We also shouldn't call it "vegan leather" when it is in fact just plastic.
Naming departs from technical accuracy when adopted by the masses, as they retrofit their common understanding. Wouldn't be too surprised if "vaccine" ends up covering other strong defense-boosters.
Wouldn't be too surprised, either - but I still think there's merit in using words in a more precise manner than the marketing department would like to do.
> It is given as a nasal spray and leaves white blood cells in our lungs – called macrophages – on "amber alert" and ready to jump into action no matter what infection tries to get in.
Right and if that is such a good thing why are those macrophages not always on alert. I smell longterm cancer or similar.
Yeah this is more likely than cancer, and is a potential side effect of anything that stimulates the immune system, including real antigen-carrying vaccines.
Indeed, I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines. We could probably just inject people with the adjuvants and get the same result.
> I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.
The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy.
That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.
Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target.
Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.
>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.
> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".
> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.
This reminds me of an episode in Star Trek: TNG's 2nd season, where Pulaski and Data visit a colony doing genetic engineering experiments on kids which created a super-virus.
That we think have no cost. The massive failure rate of drug trials and some famous cases of issues discovered only after wide scale deployment indicates we're not that great at knowing ahead of time.
The body is like legacy spaghetti code written by hundreds of teams of outsourced engineers. It mostly works. Just never remove any commented out lines or it may break.
While possible, there are also many bodily processes that are finely tuned through eons of evolution, and destabilizing pressure leads to disorder. Sometimes it's difficult to know which are which (or at least I don't know).
> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines
One of the things I do worry about is glasses. Is there a reason why we correct vision? There's probably a reason evolution made some of us see the world in a blur. Likewise with therapy - maybe killing yourself is like cell apoptosis. Many body cells are supposed to choose to die when they no longer function well. It's a good thing. That's often the problem with scientists: "They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should".
Until we find out why nature made it so some of us kill ourselves maybe we shouldn't fuck with it? Remember Chesterton's Fence.
The reason we correct vision is for safety and convenience. My guess is that we have a distribution of vision capabilities due to the inability of complex biological systems to ensure that the precise geometry of the cornea and lens is subject to statistical variations that can't be controlled. There are probably also tradeoffs associated with near and far vision.
Now, you could have restated this in a better way IMHO. I'd put it like this: are there any evolutionary advantages to having worse-than-average near or far vision? For example, we can imagine that people who had extremely good long range vision would be more successful in hunting, and perhaps- this is where I'm speculating heavily- having poor long vision is compensated by having better detail vision for fine tool work. However, what I've learned after many years is that attempting to perceive the true nature of the evolutionary fitness function is challenging.
As for your bit about suicide: please be a lot more thoughtful in speculating about suicide.
You're making the mistake of thinking of "nature" and "evolution" as intelligent, reasoning systems, and that every evolutionary adaptation exists for a purpose. Evolution doesn't do things for "reasons," things just happen.
Remember that cephalopod brains are donut shaped and their digestive tracts go right through the middle and if they eat something too big they'll have an anyeurism. Pandas and koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose and both would be extinct if humans didn't find them cute. Sloths have to climb down from trees to take a shit. Female hyenas give birth through a pseudopenis that often ruptures and kils them. Horses can't vomit and if they swallow something toxic, their stomach ruptures. Also their hooves and ankles are extremely weak and not well designed to support their weight. Numerous species like the fiddler crab and peacock have evolved sexual displays that are actively harmful to their survival.
And as for humans, our spines are not well adapted for walking upright, our retinas are wired backwards, and we still have a useless appendix and wisdom teeth. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has an unnecessarily long and complex route branching off the vagus and travelling around the aorta before running back up to the larynx.
Evolution is not smart. Evolution isn't even stupid. It isn't trying to keep you alive and it isn't even capable of caring if you die. Yes we should absolutely fuck with it, because we don't want to live in a world where we still die of sepsis and parasites and plagues because "we don't want to mess with evolution."
>koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose
Koalas biggest problem is us? Like they seem perfectly adapted to their niche. Eat lots of leaves that nobody else is adapted to use as food, and once a year, run very fast to outpace the bushfire that your principle food source needs to reproduce.
Are their hooves, though? The fossil record clearly shows a progression in their ancestors from having feet with many toes to the single "toe" they have now.
