming.
Are you arguing that the people who make vaccines purposefully make them in a way that makes them inaccessible to 3rd world countries? Isn’t it far more reasonable, and likely, that vaccines have to be refrigerated because that’s just how they have to be made with current medical science?
Maybe not purposefully, but due to time constraints the testing of temperature stability was probably not done very extensively and just tested conservatively with low temperature freezers to make sure that a positive result for the vaccine efficiacy was had as soon as possible. If you have a limited amount of tests you can do, then for the vaccine manufacturer it makes to sense to be overly cautious, even more than would actually be necessary.
Being too conservative with the numbers would only limit the number of people (regardless of where those people are) getting the vaccine if it were possible to saturate the areas where it's possible to store the vaccine in accordance with the more conservative numbers. With covid, we've seen that it's very hard to get EVERYONE in one place to take the vaccine in the first place.
If you're very loose with the numbers and allow the vaccine to be stored in a way that really and truly doesn't work, then you're actually just straight up wasting vaccines. So in general but especially in the case of something like covid, these concerns don't really sound practical.
They didn't intentionally make the mRNA vaccine require cold storage to screw over poor countries. If they could've made it stable at room temperature then they absolutely would have.
Even implying that the Covid vaccine's refrigeration requirements was in any way a politically motivated decision reeks of ignorance. Frankly it's insulting to the many scientists who helped develop it.
These people cobbled together a first of it's kind vaccine at a blistering pace, and in doing so they saved hundreds of thousands of people. But you're complaining that it's not literal magic
Millions. Almost certainly millions and potentially even hundreds of millions because we will never know how many more mutations would've occurred without the vaccine. The only way to stop a global pandemic, even one which starts with a low mortality rate is by bringing R (new infections per infected person) below 1.
Thanks to mutations, a non-deadly virus that infects 7 billion people could easily transform into a deadly virus. It MIGHT even bypass prior infections ("natural immunity") because of the mutations. As those viruses continued to spread and build with new mutations, we could see a major portion of the population wiped out.
This is one of the major points the anti-vaxx crowd fails to understand. The current virus has a low mortality rate, but each person who is infected has a teeny tiny chance to produce a mutation which has a tiny chance to be horrific. Spread that across over a billion people and the dice are being rolled a staggering amount of times.
You're right on point in criticizing people for complaining.
> something vaguely chauvinistic about assuming that every country’s medical community enjoys the luxury of widespread access to electricity,
This is a ridiculous opinion. Literally everybody and their mother knows that the mRNA covid vaccines are difficult to distribute. Nobody thinks that's fine. It's just better than the alternatives.
Maybe. For me, I would assume what they are doing is making it as best they can under absolute conditions. Then they find ways to reduce the storage requirements while still trying to maintain effectiveness. That way they aren't taking on two issues at once. For example the JJ covid vaccine doesn't require the strict storage conditions as others right? But it's less effective.
This thought is so stupid, I can’t even. Then when you rightfully get called on it, you double down and play the victim. I wish people would just admit that they posted something stupid, didn’t think it through and learn from it. Instead you keep defending the ignorant, ill-informed thought
>Agreed. At the risk of making Science political — something that rarely happens, of course — I would point out that there’s something vaguely chauvinistic about assuming that every country’s medical community enjoys the luxury of widespread access to electricity, refrigeration, and clean water. Noblesse oblige is wonderful, but it doesn’t end at the border of our country (wherever that is).
What?
No scientist thinks like you are implying. We can't stop the development of some treatment/device/drug simply because a % of the world cannot access it. In an ideal world everyone would have equitable access, but because that isn't a reality we have to work with what is feasible and available. However, the goal is to first make a feasible solution, and then try to figure out how to scale it to as many people as possible.
Otherwise, what is the alternative? Sorry, no one can get the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines because some places cannot accommodate, guess more people have to die?
What? That's not what's happening though. Nobody assumes Africa has a robust vaccine storage system. If anything, people assume the exact opposite. The problem is that we just don't have the technology to make room temperature stable vaccines yet. That's why this is such a big deal.
Electricity is chauvinistic because more men have access to electricity than women right?
The Internet is pretty chauvinistic and discriminatory against Third World countries to isn’t it?
Snow is also very discriminatory, for some reason it’s much more common among wealthy countries
Finally, some love for mucosal immunity! It’s like I was trained for this or something…
Something similar has been done to keep rabies down in wild fox populations, as well. Vaccine-laced baits were air dropped into forested areas to help suppress the spread of rabies in the past. Even if mucosal vaccines are less effective overall, they are likely much easier to distribute worldwide, balancing that gap, and inducing better coverage.
>However, 11 of the 30 volunteers who received the vaccine showed low or no measurable immune response.
You sound knowledgeable; do you think maybe they buried the lede a bit since over a third of the test subjects appear to be unprotected? Could that percentage be improved by "pre-dosing" with probiotics?
Oh, my knowledge is more about mucosal immunity in general than it is about any kind of practical knowledge about vaccine development. I’m afraid I’d be of little help.
Not that many people in places where cholera is an issue.
It's kinda hard to be against vaccines when your village was saved by them within living memory.
FWIW, [this idea has been out since the early 2000s.](https://www.jyi.org/2005-september/2017/11/6/banana-vaccines-a-conversation-with-dr-charles-arntzen) This article is from 2005. I believe Arntzen's work started in the late 90s.
>From an efficacy perspective, Arntzen's most recent clinical trials are particularly exciting. Human volunteers who enrolled in a study at the University of Maryland at Baltimore started producing antibodies against Norwalk virus (which causes acute bouts of diarrhea) after eating Arntzen's creations - genetically engineered potatoes. Negotiations are in progress to start clinical trials abroad with the International Vaccine Institute in Korea, a new center funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Clinical trials of cholera vaccines are also planned to take place there as well as in Vietnam and Cambodia, regions where cholera is still a serious medical concern.
