f13.net

Gene therapy uses virus to Pwn Leukemia in to remission. (http://www.the-scientist.com/?articles.view/articleNo/34857/title/Immune-System-Kills-Cancer/)

Fucking. Awesome.  I can only hope it's viable by the time I get cancer.  I've already decided I'd rather die than go through what my dad did for only a few extra years and the gift of bankruptcy to my surviving family.

This seems awfully similar to the plot of a movie I once saw.  Schild was very excited about it......

Between stuff like that and the advances in tissue engineering (there's a guy out there with a bladder grown from his own cells, he's had it like five years now), I'm a lot more happy about old age than I was.

Now if they can make tiny viruses that eat the crap clogging up people's arteries and shore up vein and artery walls, we're really talking...

Holy moly. Wrong section, I shan't shit this one up. Goody for scientists, they're kickin names and takin ass.

Pretty brutal, in that it functionally convinces your immune system to kill itself... but lymphoblasts shouldn't normally be in the bloodstream, so any chance they won't reinvade the marrow after a transplant is a good one. Certainly no more brutal than chemotherapy or radiation, which just kill your immune system outright.

T-cells deal with most cancers before they start, and it's only tenacious ones that cause trouble so this is a promising natural possibility. Here's hoping the results are repeatable, remission is rare, and that there's possibilities for similar therapies outside this narrow diagnosis.

I really think we're only going to go beyond incremental therapeutic progress when we can do some pretty fundamental medical nanoengineering or genetic therapy. You can kill cancers in people where the cancer is an idiosyncratic, one-off event but it's also very very clear now from the long-series epidemiology that some people are genetically programmed to produce cancers no matter how often they're examined or how aggressively they're treated.

We should stop focusing on fighting cancer and viruses and start focusing on growing entire new bodies on the back of mice or something, then simply transfer people's consciousness to those new bodies and ditch the old, sick ones. How hard can it be? :P

Technically, if we solve the problem of bridging nerves (which tissue engineers are getting closer to solving) we should be able to plop someone's head onto another's body and voila.  It was done in monkeys years ago, just couldn't solve the nervous issue.
We already have prospective gene therapies that'd take care of the rejection problems.  (having a body reject a head would be very bad)

That's why we tell science just the tip, just to see how it feels.

Was there a requirement to register our presence in a sexual way ?

The problem there is the mind fills-up.  We have limited storage space, even if it's yottas of yottabytes.  We need cybernetic memory implants as well.

I have no idea why I'm all for the idea of millions or trillions of tiny machines -- all of which probably will run on Windows Nano 2028 and be absolutely hackable -- running around my body fixing stuff and changing stuff, but the idea of cutting off my head and slapping it on a new body horrifies me.

And not just for the Franken-scar.

I'm thinking something more like a transfer of the consciousness or the 'soul' from one bio-mechanical vessel to another once the first breaks down.

If you can do that, why not go entirely virtual at that point?  Live inside a computer in an environment you make for yourself and get used to thinking thousands of times faster than the meatbags around you.  :awesome_for_real:

That would be a great idea for a movie.  :why_so_serious:

Heh, I never said it was an original idea.  I just meant that once you have the technology 01101010 describes you must have the tech to go further as well.

Actually, the first time I read about the going virtual idea idea was in Frederik Pohl's Gateway series back in the '80s.

First time I read it was in The Winter Market by Gibson, later revisited with the character Mona Lisa in Mona Lisa Overdrive.

The narrator in Gibson's short story deals with most of my weirdness about the idea.

Technically we may already live in a universe like this.   :oh_i_see:

And most likely built by the lowest bidder.

And that's the way all intelligently iterative "virtual" systems would work, ironically.  "God" would not program in the most expensive routes to task resolution.

The problem with all of these ideas is that the 'transferred' intelligence is actually just a copy; the original body is effectively committing suicide.

I always had that theory about Star Trek transporters.  Yeah, it makes a perfect copy of you but it also disintegrates the actual you.

