delton137

The Rapid Deployment Vaccine Collaborative (Radvac) has been doing some important work on bringing back and modernizing variolation.

While vaccines are clearly superior to variolation, variolation techniques can be applied immediately at the site of an outbreak. Vaccines, by contrast, take months to years to be developed, manufactured, tested, approved by the FDA, and deployed. During that time, viruses can spread and mutate, harming and killing many people.

Radvac believes that variolation deserves a new look — many scientific learnings from virology and immunology can be applied to make variolation safer and more effective. Here, Radvac co-founder and chief scientist Preston Estep reports on new self-experiments he conducted using hydrogen peroxide for virus inactivation and antibiotic ointment (neomycin) as an adjuvant. Two different delivery methods are explored - nasal insufflation and transdermal application using a cheap microneedle dermal roller. In a complementary whitepaper, Radvac has published detailed protocols for others interested in testing these methods. (link to the post below)

New on my Substack: how sleep optimization can backfire, five types of insomnia, and why I don’t recommend the Eight Sleep mattress cover.

Yeah, I agree. Not to mention TPUs and ASICS for AI.

I discuss three leading contenders for FDA Commissioner who are getting a lot of attention right now, Joseph Gulfo, MD, MBA, Balaji Srinivasan, and Jim O'Neill. Among these, my favorite is Dr. Gulfo, although I see a very strong case for Balaji as well.

say more? (main author here)

Article co-author here... that's super interesting. Would you mind sharing your condition? There's probably better things out there whatever it is...

Cerebrolysin = pig brain snake oil

"Cerebrolysin is an unregulated medical product made from enzymatically digested pig brain tissue. Hundreds of scientific papers claim that it boosts BDNF, stimulates neurogenesis, and can help treat numerous neural diseases...

A recent video of Bryan Johnson injecting Cerebrolysin has over a million views on X and 570,000 views on YouTube. The drug, which is advertised as a “peptide combination”, can be purchased easily online and appears to be growing in popularity among biohackers, rationalists, and transhumanists. The subreddit r/Cerebrolysin has 3,100 members."

HPLC and other evidence shows that rather than containing neurotrophic peptides, "Cerebrolysin is likely composed of amino acids, phosphates, and salt, along with some random protein fragments."

I don't think FHI received any funding from SBF's Future Fund. (maybe a few of the visiting staff did, though)

see my follow-up tweet on why it's plausible : https://twitter.com/moreisdifferent/status/17506201369338718...

"Combining synchrotron x-ray microscopy with expansion microscopy may represent a feasible approach for whole human brain connectomics at the nanoscale."

"Assuming 1 byte per voxel, the amount of storage needed for an 11-fold expanded human brain with 300 nm physical voxel size (27 nm effective voxel size) is about 61 exabytes."

Full post title: "That time when a bunch of people all agreed to preserve each other's brains"

It's crazy that we spend thousands on expensive funeral procedures (avg cost $7000) when people could be using that money to preserve their brain for science instead.

Thanks, I included a footnote to elaborate on this. There's actually a paper on how Cephalon produces R-modafinil because they can't just directly synthesize one of the enantiomers. It seems the process does produce both enantiomers (but more R than S ?).. I don't fully understand the process but they have a way of crystalizing out the S enantiomer of modafinil acid and using HPLC..

We published something similar in spirit recently (although it ended up as a conference paper and not in Nature)... Notably, we did our study with much fewer data - instead of millions of patents we had the text of a few thousand patents and the text of a few hundred conference papers. We had a specific focus and we wanted to focus on texts about energetic materials (explosives and propellants).

We showed how chemical-application & chemical-property relations are captured by word2vec and GloVe. For instance we found rocket fuels where the chemicals appearing closest to “rocket” while materials used in air bags appeared closest to “air bag”. We were able to filter to chemical names using ChemDataExtractor and further to likely energetic chemicals by obtaining SMILES strings from PubChem and using a classifier to classify them as likely energetics or not.

You can find our work here : https://arxiv.org/pdf/1903.00415.pdf .

You're not addressing the problem area the author is looking at though, which is lead generation (finding new molecules that either have high binding affinity to a receptor and/or might be useful for a given medical application).

Cloning seems pointless to me - they will be ahead of you time-wise. You need to have a good case you can do it better, then it makes sense. Just be prepared to be called a knock-off. Differentiation is normally what people do even if its pseudo differentiation.