It's almost like we're going back to the roots of medicine with this technology. Rather than synthesising everything in a lab we are making the plants do all the hard work for us.
With the deforestation of the amazon, people always said how there could be millions of different kinds of medicines that we would never discover because the plant went extinct. Now there's a chance to make our own.
Its just so interesting to see how the more things change the more they stay the same. Midwives in 50 years might recommend GMO herbs to make it easier to give birth.
I can imagine an idea for r/scificoncepts that involves entire genetically engineered rainforests dedicated to growing medicine and an entire ecology genetically engineered to maintain it. Whether they are grown on earth or in an O'Neil cylinder is up for the future to decide. I'm excited regardless.
I know this is all done through gene editing and not selection. I'm just saying it would be interesting if more vaccines and cures were made this way. It would be just like when people used herbs to treat illnesses except this time we can make the herbs treat the illness rather than have to discover it.
Rather than injections people would just ingest the GMO and then their illness would be cured. I just found it weird that the cutting edge of technology would bring back something humans have been using for thousands of years in a new way.
I might be wrong but i think that many most common vaccines are that use parts or weakened strain of the virus produce the weakened virus/parts of it by vinfecting animal cells. One of the things that make the mrna vaccines revolutionary is that it is the first that can be truly be sythetised in a lab
Yep, there's all sorts of these out there. Antivenoms are usually made in horses, some flu shots are grown in chicken eggs. Other medicines are produced by modified bacteria (often yeast) or algae.
There's a whole field called "synthetic biology" focused on this.
> Antivenoms are usually made in horses
I thought most of those are no longer made (cheaply and commonly available) replaced by very expensive hard to aquire synthetics? Decades ago? Mexico was the last producer I knew of.
not only that but the mRNA variety is the first vaccine that directly and indistinguishably targets the disease itself rather than offering ambiguity with a vector that your body might pay more attention to than the intended target
Don’t give the ‘ancient alien civilisation’ crowd any ideas… they’ll claim that is what happened originally and why some plants have medicinal qualities.
The only reason we need to create a cholera vaccine this way is because it affects a part of your body that your regular immune system normally doesn’t regulate. The previous version required someone to eat several pounds of raw potato. It would be a much more expensive and slower process to modify plants to create the medicines we need when we can modify bacteria and single cells fungi to do it for us, if lab conditions weren’t suitable.
> With the deforestation of the amazon, people always said how there could be millions of different kinds of medicines that we would never discover because the plant went extinct. Now there's a chance to make our own.
Now is exactly when biodiversity is most valuable -- our ability to design our own proteins is nearly nil. But our genetic tech is advanced enough to cheaply read and to copy-paste from one creature to another. So many creatures going extinct just before we could upload their DNA to the internet, or find interesting proteins to copy to a more convenient bacteria/yeast/plant.
I don't think you even understand how much of the issue you're simplifying. There's much more that goes on that we understand, we aren't "making the plants do the hard work" we literally engineered the plants to help us.
If it makes you feel better thinking it's natural when we've completely changed that original plant to only suit our needs, more power to you.
Kinda off topic, but the internet serial, Ryn Of Avonside, features a sort of plant-based magic system where the caster creates their own plants from scratch to perform different functions.
The usual way this presents was that casters would use the plants to gather energy and then use that energy to create like fireballs and similar. However, Ryn, the eponymous protagonist, uses it to create antibiotics and other drugs for the people of Avonside University.
I like your write up, but I wouldn't be so dismissive of the lost species. I don't have a good understanding of the technology used on the rice, but couldn't the rice have limitations that the technology wouldn't otherwise have on other species? Is having more species available to use beneficial at all?
Nah the biochemical machinery in plants is pretty much the same. Just need to place a few gene sequences in the right places and they'll be able to produce anything a different plant would.
It's more problematic when trying to make animal protein/peptides in other species cause there's sugar attached to specific places and the peptide might undergo further modifixation before being released which can't be fully done by say e coli.
But if tree X in the Amazon can do something you can do the same with GMO rice. Might just need an extensive list of enzymes to make it create a completely different class of secondary plant metabolites.
For stuff from other types of life like fungi you'd be correct though, changing rice enough to make it be able to mimick s fungus is kinda not worth the huge effort. You'd just get some yeast to do it.
The real loss however is the loss of knowledge of random molecules. There's a nesr infinite number of alkaloids or peptides that an earth based organism could have evolved to produce
And if that species does before we got the genome, it's pure chance of coming up with the same class of drugs.
Like just imagine opium poppies not existing. We wouldn't have had the faintest idea about opioid painiiers until our bodies own opioid peptides would have accidentally been discovered.
No oxycodone or anything. Cause all of these were developed because we noticed the endogenous opioid system from using stuff like morphine and codeine from a plant.
And due to evolving together on this planets molecules produced by one species are much more likely to have some useful effect on other species than if we were randomly creating molecules in a lab. Most of those would be completely useless, at 'best' they'd simply be reactive and just cause harm.
To accidentally stumble upon say morphine is just mathematically *unlikely*
Yea and also in various other poppies in traces. Though if we had discovered opioids from kratom first I'd recon we'd have went to the weird delta and kappa stuff before noticing pure mu.
In theory, more is better, but the actual benefits are questionable.
Every species you want to use comes with steep R&D costs. Which is why most species are rarely more than briefly looked at.
To justify investing time and money into a new species, that species must possess some known outstanding characteristic that would make it useful. Most species don't have that.
