Good Things Friday (291) and Link Love
September 20, 2024
1. This week I learned: “Thalassophobia is the persistent and intense fear of deep bodies of water, such as the ocean, seas, or lakes.” *Raises both hands* that’s very much me!
2. Wallaby is such a funny word to say.
I’d always heard that government jobs were “safe/stable/secure” but this article and recently shared experiences from folks I know shine a very different light on US gov jobs: Burned-out firefighters are fleeing the US Forest Service amid labor disputes: ‘We are decimated’
Goffstown School District Business Administrator Scott Gross is a giant pile of walking bull dung: Goffstown Turns Down Gift and Sues Families Over Lunch Debt Instead
This is a neat read: Reed College: the only place in the US where students get to run a real nuclear reactor
This seems neat. I’d really like to find time for it, but where? (or when): free ASL courses from the Oklahoma School for the Dead
This is an interesting read. Just in mice right now, so I wonder how much it translates to humans (Jenny?): Cleaning up the aging brain
MICE ARE NOT HUMANS and also fatalities in mice are much more acceptable than fatalities in humans. And the last several clinical trials targeted at amyloid- which we’re not even sure really causes alzheimers now! had a side effect of brain swelling and death. In humans. So yeah you are right to be skeptical of results in lab mice, which we kill by the thousands for clinical work.
Fun fact: 90% of human trial drug candidates fail in early trials because they don’t work, have unacceptable safety profiles, or aren’t absorbed well in humans.
https://x.com/justsaysinmice?lang=en
My favorite ever quote from a talk: “I’ve cured cancer 37 times…. in mice.”
These are all true things! At what point does it even make sense to progress from a mouse study to tiptoe towards clinical studies?
I mean pharma regularly does advance a drug candidate through trials, because rest assured everyone wants a slice of that $$$$ pie. But again, most drug candidates that work in mice simply don’t work in humans, or they fail on safety. Somebody probably already looked at this one and thought “how would I even tell if this worked and also would it give someone a heart attack or stroke.”
Alzheimers is particularly hard though, because define an effective drug. The follow up is very long for “not getting Alzheimers” and also it’s quite difficult to figure out who’s going to get Alzheimers, so you need a large sample to make sure you have enough statistical power.
My personal opinion is that more basic research is needed on what actually causes Alzheimers because that is the only thing that will give us reasonable targets and reasonable clinical endpoints. Otherwise we’re throwing spaghetti at the wall and trying to make patterns out of how it sticks. That’s not science, it’s phenomenology, and it’s ineffective.
I do remember reading that the last … many? years of Alzheimer’s research may have been barking up the wrong tree entirely because they’re starting from a flawed premise. Am I remembering right – plaque?
Yes, the papers were faked and nobody seems quite sure what really causes Alzheimers any more.
So frustrating