https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/technology/deepmind-ai-protein-folding.html
I did my master's thesis on chaperone proteins, which are essential for proper protein folding. When protein folding goes awry, you have diseases like Mad Cow Disease, or when I first met it (we go way back) it was Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy (BSE). The article in today's NYT is about how artificial intelligence (AI) is going about solving the shape of proteins in our bodies. Carbohydrates and lipids and even nucleic acids are found in canonical shapes. By that we mean 3-dimensional shapes, since our bodies are not dimensionless aggregates as shown in textbooks. The company DeepMind, with its system AlphaFold is able to predict a protein's 3-D shape, too late, as the author reveals, to help with our obsession du jour, Sars-Co-V2. DeepMind uses a system modeled, more or less on neural networks, or the network of neurons in the human brain. It identifies patterns in huge quantities of data, such as being able to identify a cat after looking at patterns in photos of cats. Drugs bind to proteins in our bodies and alter their acitvities, like penicillin binding proteins in bacterial membranes bind to penicillin. If DeepMind can find proteins and identify their shapes this can be a driver in drug development. It can do this 2/3 of the time, according to one of the developers. Its mistakes are smaller than the width of an atom. This technology can also be used to predict the outcomes of clinical trials. In the past this lab has built systems that outperformed humans at Starcraft video game and the ancient game Go.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/11/30/health/coronavirus-vaccine-prisons.html
Another NYT article about how the vaccine, when it comes, will be prioritized. When I worked at SouthWoods state prison, my classroom was next to Medical. I was surprised at how many wheel-chair-bound inmates were arriving and departing. Not the usual George-Raft-Humphrey Bogart scenario of tough inmates in the yard plotting escapes, more of a realization that people spend scores of years, decades locked behind prison walls, invisible, isolated, hopeless and vulnerable. In the case of Sars-Co-V2 which causes the coronavirus, these inmates disproportionately African-American and Latino are in the direct path of disaster. The men in their wheelchairs are often suffering from chronic disease such as high blood pressure, diabetes and various mental illnesses. How would it not be in the interests of humanity to release them or at least to vaccinate them? The article discusses whether the inmate population should be prioritized for administration of some of the first doses of vaccines but they are not ranked by the CDC in the "top tiers". The CDC did prioritize prison guards and others who work in jails. During the summer more than 2200 inmates were sickened and 28 people died at San Quentin SP in California.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/climate/georgina-mace-dead.html
NYT obit for Georgina Mace, who no one has heard of, who was responsible for building the scientific basis for recording endangered species and member of the International Union of Conservation Biologists. In 1990 she was a member of the Zoological Society of London and she solidified the Red List to make it applicable in a rigorous way to be "rapidly applicable to thousands of species." The list incorporates climate change as a danger threat. From the article "The list has grown to include more than 120,000 species of animals, plants and fungi; some 32,000 are currently listed as endangered."
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/01/science/leaf-stick-insects-phyllium-asekiense.html
This from the NYT is about eggs received by the Montreal Insectarium supposedly from a leaf insect, Phyllium asekiense. The Covid-19 hiatus from real life is as good a time as any to fulfill your childhood fantasy of breeding insects. Eggs hatch into nymphs, if you remember your insect life cycles. One of the eggs grew and looked like its mom but the other was thin and stick-like (not leaf-like) and had wings. It turned out the two insects, which had been classified as different species,were actually the same species. This is called sexual dimorphism, where the males and females appear totally different. Since the females appear differently from the males (and since this is a descriptive science) how can the puzzle of relating the two sexes be solved, besides of course, the infrequent event that was written about here? What a cool job!
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/02/business/singapore-lab-meat.html
A NYT article about lab-grown meat. Eat Just is an American start-up based in SF which would permit you to satisfy your carnivorous instincts without an animal having to be killed. Although having to pay $50 for a single nugget may seem excessive for conscience-salving, it doesn't seem that this product will be quick to market since regulatory agencies in the US and Europe have not regulated it yet. (Let's focus on a vaccine, shall we?) The nuggets have been approved by the regulatory agencies in Singapore.
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