This was believed in the 20th century, but we now believe the appendix is actually useful, and is basically a fail-safe in case the intestinal flora are wiped out; some will survive in the appendix and repopulate the intestine.
They didn't claim evolution got it perfectly right.
They speculated that immune systems evolved to avoid being continuously on alert. And that's exactly right- our immune systems have an extremely complicated system for detecting foreign invaders that is tightly regulated. And a failure to regulate that is often associated with autoimmune disorders, which remain very poorly understood.
I've studied biology from the perspective of engineering better drugs for decades now and I can say with confidence that I simply don't understand how the immune system works, and I don't think anybody else really does either (compared to, say, the heart, or many biological systems like protein production). We have identified many players, and observed a great deal of actions, and have speculative models for many of the underlying processes, but we don't really have an "understanding" of the immune system. I skimmed this paper and frankly, it has a very long way to go before people are convinced to try this in human clinical trials.
I look forward to innovations, but to a first order approximation: evolution found model parameters that exceed the best human science and engineering.
(Most) vaccines work by letting your immune system know to watch out for particular things. That's an information advantage. Likewise, antibiotics are chemical agents that the body lacks the genes to synthesise. Betting that the immune system's parameters are generally well-calibrated is entirely compatible with taking antibiotics and vaccines, where indicated.
You wouldn't want to get vaccinated for smallpox in the middle of a plague epidemic, because that would waste your immune system's resources on an extinct-in-the-wild disease, when it really needs to be gearing up to stop the plague killing you.
I'll be fascinated to see how this plays out for people with autoimmune conditions - generalised heightening of the immune system feels like it would be dangerous for those people. Are any immunologists lurking who might be able to speculate?
Its often completely normal to use healthy controls in a trial like this, healthy people not getting ill is your target audience and the long term stage 3 will be against healthy people. So many drugs are not tested against obvious groups that might produce a poor result to make the findings as strong as possible but it means in a lot of cases chronically ill people are making judgements on no data at all.
But then it is mentioned that the treatment "also seemed to reduce the response to house dust mite allergens".
The treatment also supposedly activates macrophages in the lungs (and thus not elsewhere). Only some small particles and vapor droplets from foods go into the lungs.
We shouldn't call it a vaccine when, in fact, it's just a line of cocaine for macrophages.
We also shouldn't call it "vegan leather" when it is in fact just plastic.
Naming departs from technical accuracy when adopted by the masses, as they retrofit their common understanding. Wouldn't be too surprised if "vaccine" ends up covering other strong defense-boosters.
> "vegan leather" when it is in fact just plastic.
https://knowingfabric.com/mushroom-leather-mycelium-sustaina...
is pretty neat
Wouldn't be too surprised, either - but I still think there's merit in using words in a more precise manner than the marketing department would like to do.
I mean the word “vaccine” literally specifically references cow pox, so it’s already broadened. No reason not to go up another level.
Mushroom leather says hello
Yes, but in this case the name is likely to actually reduce the adoption not increase it.
> It is given as a nasal spray and leaves white blood cells in our lungs – called macrophages – on "amber alert" and ready to jump into action no matter what infection tries to get in.
Right and if that is such a good thing why are those macrophages not always on alert. I smell longterm cancer or similar.
The most likely, because it consumes energy and respiratory diseases take almost nobody from the gene pool.
What has no relation at all to what possible side effects this could have.
> I smell longterm cancer or similar.
Or simply autoimmune reactions which can be devastating.
Yeah this is more likely than cancer, and is a potential side effect of anything that stimulates the immune system, including real antigen-carrying vaccines.
Indeed, I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines. We could probably just inject people with the adjuvants and get the same result.
> I wonder whether the vaccine content matters at all in current vaccines.
The target does matter, that is the basis for the whole technology, and the thing most predictive of efficacy. That's why the flu shots often don't work and the shots for smallpox and measles do, the flu is a more rapidly mutating target.
Going crazy with the adjuvants was popular during the pandemic when it became clear that the virus had mutated (the target protein), but no one wanted to do R&D for a new target. Counting white blood cells became a proxy for efficacy, and you can manipulate that stat with adjuvants.
Why not just eat a handful of dirt?
Because respiratory infections aren't often treated through the digestive system?
If only Stanford University had asked you first!
If only you had read the article.