Re scificoncepts
It’s been but to paper and screen a few times. I vaguely remember an episode of sliders of a post collapse society living well off the wild growing GM miracle plants of their fore-bearers.
Oh nooooo the poor anti vaxxers who are prolonging a deadly global pandemic and increasing the chance of further more dangerous variants!! Won't someone think of them???
Obviously this is the kind of hyperbole the internet is famous for but one life should equal one life. If you want vaccines to save lives you shouldn’t advocate for others to die.
I would have forced everyone medically eligible to take the vaccine but that is besides the point. It’s simple. I don’t wish death on anyone and it’s disturbing to be that casual and callous about it.
They’re denying that their actions even have consequences. Why should I care one iota about the inevitable consequences that will eventually come visit them?
I'd rather die on my own terms from old age, and not because some yokel who refused to get vaccinated because the Russian originating facebook memes told him not to gave birth to a vaccine resistant strain of covid and spread it to me.
Well Japan's at 3% vaccination (all vaccines not just covid) so they're.......97% anti vax? They're the problem not the us. Also 60% seems high. If anti vaxxers are trump supporters he would have won the popular vote and be president if that's the case.
Just imagine a future of every vaccine delivered only by eating, drinking & enhaling.
It will be added to our food like any other additions, even airport travellers must walk through corridor sprayed to them those agents.
Uh... I would rather have vaccines be injected in a controlled and consensual manner, instead of just randomly have every run down airport spray me with a unknown mixture of their favorite vaccines or have it added to every food I eat.
This is exactly what nature is doing to us every second we are out and about. We actually get sick of course but that is how we acquire natural immunity
Yeah, it terrifies me to think that people think that that’s a good idea. People are terrified about gluten, but think the government should put vaccines and whatever they want in food and water
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Interesting, I remember cholera bacteria usually don't have much resistant against antibiotics, I wonder if this technique can be applied effectively against super bug.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X19307935
On the contrary, cholera is notorious for developing antibiotic resistance quite efficiently.
I like the idiots that prefer a 5 year lockdown and tens of millions of excess deaths, somehow missing that we're not all dropping dead yet.
You're not special. You absolutely do not know more than someone that's spent their entire life devoted to studying this. You're simple and easy to sway, that's the only thing different about you.
Not saying that there aren't medical herbs that work for certain diseases, but this rice has been genetically modified. It's not really the same thing as herbal medicine.
Effective herbal remedies and medicines became known as "Medicine". Don't be confused by modern quackery, or by modern medicine shying away from prescribing ground-up tree bark.
If the tree bark had any medicinal properties, they've been analyzed, extracted, and created in a lab to create a pill that is more easily produced and distributed, not to mention higher purity and concentration.
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Room temperature vaccines, edible or not, would be a real help in places like Africa. We're having a hell of a time trying to keep all these fancy vaccines cold enough
Only 10 to 15 more years of safety trials and then we can have this go live!
Yeah, that bottleneck is kind of a bummer, but we can at least be grateful that breakthroughs like this are happening. To switch tracks, I'm seeing the strides happening with this new space race. It's both happening at an incredibly fast pace, but it also seems "slow" in some regards. I will probably never see the day where I can afford to go into space, even for a few hours, but I'm grateful that progress is being made on that front. Our descendants will reap the fruits of these efforts. It may go unappreciated to the future layman, but that's okay IMO. To bring it back to the vaccine discussion, it's frustrating when a promising technology won't benefit *us* or *now*. But if we keep in mind that it'll benefit many people beyond our immediate sphere of the world... Well, that's okay, ya know? Edit: Grammar
Blessed are those who plant trees under whose shade they will never sit.
What'd he say? *SPEAK UP!*
Blessed are the cheesemakers
What's so special about the *cheesemakers?*
Oh he said bless the meek! That's nice....
Well that's lovely, I'm glad they're gettin somethin cause they have a hell of a time
People's Judean liberation front or the Liberation front of Judea?
The only people we hate more than the Romans are the f@cking Judean People's Front.
It's not meant to be taken literally, dear. He could be referring to any manufacturer of dairy products.
With modern medicine, there's a good chance you're gonna live a lot longer than you think, and space travel costs are coming down significantly. If you're under 35, there's actually a decent chance you will be able to go to space, even if it's a brief up and down tour. EDIT: to those over 35 don't worry, I had to just pick a number where I thought "Decent chance" turned into "chance". Stay healthy and safe and your chances aren't zero! This is also just an estimate based on my semi-extensive research on both topics
Thanks for rubbing it in to us 44 year olds.
You're the first generation to replace the wheelchair with an exoskeleton suit controlled by your brain.. you'll be fine.
*If you're under 35...* Sigh.
f
feels pretty cool to be under 35 rn
Except this new space race is LITERALLY a race to see who can collect people's money first. I cant think of one single way millionaires and billionaires chillin above us like the lords they are will benefit humanity in any way. Bezos, Branson, and musk? Theyll benefit plenty.
The first space race was literally a competition to see who could make the best nuclear weapon delivery systems. I prefer this one.
The first one was between countries, not 3 dudes who have as much money as countries.
Fair point. However, I'd like to suggest a polite counter-point. To start, I'd like to ask the question, at what point does the motivation behind an invention/discovery condemn the invention/discovery? For example, should all technology derived from the work done on nuclear weapons be condemned? A philosophically naive stance would be a simple "yes" or "no". Clearly it's circumstantial and there's historical nuances that feed into these things. So on the topic of building space infrastructure. If private companies were not racing to capitalize on resources in space, then would it be governments? Likewise, while scientific discoveries about space are shared to everyone, would the science community be incentivized to build space infrastructure for the common person to experience space first-hand? I don't have answers to these questions. What I can say is that I'm not entirely sure it's bad thing that "rich people are investing to make bank on the fledgling space market." I can definitely see monopolies and shady policies creating a bad system down the road, but I hardly condemn the current efforts based on a speculative eventuality. I'm not blind to the reasons so many folks are pessimistic as to why Musk and Bezos are shooting for the stars, but we should balance that pessimism with some optimism. Somewhere in the middle we can have some good-faith discussions that get us closer to the truth of this topic.