To make matters worse, since the copy is perfect, it thinks everything worked fine.  "Go ahead!  Works great!"

That's why they still use it, no one realizes that they're stepping into a disintegration chamber!

There was a book -- um, guy that wrote Hyperion -- where a sort of fallen civilization travelled around by old transport tech. Called "faxing". Sadly, they did NOT know what a fax machine was.

As for transporters, that's probably a copy (although if you're actually turned into energy, that energy beamed down and reassembled, are you really? And after the first time it happens, do you really care?). Conciousness transfer or uploading? Depends, I'd guess.

Nobody really has a grasp on consciousness (other than to say a lot of what we think we decide consciously we don't), and some of the processes are quantum level. It might be an actual 'transfer', it might be a copy. Obviously one is death and a copied resurrection, one isn't. (Then there's the multi-universe concept and quantum immortality, which says it doesn't matter. Somewhere out there, somehow, there's a version of you that doesn't ever die. Ever. Hurt, injured, crippled -- but awake, alive, conscious and never quite dying. Which again, makes transporters not really matter. You'd perceive a uniform stream of consciousness...)

I'm pretty fond of the implications of being able to copy yourself. What happens when you differ enough you can't merge? When a me-copy decides it is it's own person?

I've always wondered about the implications of a very slow copy job on your mind.  What if there were nanos that would replace neurons in your brain with much longer lived artificial cells as the live neurons died?

You wouldn't notice any change but in a few years you'd be wandering around with an artificial brain that could easily be transferred into a clone body when your original wears out.

To me, that wouldn't feel like dying even though it's no more the original "me" than a quick upload to a computer would be.

To a sufficiently strict value of continuity, you die every time you become fully unconcious.  Don't think about it too hard, you won't be able to sleep.

I prefer soft transcendance to uploading, transfer more and more of the storage and processing out of your wetware over years, until the lack of the massively parallel goo just means certain kinds of thinking slow down.

--Dave

There was an Outer Limits episode about this. A woman goes into a transporter to travel to a distant world, then it seems to not have worked so she steps out of it. It turns out she actually did transport to the other world, her original body was supposed to be destroyed and the malfunction was that it was not. Then the creature that invented/runs the transporters demands that she be killed.

Also the creature was a dinosaur.

There was a book called Waystation (I think it was by Clifford Simak?) with a similar premise -- the transporter would beam information to a remote station to build a new copy of you, and the old you would be automatically anesthetized and dissolved in acid.

Most of the human body commits slow suicide all the time. How much of 'you' is the same 'you' as a decade ago?

The Michael Crichton book "Timeline" explored this a bit too.

Makes me wonder about sleeping. Are you still you in the morning? What about after a coma? Being knocked unconscious? Sure, all the lizard brain stuff keeps working -- but the important "you" stuff isn't firing on all cylinders.

Or heck, after a seizure (those are fun. Afterwards, there's thirty minutes or so when you're wandering around, answering questions -- if incoherently -- that you  have no memory of. At ALL)?

You are not really you anyways.  The most "you" is akin to the rider on an elephant.  The rider being your consciousness or conscious choice.  The notion of "you" is slowly being proven to be mere fluctuations in quantum foam that can exist sans body anyways.

Have we used up all the weed for this conversation yet?  Should I run out and get some more?

My quantum foam fluctuates, ergo sum.

I've got another one at home where the central character was essentially a circuit court judge for whatever interstellar polity existed. In the book, space travel was still limited by relativity. The ships were essentially flying cloud storage for his consciousness. At each stop, a new body would be created and his consciousness copied over. Once his reason for being there was concluded his consciousness would be reuploaded and the ship would continue on. However, the newly created guy would stay there still alive. I didn't get very far as the whole idea was a bit much for teenaged me, but from what I did read he spent time being jealous of the guys left behind on previous stops and the guy who would sail off to the next world.