>There may also be consequences to dialling up the immune system beyond its normal state – raising questions of immune disorders.
> Jonathan Ball, professor of molecular virology at the Liverpool School of Tropical Medicine, said the work was undeniably "exciting" but cautioned "we have to ensure that keeping the body on 'high alert' doesn't lead to friendly fire, where a hyper-ready immune system accidentally triggers unwelcome side effects".
> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines.
Autoimmune disorders
This reminds me of an episode in Star Trek: TNG's 2nd season, where Pulaski and Data visit a colony doing genetic engineering experiments on kids which created a super-virus.
there are many, many things our bodies could do (or not do) to greatly improve our health at no cost whatsoever.
That we think have no cost. The massive failure rate of drug trials and some famous cases of issues discovered only after wide scale deployment indicates we're not that great at knowing ahead of time.
The body is like legacy spaghetti code written by hundreds of teams of outsourced engineers. It mostly works. Just never remove any commented out lines or it may break.
Which things?
While possible, there are also many bodily processes that are finely tuned through eons of evolution, and destabilizing pressure leads to disorder. Sometimes it's difficult to know which are which (or at least I don't know).
Or antimicrobial resistance.
this isnt exactly a vaccine its more like prophylactic immunoinduction.
"toll like receptors"
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7173040/
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S135964462...
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s40364-022-00436-7
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toll-like_receptor
US: Quits the WHO, ends funding of medical research
The world: Announces cures for half a dozen cancers, and the common cold
This team is at Stanford, unless I’m reading the article incorrectly. Still awful that the US pulled out of WHO.
Ah yep, I read the story elsewhere earlier that insinuated it was a team outside of the US
I wonder how long before this gets defunded too?
Even if it worked perfectly, I would be worried that an unexercised immune system would turn on me.
why do they call it a vaccine, its nothing like that...
there's probably a reason evolution didnt put the immune system on permanent "amber alert" as they call it in the article
> The research team in the US does not think the immune system should be permanently dialled up and think such a vaccine should be used to compliment rather than replace current vaccines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amber_alert
Amber alert means something different than the author thinks ...
They wanted "red alert".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Alert
This is just an idiom for denoting a high alert state.
Perhaps "Defcon 02" would be better understood?
True though there is the theory that it was unnecessary for the immune system to regulate itself in some ways because we were full of parasites.
>The effect lasted for around three months in animal experiments.
It would just be temporary, but there is likely trade offs.
One of the things I do worry about is glasses. Is there a reason why we correct vision? There's probably a reason evolution made some of us see the world in a blur. Likewise with therapy - maybe killing yourself is like cell apoptosis. Many body cells are supposed to choose to die when they no longer function well. It's a good thing. That's often the problem with scientists: "They were so preoccupied with whether they could, they didn't stop to think if they should".
Until we find out why nature made it so some of us kill ourselves maybe we shouldn't fuck with it? Remember Chesterton's Fence.
The reason we correct vision is for safety and convenience. My guess is that we have a distribution of vision capabilities due to the inability of complex biological systems to ensure that the precise geometry of the cornea and lens is subject to statistical variations that can't be controlled. There are probably also tradeoffs associated with near and far vision.
Now, you could have restated this in a better way IMHO. I'd put it like this: are there any evolutionary advantages to having worse-than-average near or far vision? For example, we can imagine that people who had extremely good long range vision would be more successful in hunting, and perhaps- this is where I'm speculating heavily- having poor long vision is compensated by having better detail vision for fine tool work. However, what I've learned after many years is that attempting to perceive the true nature of the evolutionary fitness function is challenging.
As for your bit about suicide: please be a lot more thoughtful in speculating about suicide.
I had to upvote this just because it's such an incredible take, it really made my day even if I think it's complete horseradish
C'mon now, it's probably one of the better trolls I've seen today.
Poe's law and all, but the first two responses to this are missing some sarcasm that looks pretty overwrought to me.
Really...?? :)
"Sorry son, you can't get these glasses. It's for the betterment of humanity."
I think you missed their sarcasm
... Yeah probably huh :)
You just don't know sometimes.
This isnt a vaccine against suicide.
You're making the mistake of thinking of "nature" and "evolution" as intelligent, reasoning systems, and that every evolutionary adaptation exists for a purpose. Evolution doesn't do things for "reasons," things just happen.