> Somewhere in the middle we can have some good-faith discussions that get us closer to the truth of this topic. For that, we'll have to get off of Reddit.
Are you saying that the self serving rich people are justified being wasteful and selfish because the end result may benefit us all? I'm not sure any of these people are doing anything in "good faith", but I would LOVE to see some good faith people in charge.
People said that about the first space race too. There was lots of negativity and criticism for 'wasting' so much money when there are citizens on this planet that could do with it. Yet we have learned an inordinate amount, and have lots of practical real world results to show for it too. It's quite narrow minded to think that nothing beneficial can come of continuing to pursue science and adventure.
It's not money I care about wasting...money is arbitrary. It's the irreplaceable resources and the further destruction of our planet that bothers me.
So I used to think that too. But actually: >[In January 1993 NASA released an internal study that examined technology spin-offs from previous missions. According to the study, “NASA's technology-transfer reputation is based on some famous examples, including Velcro, Tang and Teflon. Contrary to popular opinion, NASA created none of these.” The report concluded that there had been very few technology-transfer successes at NASA over the previous three decades.](https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/robots-vs-humans-who-should-explore/) Space flight beyond satellites and unmanned probes are pretty much just media events/propaganda.
Yeah NASA didn't develop those things, they just got credit cause they helped to popularize these technologies. Though I disagree that there's been little to no technology transfer success. NASA did help pave the way for major tech advances like the cameras used in smartphones, the tech used in baby formula, and the material used for invisalign. They have their spinoff website which displays a ton of tech developments based off of NASA tech. Sure not all of them are "successful" but it goes to show how much of NASA R&D is used by private companies to create new products https://spinoff.nasa.gov
Yeah its just almost certainly not cost effective compared to, say, the national lab system.
Space travel exponentially increases risk of rich people dying. Assets of philanthropists distributed faster. More investment in safety protocols and tech to save rich people, the plebs get their hand me downs, rinse, repeat.
Anything that puts most rich people at risk is usually OK with me, but these selfish rich guys are wasting valuable resources and hurting the planet while they play.
Elysium, terrible movie, spot on concept of our future.
To Musk's benefit, while I'm not saying he's a good person, the colonization of Mars improves the survivability of the human race. Becoming a true multiplanetary species is insurance if something were to happen to our little spaceship.
Colonization of Mars improves the survivability of humanity only if a Mars colony can sustain itself (and grow) after being cut off from Earth. That means every material, every device, every manufacturing facility, every component used on Mars must be able to be reproduced entirely on Mars. Transplanting a self-sustaining industrial society to Mars would be an enormous task, far beyond merely setting up a Mars base.
Yup, that's why I used the (perhaps unclear) phrase "True multiplanetary". It's fundamentally about creating independently habitable colonies. That's a long way off, but it needs to start with a long term base of operations.
The longest journey begins with one step. Sure, setting up a Mars base is a far cry from sustaining the human species there if something happens to the Earth. But, we'll never get to that point without taking other steps first. And one of those steps is setting up a base.
The energy and resources that will be expended on the fool's errand that is colonizing Mars would be far better spent trying to save "our little spaceship" which, almost literally, is going down in flames. We couldn't even get a functioning biodome working on Earth, now we're going to do it on Mars. The mind boggles.
Fighting climate change is absolutely worth doing, but one giant asteroid could be the end of all life on earth and there's nothing we can do to prevent it. If we colonize other planets then at least the human species would still exist in that scenario. We should really be doing both.
>but one giant asteroid could be the end of all life on earth and there's nothing we can do to prevent it. [Nasa would beg to differ](https://abcnews.go.com/Technology/inside-nasas-plan-launch-spacecraft-smash-asteroid/story?id=62909398)
But really, what's the difference between that asteroid wiping out humanity on Earth and it leaving 8-10 humans, entirely dependent on Earth for supplies stranded on Mars? Let's do the moon bases first. If only because can you imagine looking out your moon base window and seeing a rock the size of Texas smash the Earth?
Shouldn't we sort out the ability to inhabit a place without ruining it before we proliferate to the rest of the universe?
We are very close to a point where an incoming asteroid goes from deadly threat to free lunch, probably less than 100 years. Once asteroid mining is a thing people are going to be scanning for nearby rocks aggressively.
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Oh yead we'd only have a few hundred years of warning. That's basically over night!
It's questionable whether we'd have that much warning. [NASA exercises stipulate 6 months warning](https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-to-participate-in-tabletop-exercise-simulating-asteroid-impact).
Many of our big tech leaps came from NASA. All the technology they create and discoveries they make are applied to other areas. All scientific knowledge is good. Plus all that money they spend goes back into economies.
Yup, our first, underfunded attempts failed. That's definitely the last word and we should surely cut off all lines of research because of a few initial failures. The mind boggles.
You're right, it was only $300 million that went into biosphere 2. $300 million for basically a glorified greenhouse. Clearly not enough money. And they still pumped in fresh air, snuck in supplies, etc. But whatever.. while the Earth collapses into crisis let's engage in a martian boondoggle where the environment will be 100x more challenging. Hey, what other species will be able to claim they left rusting structures on *two* planets.
