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    I'm going to show you exactly what I took issue with your post, Eos.

    That, is what I mean by stabbing your own feet. You basically contradicted yourself. The rest of your previous posts were starting to go off-tangent because I was specifically taking issue with this post, and substantiating myself as to why your post was flawed, and had nothing to do with my stance on this thing. I just included all the rest of the stuff in my later posts. The HIV thing is part of the reason for my stance towards DRACO. NOT the other way round. Your substantiation has also not been sufficiently credible, although I admit that mine, even though it is based on scientific theory, is still a theory that isn't backed by anyone. We're not any better than each other, on this aspect.

    ------[the rest of the paragraphs below may be ignored if you can't be bothered to read more sciency stuff]------

    Now, about all the fuss about me being negative, and what they say and didn't say.

    The paper says it can do ___________. The paper says it has potential to do ___________. It did not say it can do ______________.

    I remind all of you that the media does not always convey what the paper hopes to convey exactly. General idea, yes. I'm very sure the authors would want their work to be advertised [hence what I said earlier about "making noise"]. It is then very easy for the media and the general public to give excessive hope, or overstate its capabilities. In this case, the paper did not say that DRACO can cure HIV, because they have not tested it. In theory, maybe, maybe not - the paper did NOT say anything about curing HIV using DRACO at all. You CANNOT extrapolate blindly and start saying that DRACO can cure XXX and YYY because of several precedent successes (and I note: no reported failures yet).

    [And to make things super clear: what the media said (given that url) that this thing claims to be able to do, and what the paper claims to be able to do, is similar, but not exactly the same. This part is explained below.]

    If you don't bother to try and understand what I said earlier, too bad then. If you still prefer to think of this as a miracle cure, by all means. I am here to explain exactly what the paper is supposed to convey, and why you cannot totally believe what the media says. Hell... even in papers researchers do all kinds of things to make their papers sell and be accepted by the journals.

    MIT is not a guarantee that the work is excellent - the point is: what university it is, has no bearing on the impact of the work, or whether it is a good or lacklustre work. E.g. all work coming from Harvard is good? Why don't you do a google search on "harvard scientist", and see what you get?

    "Miracle drugs" aren't all pseudo-scientific garbage. This one here has potential (though it'd still have some limits somewhere I believe), though ask much as I'd like to ask you to look at some of the older threads, you can't because they're not around anymore (unless there's an archive somewhere?). Well... it depends on how you define "miracle drug"... Blockbuster drug? Cures all ____ diseases? Does _____? Rosaglitazone was a blockbuster, but it doesn't actually really work. Penicillin... doesn't cure all bacterial infections even back at the time when it was discovered, but people call it a "miracle drug" because it can save so many lives, while being ignorant (not intentionally) about what it can't cure. To the point that back then, people prescribed penicillin to any kind of malaise or medical issues that you could think of.

    So what's my point after saying so much? Don't take things at face value. Read between the lines. Do not infer blindly. Sometimes, what is NOT said can be more important than what is said. And obviously you have to be able to tell what isn't said (you'd have to be in the field to do most of this, however).

    And, drug/treatment discovery is an enormously long process, easily 10 years. With so many different things that they have to go through, any of these drugs/cures can fail at any clinical trial, no matter how much the press describes it as "miracle drug" or not, or how much hope you put into it. Why I always advice caution: false hope, once dashed, can shatter people's will. There is no additional benefit of telling to the world how miraculous a drug is, if it hasn't gone through a significantly long process of testing - I'd say, phase IIA.


    A quibble on the paper: I'll quote from it then.
    Sure the summary says things so nicely, and the abstract as well:
    Now amongst all the viruses said here, NONE of them are retroviruses. Even if HIV is a (+)-ssRNA virus, the way it replicates is different from conventional (+)-ssRNA viruses. As a specific example, you absolutely cannot say right now that it can cure HIV, because they have not tested a precedent model retrovirus (e.g. lentivirus, FIV). Broad spectrum does not equate to all-covering. 15 different viruses, and the family of viruses that they are in. That, and a couple more reasonable extrapolations, is all that you can say for DRACO. It's still a very broad spectrum cure, it's an awesome discovery, so if that qualifies for your definition of "miracle drug", so be it. But it certainly hasn't been shown yet to be able to cure everything else. The theory is a good one, nice, but not foolproof, and certainly a theory until proven (beyond reasonable doubt) to be true.

    In a way, it's not a slip on the part of the authors - in fact this is one of the ways that they will sell their paper. Scientists who read this paper will understand and appreciate their idea, and then identify what's not being explicitly mentioned. I'm just being pointed here.

    Hadriel

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    And if you'd explained yourself in the first place you'd have looked significantly less condescending. /* For that matter if you'd stop "signing" every post like we don't already have an entire left panel showing who you are to every thing you post you'd probably look less pretentious too. We know who you are already. */

    We're not all molecular biologists here. Most of us don't give even the slightest pretense of a damn about how it works, we're just hopeful it does what we're told it will and taking it with a grain of salt that since it's not very far along it probably won't be any where near as impressive as it sounds. This is current events, not the Rubiks Cube.