Remember that cephalopod brains are donut shaped and their digestive tracts go right through the middle and if they eat something too big they'll have an anyeurism. Pandas and koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose and both would be extinct if humans didn't find them cute. Sloths have to climb down from trees to take a shit. Female hyenas give birth through a pseudopenis that often ruptures and kils them. Horses can't vomit and if they swallow something toxic, their stomach ruptures. Also their hooves and ankles are extremely weak and not well designed to support their weight. Numerous species like the fiddler crab and peacock have evolved sexual displays that are actively harmful to their survival.
And as for humans, our spines are not well adapted for walking upright, our retinas are wired backwards, and we still have a useless appendix and wisdom teeth. The recurrent laryngeal nerve has an unnecessarily long and complex route branching off the vagus and travelling around the aorta before running back up to the larynx.
Evolution is not smart. Evolution isn't even stupid. It isn't trying to keep you alive and it isn't even capable of caring if you die. Yes we should absolutely fuck with it, because we don't want to live in a world where we still die of sepsis and parasites and plagues because "we don't want to mess with evolution."
>koalas evolved special diets that serve no evolutionary purpose
Koalas biggest problem is us? Like they seem perfectly adapted to their niche. Eat lots of leaves that nobody else is adapted to use as food, and once a year, run very fast to outpace the bushfire that your principle food source needs to reproduce.
Yes, there’s a misconception that evolution leads to optimization and efficiency. It really just leads to traits that are “good enough”.
FYI horses are the product of domestication.
Are their hooves, though? The fossil record clearly shows a progression in their ancestors from having feet with many toes to the single "toe" they have now.
Fair enough.
In my defense, domestication is still technically an evolutionary process.
>we still have a useless appendix
This was believed in the 20th century, but we now believe the appendix is actually useful, and is basically a fail-safe in case the intestinal flora are wiped out; some will survive in the appendix and repopulate the intestine.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appendix_(anatomy)#Functions
Are you wildly speculating or do you have a source with research backing up your claim evolution got it perfectly right?
I personally look forward to every innovation that potentially improves our baseline.
They didn't claim evolution got it perfectly right.
They speculated that immune systems evolved to avoid being continuously on alert. And that's exactly right- our immune systems have an extremely complicated system for detecting foreign invaders that is tightly regulated. And a failure to regulate that is often associated with autoimmune disorders, which remain very poorly understood.
I've studied biology from the perspective of engineering better drugs for decades now and I can say with confidence that I simply don't understand how the immune system works, and I don't think anybody else really does either (compared to, say, the heart, or many biological systems like protein production). We have identified many players, and observed a great deal of actions, and have speculative models for many of the underlying processes, but we don't really have an "understanding" of the immune system. I skimmed this paper and frankly, it has a very long way to go before people are convinced to try this in human clinical trials.
I look forward to innovations, but to a first order approximation: evolution found model parameters that exceed the best human science and engineering.
I bet my money on the immune system any day.
Hard to beat a half million years of evolution with a nasal spray from last year.
You don't have to bet money on it.
You can just stop taking antibiotics and vaccines.
Those are way more interesting odds.
(Most) vaccines work by letting your immune system know to watch out for particular things. That's an information advantage. Likewise, antibiotics are chemical agents that the body lacks the genes to synthesise. Betting that the immune system's parameters are generally well-calibrated is entirely compatible with taking antibiotics and vaccines, where indicated.
You wouldn't want to get vaccinated for smallpox in the middle of a plague epidemic, because that would waste your immune system's resources on an extinct-in-the-wild disease, when it really needs to be gearing up to stop the plague killing you.
I'll be fascinated to see how this plays out for people with autoimmune conditions - generalised heightening of the immune system feels like it would be dangerous for those people. Are any immunologists lurking who might be able to speculate?
Its often completely normal to use healthy controls in a trial like this, healthy people not getting ill is your target audience and the long term stage 3 will be against healthy people. So many drugs are not tested against obvious groups that might produce a poor result to make the findings as strong as possible but it means in a lot of cases chronically ill people are making judgements on no data at all.
It seems like it could also be quite dangerous for those with food allergies.
But then it is mentioned that the treatment "also seemed to reduce the response to house dust mite allergens".
The treatment also supposedly activates macrophages in the lungs (and thus not elsewhere). Only some small particles and vapor droplets from foods go into the lungs.