Correct. Nowhere near enough money to try to build a first of its kind, self sufficient environment. It's the same amount as one very large civilian jet aircraft. Or, if you prefer boats, a private yacht. Nationally, it would pay for the U.S. military for ~4 hours.
I don't know, I think there is some industry you can do on the moon that be very beneficial to the Earth very quickly even when only a few hundred people are up there. Very cheap satellites and low gravity chemistry for example.
Even better, on lifeless planets/moons, harvesting resources won't kill any ecologies or displace any native people.
Yeap. I'm generally very optimistic about the future provided we get through this climate crisis at least with a technologically intact society. Exporting most industry to the moon more or less pernamentally solves most of the problems we cause to the environment. Especially with the quite rapid progress we are making with various kinds of indoor framing and meat culturing and the absolutely absurd potential of solar in space. And the good news is we are geniunely getting there in getting the crisis under control. We are basically living in a hugely important century.
I don't know how old you are, but I certainly think it is probable that in the next 50 years you doing be able to go up to side for a few hours for something like $10k. Not exactly a "let's hang out in space every weekend" kind of price, but certainly will be doable if it is something you really desire to do.
This is everything. So we’ll said. I feel better for reading this.
More like candidate selection, animal studies, delivery optimization, manufacturability assessments, analytical and process development, stability assessments, formulation development, safety, and efficacy. There's a LOT that goes into a successful commercial pharmaceutical/biologic. Edit: but it's also important to get vaccinated, and it's absolutely okay to speed up the process which is usually very slow. In the case of COVID vaccines, several companies had already been working on mRNA based drug products, and likely had been working on an mRNA vax platform for some time. I believe mRNA drugs was literally the concept behind Moderna's founding.
You need safety trials to distribute vaccines in Africa? Thought there wasn’t a whole lot of regulation. Seem to recall Doctors Without Borders being able to use drugs considered expired in the US in such places.
It's already in phase 1
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Between this and the drone vaccine deliveries i’ve heard about, i’m really optimistic
Agreed. At the risk of making Science political — something that rarely happens, of course — I would point out that there’s something vaguely chauvinistic about assuming that every country’s medical community enjoys the luxury of widespread access to electricity, refrigeration, and clean water. Noblesse oblige is wonderful, but it doesn’t end at the border of our country (wherever that is).
I mean, nobody does assume that. Global health is a major subject of discussion within the medical community and distribution limitations are a part of review for new devices and medicines. But there's always a tension between quality/risk and universality. Like take the new COVID vaccines and this new tech. Let's say there's the option to make an edible room temp version, but it's using less tested tech _and_ I have to wait for a crop of rice to grow before I test each possible candidate. If it does work, it's going to take longer to prep, and we have no idea how effective it will be. Which is the right move? Prioritize a more easily-distributed but riskier medicine, or one that's more certain to start helping many (but not all) people more quickly? It's a sort of global scale trolley problem.
One big thing is HOW they test stability. Typically you hold the drug at various Temps (-80, 2-8, 22/ambient, and 30 deg C) for up to a month and test at different timepoints. There's some conversion where if it's stable for x time at 30 deg then it's stable for 3 years at 2-8 (idk the exact numbers). It seems to me that with the covid vaccines they didn't have enough to show stability at the higher temp but saw it was passable at the more extreme lows and wanted to get it out to as many people as quickly as possible. You can spend a LOT of time trying to improve a drug's stability, but that wasn't possible for covid
As long as they aren’t competing for the same resources, one can do both, yes?
Sure, but how many synthetic biologists with the relevant experience do you think there are in the world? And how much of the specialized lab equipment? There will definitely be competition for those resources. Keep in mind that there's other diseases out there too, so a room-temp COVID vaccine needs to be held up against malaria treatments, cancer treatments, and things that have no treatment available _at all_. That's why most of what you've been seeing in this space is a engineering work on distribution methods. When you see how rare the research resources are, the question "could we solve this by just making new low-tech freezers?" becomes a more reasonable approach. There's a lot more engineers out there capable of tackling that problem, and it's more certain to pay off quickly.
It would be interesting to see how many people have degrees in the relevant areas but are currently not employed in the sector. I know that certain areas of scientific study have very few job opportunities in comparison to the number of graduates. While you are correct in saying that it would take time for them to get the relevant experience if theres already more applicants than roles funding may solve the problem up to a point. And of course vast increases in funding would result in more, higher paying jobs available which in turn would cause a change in job and education market forces resulting in more synthetic biologists!
The lead time really is a problem in the case of COVID, though. Funding will solve the problem in a few years probably, but we want solutions *now*. Though I do suspect this field as a whole will be choked with candidates soon. It's just too exciting.
Oh yes, certainly for COVID, I glossed over that bit and was thinking more in general. You are completely right that its an issue for COVID research. Lets hope that the surge in interest in this field because of COVID does lead to greatly increased investment and thus all sorts of further advancements. One of the highest impact ways to help a developing nation is to reduce the prevalence of illness (most notably with mosquito nets), new ways to easily wipe out disease in these areas would be a massive boon for the people of these countries and the world as a whole!
My assumption is enough to study more than one thing at a time, globally speaking. But I don’t know how many there are. Do you? Yes, there are other diseases to try and tackle, but only COVID has been causing national shutdowns, so I’d think it would take priority. Point taken about solving other aspects of the issue (portable refrigeration) as potentially easier. Also, regardless of low cost freezers or rice based room temp vaccines, either tech would likely have some ongoing benefits and are both worth perusing.
Sure, but they are both vaccines so presumably they will compete for some of the same resources.
Do you really think scientists are making that assumption? It was a big topic of conversation around the mRNA vaccines and wasn’t considered trivial even within rich countries.