(http://static.giantbomb.com/uploads/original/15/155745/2195405-40k_011.jpg)

Here's a nice article from Stanford Medical School (http://stanmed.stanford.edu/2012summer/article7.html) from last summer related to what exactly these altered cells are producing. Essentially there's a protein called CD47 that's very popular with a lot of cancers. It overrides white bloodcells urge to eat cells with major internal problems. These cancers overproduce it, and the altered T-cells produce antibodies to block it.

While a few healthy cells also happen to have the protein, if they're not displaying any other "oh god i'm malfunctioning" molecules, macrophages and hunter-killers won't eat them regardless.

This is much more hopeful news than I originally gave it credit for, and it's based on more than a decade of solid experimental evidence. Here's hoping this is as major a breakthrough as the hype-train is claiming.

I suppose in a dark bit of irony, one of the cancers that particular treatment shows promise for is bladder cancer -- and is very effective at handling already spread cancer (whatever that m-word is). Which is, you know, the situation Iain Banks is in right now.

I sadly doubt he'll still be around when they get to human trials late this year or early next. :(

Still, the approach sounds pretty interesting. I mean their basic point -- successful cancer cells obviously have to have a "don't kill me" signal that prevents the immune system from cleaning them up like it does with other malformed cells (and does with all the cancer cells that don't turn into, you know, cancer). And obviously since your body develops cancerous cells that your immune system DOES kill, then there's obviously a "kill me" sort of signal for malformed cells. (Otherwise, as they note, the default for your immune system would all cells are bad, unless they prove otherwise, which is likely not the case).

So even if this particular cancer therapy doesn't work on many cancers -- or any at all -- it's a pretty promising line of research. Helping your immune system identify these things is akin the difference between vaccination and treatment --- it's so much easier to get your body to nip it in the bud than try to cure it once you have it.

Oops. Days late.

Metastasize.

As long as they don't dump the trial because it's not "economically viable" like the promising treatment they pulled my dad off of.  Fuck drug companies.  With cancer.

One can hope. Given it might be fairly broad spectrum, that's a good sign.

Not enough awesome science to keep this bumped I guess.. Page 3?!

Vid making Facebook rounds only just now, even though the article is from back in July.

http://junkee.com/someone-invented-magic-and-it-is-freaking-us-out/14880

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DZrjXSsfxMQ

I remember seeing the Syrup thing a while back along with a Ketchup Bottle that ketchup didn't stick to from, I think, MIT.  Either way this is awesome.

Though putting both in an aerosol can and then spraying it around with no breathing apparatus makes me wonder how long until there's enough built-up in their lungs that they suffocate because they sealed their tissue up.  :awesome_for_real:

NeverWet is old news dude - like last year old.   :grin:   Granted, I try to catch the papers b4 they go "public."  Btw, you can already buy this off-the-shelf.  Rustoleum bought the patent no?

Science! (http://news.yahoo.com/scientists-date-world-s-oldest-animal-at-507-years-old-----after-they-kill-it-181251945.html)  :awesome_for_real:

My father got that shit and sprayed his shoes, but it peels off pretty fast.

I dont think the current formula they use for it is properly designed for use on a lot of fabric.   From what I remember the rep telling us at the last HomeHardware dealers market I was at this summer, they are hopeing to have a formulation specifically targeted at fabric out for consumer use early next year.

And I will be spraying every single umbrella I have with it.

I thought neverwet was some kind of marriage guidance.

 :rimshot:

On the flipside, spray it (the neverwet) on the bedsheets perhaps?  Squeegee in the nightstand ftw.

RIP, Fredereick Sanger (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/21/us/frederick-sanger-two-time-nobel-winning-scientist-dies-at-95.html?_r=0).....


Sanger was an amazing man.  Not only did he win two nobel prizes, he stayed true to what he was about, something you just don't see much anymore. 

And with enough self awareness to stick with what he was good at when given a choice.

I don't think it was self awareness.  It's called having a soul and not being a greedy bastard.  There are too many greedy bastards around now in medicine and science.  The whole goal is to essentially "get into management" and surf the internet while other people work for you. 

It's also not your work. It's the company's.