In the science policy world a term often heard is "high-risk, high-reward" activities; funding initiatives, projects, or researchers that individually are likely to fail but that also hold potential for truly radical, breakthrough discoveries. But what about "low-risk, high-reward", wouldn't that be nice?
One more of Stripe Press' beautifully edited tomes, Scientific Freedom: the elixir of civilization, is Donald Braben's theoretical case for the existence of such scientific opportunitie…
I just finished reading Vinay Prasad's Malignant, a book on the current state of oncology, covering everything from the way clinical trials are run to the myriad of ways cancer therapies can be administered (as neoadjuvants, adjuvants, in a metastatic setting etc).
I jokingly described Prasad's take as "cancer therapiesnihilism" on Twitter in the same way that John Ioannidis has been described as a methodological terrorist. It is nihilistic in that relative to what one would hear from the pharma…
Deriving multiple aging clocks out of looking at blood plasma; also includes nice table of proteins that accumulate (or decrease their frequency) with age and what they might be doing.
Bryan Caplan on Matt Yglesias' One Billion Americans
In the same way that the secretome of stem cells can ameliorate Alzheimer in a mouse model(See previous links), stem cells may not be needed to help regenerate injuries to the heart (in this case, in pigs), just what they secrete, as if telling cells "hey there are ste…
What follows is an unedited guest post by the author of Applied Divinity Studies about Substack. While I don't necessarily endorse everything said in the text that follows, I thought it was an interesting post and the author asked me to guest-post it here.
Some thoughts of my own as a prologue:
Looking at things I read in my RSS I notice first that indeed I look at my RSS reader (Feedly), and not at my mailbox. RSS is a civilized way of following updates from disparate sites you like, aggregating them in o…
How Ichor Therapeutics (a sort of meta-company that incubates biotech startups) is run, and how it was built from scratch (They don't use external labs)
A brief history of the last 50 years of aging research; mostly focused on what one might call "classic" aging research (That is focused around IGF-1, rapamycin, caloric restriction etc)
Speculation on how to increase antimatter production by a factor of 10 billion. Seems doable. This would be useful chiefly for spaceships I can imagine.
It is rare…
Gene editing powered by retrotransposons, coming soon to a chromosome near you at some point
In my immunosenescence post I hinted at the possibility of the nervous system playing a role in the aging of hematopoietic stem cells. Well, shortly after a brief review about exactly that came out! And the same goes for the broader topic, neuronal regulation of immunity, and rejuvenation of neural stem cells.
What happens if you give old animals young stem cells (in the form of bone marrow transplants)? Not much. N…