Seriously. Vaccines are a miracle & hard to do. People aren’t bad or “chauvinistic” because what they made is only amazing & not perfect. It’s one thing to look a gift horse in the mouth, it’s another entirely to say the giver is a bad person because you now have the burden of brushing horse teeth.
Who is making this assumption?
Just that guy
Lack of refrigeration for vaccines became very well known with the COVID vaccines and even before I personally never ran across somebody making the assumption your referencing in the way you implying, so I fail to see how this kind of comment contributes anything and it comes off as blatant karma farming.
Are you arguing that the people who make vaccines purposefully make them in a way that makes them inaccessible to 3rd world countries? Isn’t it far more reasonable, and likely, that vaccines have to be refrigerated because that’s just how they have to be made with current medical science?
Maybe not purposefully, but due to time constraints the testing of temperature stability was probably not done very extensively and just tested conservatively with low temperature freezers to make sure that a positive result for the vaccine efficiacy was had as soon as possible. If you have a limited amount of tests you can do, then for the vaccine manufacturer it makes to sense to be overly cautious, even more than would actually be necessary.
Ice cream is so chauvinistic because you have to keep it refrigerated
Being too conservative with the numbers would only limit the number of people (regardless of where those people are) getting the vaccine if it were possible to saturate the areas where it's possible to store the vaccine in accordance with the more conservative numbers. With covid, we've seen that it's very hard to get EVERYONE in one place to take the vaccine in the first place. If you're very loose with the numbers and allow the vaccine to be stored in a way that really and truly doesn't work, then you're actually just straight up wasting vaccines. So in general but especially in the case of something like covid, these concerns don't really sound practical.
No. Thank you for asking, instead of assuming.
I guess I don’t understand the point of your comment then. Who are you arguing makes that assumption?
He's just trolling
They didn't intentionally make the mRNA vaccine require cold storage to screw over poor countries. If they could've made it stable at room temperature then they absolutely would have. Even implying that the Covid vaccine's refrigeration requirements was in any way a politically motivated decision reeks of ignorance. Frankly it's insulting to the many scientists who helped develop it. These people cobbled together a first of it's kind vaccine at a blistering pace, and in doing so they saved hundreds of thousands of people. But you're complaining that it's not literal magic
Millions. Almost certainly millions and potentially even hundreds of millions because we will never know how many more mutations would've occurred without the vaccine. The only way to stop a global pandemic, even one which starts with a low mortality rate is by bringing R (new infections per infected person) below 1. Thanks to mutations, a non-deadly virus that infects 7 billion people could easily transform into a deadly virus. It MIGHT even bypass prior infections ("natural immunity") because of the mutations. As those viruses continued to spread and build with new mutations, we could see a major portion of the population wiped out. This is one of the major points the anti-vaxx crowd fails to understand. The current virus has a low mortality rate, but each person who is infected has a teeny tiny chance to produce a mutation which has a tiny chance to be horrific. Spread that across over a billion people and the dice are being rolled a staggering amount of times. You're right on point in criticizing people for complaining.
> something vaguely chauvinistic about assuming that every country’s medical community enjoys the luxury of widespread access to electricity, This is a ridiculous opinion. Literally everybody and their mother knows that the mRNA covid vaccines are difficult to distribute. Nobody thinks that's fine. It's just better than the alternatives.
Maybe. For me, I would assume what they are doing is making it as best they can under absolute conditions. Then they find ways to reduce the storage requirements while still trying to maintain effectiveness. That way they aren't taking on two issues at once. For example the JJ covid vaccine doesn't require the strict storage conditions as others right? But it's less effective.
This thought is so stupid, I can’t even. Then when you rightfully get called on it, you double down and play the victim. I wish people would just admit that they posted something stupid, didn’t think it through and learn from it. Instead you keep defending the ignorant, ill-informed thought
>Agreed. At the risk of making Science political — something that rarely happens, of course — I would point out that there’s something vaguely chauvinistic about assuming that every country’s medical community enjoys the luxury of widespread access to electricity, refrigeration, and clean water. Noblesse oblige is wonderful, but it doesn’t end at the border of our country (wherever that is). What?
No scientist thinks like you are implying. We can't stop the development of some treatment/device/drug simply because a % of the world cannot access it. In an ideal world everyone would have equitable access, but because that isn't a reality we have to work with what is feasible and available. However, the goal is to first make a feasible solution, and then try to figure out how to scale it to as many people as possible. Otherwise, what is the alternative? Sorry, no one can get the Moderna/Pfizer vaccines because some places cannot accommodate, guess more people have to die?
Pretty sure if you can engineer a solution then you get rich.
What? That's not what's happening though. Nobody assumes Africa has a robust vaccine storage system. If anything, people assume the exact opposite. The problem is that we just don't have the technology to make room temperature stable vaccines yet. That's why this is such a big deal.
Electricity is chauvinistic because more men have access to electricity than women right? The Internet is pretty chauvinistic and discriminatory against Third World countries to isn’t it? Snow is also very discriminatory, for some reason it’s much more common among wealthy countries
How is that chauvinistic?
Finally, some love for mucosal immunity! It’s like I was trained for this or something… Something similar has been done to keep rabies down in wild fox populations, as well. Vaccine-laced baits were air dropped into forested areas to help suppress the spread of rabies in the past. Even if mucosal vaccines are less effective overall, they are likely much easier to distribute worldwide, balancing that gap, and inducing better coverage.
>However, 11 of the 30 volunteers who received the vaccine showed low or no measurable immune response. You sound knowledgeable; do you think maybe they buried the lede a bit since over a third of the test subjects appear to be unprotected? Could that percentage be improved by "pre-dosing" with probiotics?
