The descendants of those things will be chasing our descendants through the streets. And catching them.
Awwwww ...... mini-cheetah's so cute!!! Just like a mini-velociraptor.
Bad enough alone, but in packs they can strip a Diplodocus to shattered bones in under 5 minutes.
First air-to-air Schlieren images of supersonic shock waves from in-flight aircraft:
https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstro...teraction.html
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The satellite taking the image is orbiting Earth at a different speed than the moon giving the lunar eclipse a yo-yo effect.
<p>
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood.</p>
Watching a piece about gene therapy for sickle cell disease and my eyes are wet. Almost certainly big problems will show up with time, very possibly it will be abandoned, but for now . . . .
I did a licensing deal with a company that is developing a carbon monoxide-based treatment to address sickle cell. One of my scientists, from a previous jobby, was a co-inventor of that technology.
Your dog just ate an avocado!
It's not really pure science, as we already have a pretty good idea about what's going on here and what needs to be accomplished to make it work bettererer. The problem is that using viral vectors as gene therapy delivery vehicles is incredibly inefficient, the upshot being that patients must be administered a much greater viral load (i.e., viral vector + therapeutic DNA) than what is theoretically needed to replace the mutant gene. So instead of, say, dosing the patient to have one virus per cell (ideal), we dose with far move virus in order to achieve 100% infectivity. This means more virus per cell. Not good.
The defective gene will be replaced by one virus-insertion event, however, the remaining vectors will insert their DNA cargo indiscriminately, possibly resulting in disrupted regulatory sequences, structural alterations, or new gene mutations, the kinda shit that may lead to cancer.
So the issue here, at least to my actual knowledge, is figuring out how to significantly boost the infectivity rate of the viral vectors such that you end up with the ideal dosing and eliminate inappropriate DNA insertion events within the patient's cells. Dr. Goat understandably weeps for these patients because every treatment is a such a fucking crap shoot- sure, the sickle cell may be gone, but now what? Better or worse? Lucky seven or snake eyes? Watching kids crap-out sucks.
Your dog just ate an avocado!
A few other pretty obvious potential sources of problems--1) requires massive doses of chemo to wipe out the bone marrow, with all the risks that entails, 2) the virus they use to transfer the gene is HIV with the HIV replication apparatus removed--but is the removal 100% successful, 3) possible graft vs host reaction. Obviously much, much smarter people than me are working on this and have undoubtedly considered all of these things and plenty others but any time you do an intervention this massive the morbidity and mortality rate is bound to be significant. It certainly sounds promising, the disease it is being tried on is desperate, and the young woman they are profiling is incredibly brave--and seems to be a total sweetheart. Having cared for a few of these unlucky folks I do hope and pray the treatment works.
I would think there would also be possible issues w that edited gene effecting some other one just by its absense. Sickle cell is awful, but as they say it got selected evolutionarily, so with all these future gene edits I would be worried about an unforeseen consequence. I had no idea sickle cell could be so devastating even though I have been aware of it as long as I can remember. I also had no idea how scary the whole process of getting the gene transfers would be. They definitely need a better mechanism for that magic. But it's the second treatment use of HIV I've heard of which is kind of amazing
Sounds like she'd probably be dead in 5-10 years (of misery) anyway. Might as well go for the moon shot.
The story abut one doc calling her a drug seeker and walking out of the room while she writhed in pain on the floor was unbelievable. If that was my kid I'd fucking lose it.
Maybe they should according this
Killer robots are already running a muck and killed 29 people in a lab.
BTW NSFW and very tongue and cheek
The woman making the claim is know for her Rowswell stories
Entertaining yet scary when you stop and think what the future might hold.
A few points to clarify:
1) The lentiviral vectors will not cause HIV.
2) CRISPR/Cas9 technology will drastically lessen and probably eliminate the shotgun off effects of using lentiviral vectors.
3) The transplant part can use chemo and/or radiation, but there are several protocols of varying strength, most extremely well tolerated, some suitable for patients as old as 80(!)
4) Graft-versus-host disease will not happen for engineered stem cells since the patient's own cells are being used in an autologous manner.
5) Graft-versus-host disease can occur with other types of transplants being used for SCA (matched sibling, matched unrelated and most recently haploidentical, or half-matched), but the means of dealing with this complication have vastly improved recently.
6) The evolutionary "advantage" of SCA and similar thalassemias appear to be relative resistance to malaria when the individual inherits one of the mutations, but not both. We have better ways of dealing with malaria nowadays.
^^^ that's deep. Two of the same, foes to each other, unable to retreat from the fight, ensnarled in the very thing that continues their survival, to slowly strangle out their existence.
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I came to post this. This is fucking amazing. On my second watch now.
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Last edited by Ripzalot; 03-28-2019 at 06:41 AM.
<p>
Aim for the chopping block. If you aim for the wood, you will have nothing. Aim past the wood, aim through the wood.</p>
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