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    Hope should not, imo, be blindly wished for. This does not have to be in RC in order for some logical and rational thinking to take place.

    I gave you a chance to correct yourself without me having to go through all that trouble, and without me having to tear it down. You chose to take it as me being condescending... fine. Different people from different parts of the world take things differently. Not the most amusing observation.

    Kind of a pity that people don't bother about the work that we do. That only makes the danger of "scientific" media articles ever more deadly [not that all of them are terribly inaccurate]. This doesn't even have to be about science, in fact. Taking things at face value is not the wisest thing to do, anywhere [interviews are subjective].

    Hadriel

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    Default


    Scientists are taught to be skeptical and question everything, but Hadriel, I don't know how much clearer Eos can be. In the simplest of terms, all he said was that this drug has, the possibility, not a guaranteed success of curing many other viral infections, namely HIV. I find it great that you can already tell where there might be certain issues in DRACO, and who knows, maybe the MIT scientists will realize the same issues and then will try to reinvent themselves to counteract the problems. However good a healthy dose of skepticism may be, I do think that even though Eos may have made an error (no one knows every bit of knowledge in the world), you blew it out of proportions.

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    That's the point at which you're being condescending however; It's not giving me a chance to figure out where my understanding of a problem is wrong if you have training and specialization in the field and I, like 98% of the other forumers, don't. That's just taking for granted that a highly specialized area of research is common knowledge and you come off as an ass for it. It'd be like a mechanic (or doctor) rolling his eyes at a customer who's explained their symptoms and telling them to say them over again and see if they can figure it out for themselves.

    I have no problem being wrong, anyone can be wrong, including you, with as little as we have on this and as limited as the testing has been, but if you're going to assert your own correctness over someone you at least need to learn to do it with evidence, not condescension and belittling when your entire point is supposed to be how much better you understand it.

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    This sentence is why you guys are arguing. It's entirely possible to be "sufficiently well versed in science" and have absolutely no clue what another scientist is jabbering on about. Science is too broad a term. Refine it to medical science and perhaps you have a point. Please take care not to blame and attack others outside your field for making stupid/ignorant mistakes in word or concept verbalization, just correct them if they actually want to know what's going on and move along.

    I could probably stump you on acoustics, numerical simulations, QM, or GR material -- and easily, judging from your obvious medical background -- but that doesn't mean you are any less well versed in science.

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    I don't, in fact. If you say "I don't understand what you're saying", I'll settle the rest.

    I did say it outright for you immediately following your post, where your mistake was. The rest of the explanation is not intended for you per se. I'm not here to impress, I'm not here to stump or flaunt. I'm here to inform.

    Or would you rather had me tell you that you had a typo that makes your entire post null? It is a glaringly obvious mistake if you read properly - doesn't take any science to tell the difference between RNA and DNA. [As an analogy, it just takes one stroke to change "ten" to "thousand", or reversing the lengths of 2 strokes to change "not yet" to "not/never/end" in chinese.]

    I've been thinking. We (asians) don't like to tell people directly their mistakes, because we think it makes them look bad. I absolutely don't want to make you look bad, so it looks like in the process I made myself look like the bad guy. "cryptic innuendo" is what we do best, if that's what you like to put it. In fairness, I have only attacked you (imo) after your reply. That "cryptic innuendo" was still a chance for you to spot your mistake. So if you still think I'm being condescending, then too bad for me then, because I never intended to convey that signal. "My correctness" was never directly related to your post, only that it was also about HIV, in which I posted all that because people asked about it earlier. Which I guess eventually made it look as though I'm trying to hammer you. Quite the opposite, because it doesn't need a hammer to take down what you posted.

    As a musing, am I taking basic understanding in modern biology for granted? Is such stuff not taught in the teen years in your side of the world? To us, this is "basic science".

    Hadriel

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    Considering my teen years are further away than 40% of our registered user base have been alive and what they've taught for biology has changed drastically in the past 20 years, yes, yes you are completely taking for granted what your audience, which consists of people from 13 to 65 at least, have/know/remember.

    You're not addressing your peers here, you're addressing the general internet so you can't expect everyone to have similar knowledge and experience as you because it education is drastically different from country to country, school to school, culture to culture and generation to generation.

    Biology and the other sciences in general have very little direct bearing on my day to day life. I read stuff like this article to get a general idea what's going on in the sciences but like most people I don't deeply research them because at the end of the day the only thing that will matter to me is whether it worked or not and what it works on, not how or why.

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    Ok then. In that case, that part is my fault, and I'll apologise for it.

    'bout time to end this here. Still a point to note: the media is notoriously inaccurate at times at reporting scientific articles. But then again... that's how they generate interest. We have to depend on them occasionally [doing that] to make our work known.

    (amusingly, I'm not a biologist, though I'm well-trained in that field)

    Hadriel

  10. Default the superdrug to heal RNA Viruses


    This “Superdrug,” is promising indeed.

    With a lot of scientific breakthroughs going on i wouldn't doubt it if researchers nowadays can create medicines that can heal even the most toughest virus there is in the world. I I hope research such as these will continue to flourish, because it's for the benefit of mankind.

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