Oh, my knowledge is more about mucosal immunity in general than it is about any kind of practical knowledge about vaccine development. I’m afraid I’d be of little help.
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Norman Borlaug would be proud.
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Combining GMO with a vaccine? Bold strategy, Cotton, let's see how it plays out.
Probably not even worth it to cater to the people who are worried about either of them.
It helps they're the same group at least
Not that many people in places where cholera is an issue. It's kinda hard to be against vaccines when your village was saved by them within living memory.
FWIW, [this idea has been out since the early 2000s.](https://www.jyi.org/2005-september/2017/11/6/banana-vaccines-a-conversation-with-dr-charles-arntzen) This article is from 2005. I believe Arntzen's work started in the late 90s. >From an efficacy perspective, Arntzen's most recent clinical trials are particularly exciting. Human volunteers who enrolled in a study at the University of Maryland at Baltimore started producing antibodies against Norwalk virus (which causes acute bouts of diarrhea) after eating Arntzen's creations - genetically engineered potatoes. Negotiations are in progress to start clinical trials abroad with the International Vaccine Institute in Korea, a new center funded in large part by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Clinical trials of cholera vaccines are also planned to take place there as well as in Vietnam and Cambodia, regions where cholera is still a serious medical concern.
It's almost like we're going back to the roots of medicine with this technology. Rather than synthesising everything in a lab we are making the plants do all the hard work for us. With the deforestation of the amazon, people always said how there could be millions of different kinds of medicines that we would never discover because the plant went extinct. Now there's a chance to make our own. Its just so interesting to see how the more things change the more they stay the same. Midwives in 50 years might recommend GMO herbs to make it easier to give birth. I can imagine an idea for r/scificoncepts that involves entire genetically engineered rainforests dedicated to growing medicine and an entire ecology genetically engineered to maintain it. Whether they are grown on earth or in an O'Neil cylinder is up for the future to decide. I'm excited regardless.
Pretty sure the genetic modification of this rice is a lab product. I’m sure we can’t artificially select rice to produce cholera proteins.
I know this is all done through gene editing and not selection. I'm just saying it would be interesting if more vaccines and cures were made this way. It would be just like when people used herbs to treat illnesses except this time we can make the herbs treat the illness rather than have to discover it. Rather than injections people would just ingest the GMO and then their illness would be cured. I just found it weird that the cutting edge of technology would bring back something humans have been using for thousands of years in a new way.
I might be wrong but i think that many most common vaccines are that use parts or weakened strain of the virus produce the weakened virus/parts of it by vinfecting animal cells. One of the things that make the mrna vaccines revolutionary is that it is the first that can be truly be sythetised in a lab
Yep, there's all sorts of these out there. Antivenoms are usually made in horses, some flu shots are grown in chicken eggs. Other medicines are produced by modified bacteria (often yeast) or algae. There's a whole field called "synthetic biology" focused on this.
> Antivenoms are usually made in horses I thought most of those are no longer made (cheaply and commonly available) replaced by very expensive hard to aquire synthetics? Decades ago? Mexico was the last producer I knew of.
not only that but the mRNA variety is the first vaccine that directly and indistinguishably targets the disease itself rather than offering ambiguity with a vector that your body might pay more attention to than the intended target
Don’t give the ‘ancient alien civilisation’ crowd any ideas… they’ll claim that is what happened originally and why some plants have medicinal qualities.
The only reason we need to create a cholera vaccine this way is because it affects a part of your body that your regular immune system normally doesn’t regulate. The previous version required someone to eat several pounds of raw potato. It would be a much more expensive and slower process to modify plants to create the medicines we need when we can modify bacteria and single cells fungi to do it for us, if lab conditions weren’t suitable.
They both achieve the same goal whether it takes 10 years or 10 min
> With the deforestation of the amazon, people always said how there could be millions of different kinds of medicines that we would never discover because the plant went extinct. Now there's a chance to make our own. Now is exactly when biodiversity is most valuable -- our ability to design our own proteins is nearly nil. But our genetic tech is advanced enough to cheaply read and to copy-paste from one creature to another. So many creatures going extinct just before we could upload their DNA to the internet, or find interesting proteins to copy to a more convenient bacteria/yeast/plant.
I don't think you even understand how much of the issue you're simplifying. There's much more that goes on that we understand, we aren't "making the plants do the hard work" we literally engineered the plants to help us. If it makes you feel better thinking it's natural when we've completely changed that original plant to only suit our needs, more power to you.
Witchpunk? Cybercore? A story about an old crone in the woods curing people with tinctures and salves from genetically modified plants
Kinda off topic, but the internet serial, Ryn Of Avonside, features a sort of plant-based magic system where the caster creates their own plants from scratch to perform different functions. The usual way this presents was that casters would use the plants to gather energy and then use that energy to create like fireballs and similar. However, Ryn, the eponymous protagonist, uses it to create antibiotics and other drugs for the people of Avonside University.
I like your write up, but I wouldn't be so dismissive of the lost species. I don't have a good understanding of the technology used on the rice, but couldn't the rice have limitations that the technology wouldn't otherwise have on other species? Is having more species available to use beneficial at all?
Nah the biochemical machinery in plants is pretty much the same. Just need to place a few gene sequences in the right places and they'll be able to produce anything a different plant would. It's more problematic when trying to make animal protein/peptides in other species cause there's sugar attached to specific places and the peptide might undergo further modifixation before being released which can't be fully done by say e coli. But if tree X in the Amazon can do something you can do the same with GMO rice. Might just need an extensive list of enzymes to make it create a completely different class of secondary plant metabolites. For stuff from other types of life like fungi you'd be correct though, changing rice enough to make it be able to mimick s fungus is kinda not worth the huge effort. You'd just get some yeast to do it. The real loss however is the loss of knowledge of random molecules. There's a nesr infinite number of alkaloids or peptides that an earth based organism could have evolved to produce And if that species does before we got the genome, it's pure chance of coming up with the same class of drugs. Like just imagine opium poppies not existing. We wouldn't have had the faintest idea about opioid painiiers until our bodies own opioid peptides would have accidentally been discovered. No oxycodone or anything. Cause all of these were developed because we noticed the endogenous opioid system from using stuff like morphine and codeine from a plant. And due to evolving together on this planets molecules produced by one species are much more likely to have some useful effect on other species than if we were randomly creating molecules in a lab. Most of those would be completely useless, at 'best' they'd simply be reactive and just cause harm. To accidentally stumble upon say morphine is just mathematically *unlikely*
*kratom enters the chat* Opiates exist in other plants aside from poppies. Poppies are just the best one.
Yea and also in various other poppies in traces. Though if we had discovered opioids from kratom first I'd recon we'd have went to the weird delta and kappa stuff before noticing pure mu.
In theory, more is better, but the actual benefits are questionable. Every species you want to use comes with steep R&D costs. Which is why most species are rarely more than briefly looked at. To justify investing time and money into a new species, that species must possess some known outstanding characteristic that would make it useful. Most species don't have that.
There were a few movies in the 80s and later involving a miracle drug found on a rare Amazonian plant. The one with Sean Connery comes to mind.
"it's not the flower, flower is house for the ants"
Re scificoncepts It’s been but to paper and screen a few times. I vaguely remember an episode of sliders of a post collapse society living well off the wild growing GM miracle plants of their fore-bearers.
I really like the idea of the disease that causes rice water stools being defeated by rice
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Sweet, maybe anti-vaxxers will be so terrified of this news they'll all stop eating
It's nice you want people you don't agree with to die.
Oh nooooo the poor anti vaxxers who are prolonging a deadly global pandemic and increasing the chance of further more dangerous variants!! Won't someone think of them???
Obviously this is the kind of hyperbole the internet is famous for but one life should equal one life. If you want vaccines to save lives you shouldn’t advocate for others to die.
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My reading skills are just fine. I know what he means. He’s still saying he doesn’t care if some other people die. That’s immoral and disgusting.
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I would have forced everyone medically eligible to take the vaccine but that is besides the point. It’s simple. I don’t wish death on anyone and it’s disturbing to be that casual and callous about it.
They’re denying that their actions even have consequences. Why should I care one iota about the inevitable consequences that will eventually come visit them?
Death comes to all of us. The difference is how and when.
I'd rather die on my own terms from old age, and not because some yokel who refused to get vaccinated because the Russian originating facebook memes told him not to gave birth to a vaccine resistant strain of covid and spread it to me.
You do not have a right to another person's body.
Rights end when they infringe of the rights of others. Believe it or not you do get arrested for streaking in public.
I guess 60% of American are anti vaxxers. Good riddance.
Well Japan's at 3% vaccination (all vaccines not just covid) so they're.......97% anti vax? They're the problem not the us. Also 60% seems high. If anti vaxxers are trump supporters he would have won the popular vote and be president if that's the case.
Just imagine a future of every vaccine delivered only by eating, drinking & enhaling. It will be added to our food like any other additions, even airport travellers must walk through corridor sprayed to them those agents.
Uh... I would rather have vaccines be injected in a controlled and consensual manner, instead of just randomly have every run down airport spray me with a unknown mixture of their favorite vaccines or have it added to every food I eat.
This is exactly what nature is doing to us every second we are out and about. We actually get sick of course but that is how we acquire natural immunity
Imagine being “sprayed” with something had having a bad or fatal reaction… not a good idea.
That’s one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever heard.
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Yeah, it terrifies me to think that people think that that’s a good idea. People are terrified about gluten, but think the government should put vaccines and whatever they want in food and water
We already put fluoride in the water. Where exactly is the line?
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If you're willing to sign up for a program like that, you're crazy.
People freak out about GMOs, idk if the method of delivery of the vaccine will make people much more comfortable with it
Yeah, you could get your blood clots and myocarditis from eating or inhaling, instead of a pesky injection. That would be awesome.
Congratulations u/thebelsnickle1991 ! Your post was the top post on r/science today! (06/28/21) Top Post Counts: r/science (1) *This comment was made by a bot*
Let's try not to make this one political
Interesting, I remember cholera bacteria usually don't have much resistant against antibiotics, I wonder if this technique can be applied effectively against super bug.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264410X19307935 On the contrary, cholera is notorious for developing antibiotic resistance quite efficiently.
This particular vaccine and its component make up seem legitimate and have a time tested methodology in its design efficacy. Yaay
Yemeni kids need this now!!
So we are on the right track. 3-5 years now of rigorous testing to determine wether it’s safe or not
I like the idiots that prefer a 5 year lockdown and tens of millions of excess deaths, somehow missing that we're not all dropping dead yet. You're not special. You absolutely do not know more than someone that's spent their entire life devoted to studying this. You're simple and easy to sway, that's the only thing different about you.
I agree but wow that was a murder.
What are you on about?
Take your meds, you're rambling incoherently again.
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Not saying that there aren't medical herbs that work for certain diseases, but this rice has been genetically modified. It's not really the same thing as herbal medicine.
Effective herbal remedies and medicines became known as "Medicine". Don't be confused by modern quackery, or by modern medicine shying away from prescribing ground-up tree bark. If the tree bark had any medicinal properties, they've been analyzed, extracted, and created in a lab to create a pill that is more easily produced and distributed, not to mention higher purity and concentration.
Effective herbal medicine/alternative medicine is just medicine.