I think alphafold gets hated on too much. It won’t revolutionize things but I bet people are out there right now looking at different structures and motifs only seen on alphafold to get a better idea on how existing drugs bind and affect them. And then designing analogues and so on. Time will tell, I guess.
It’s kind of like anything in research, lots of small steps enable revolutionary breakthroughs every so often.
You can assume that any known drug target has experimentally determined structures available, once you spend the enormous amounts of effort necessary to put a drug through real clinical trials the effort to determine the target structure is pretty much irrelevant.
Of course there are plenty of drugs where we either don't know where they bind or we're probably wrong about where we think they bind. Or they bind at multiple places and some desirable or non-desirable effect are due to binding at places we don't know yet.
There are real uses to having lots of high-quality structure predictions for proteins. Drug development is something that only get limited benefits here. If you want to know how drugs or drug candidates bind to proteins you first create a protein structure with X-ray crystallography. Then you soak your crystals with your drugs or drug candidates and determine even more structures. The interesting part here is not necessarily the overall fold of the protein (which is mostly what AlphaFold gives you) but e.g. a single hydrogen bond to the drug in the active pocket of the target protein. You need really high-quality data if you want to do any kind of rational drug design, most of the time we still just semi-randomly vary structures until they bind better as far as I understand.
I find this view very strange. If you apply the same logic to politics, the outcome is pretty grim. And we've been seeing more and more of that.
I don't like hype or hate that's devoid of nuance. But actual scientists working in these fields don't generally pay attention to these things as much as we might. They read the papers, and they have years of training to help them decide what is overhyped and what isn't. I'm not sure what happens on HN or in advertising channels has such a huge bearing on this.
Actual scientists in the field are usually the ones providing the hate and counterbalance to the massive marketing machine that is Google.
The scientists are not the ones who need the counter-marketing, that's for the people who are not experts and only hear this one achievement (which is significant!) being trumpeted repeatedly as Google maximizes the PR benefits of conducting research.
It's like IBM's Watson play, except that there is at least a some serious meat behind AlphaFold.
Thanks, that solved it, but now I have other errors like needing to install sass etc. V2 seemed much better now, it just worked, now I have to go installing everything and the kitchen sink.
Not knowing anything about glyphosate, I went to the article before reading the comments. I’ll just put this here because it was clear the researchers wanted to be sure people see it. From the first paragraph of the article—>
> In 2015, the International Agency for Research on Cancer determined that glyphosate is a “probable human carcinogen” (IARC, 2015). However, the European Food Safety Authority and the Joint Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO)/World Health Organization (WHO) Meeting on Pesticide Residues (EFSA 2015, FAO/WHO 2015) determined that glyphosate is unlikely to be a carcinogen. The US EPA concluded that “available data and weight-of-evidence clearly do not support the descriptors “carcinogenic to humans,” “likely to be carcinogenic to humans,” or “inadequate information to assess carcinogenic potential” (US EPA 2017a). Controversy and concern that the rising use of glyphosate may have adverse human-health effects exist (Myers et. al., 2016).
People who have been exposed to the chemical got cancer. Internal Monsanto documents show the link and their concern. A man got a court to rule in his favour for 289 million dollars, after the jury saw this evidence: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2018/aug/10/monsanto-tr...
As far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate and last time I brought up this lawsuit on HN I was shocked people were defending them. We’re talking about the company that intentionally sold HIV infected blood to people. If it was legal and they could increase profits by lighting people on fire they would do it. Yet people trust corrupt research that they paid for showing their product is safe.
Well their crap poison is on almost all the produce in every grocery store in the country so I guess they get the last laugh.
I love the fact that Beyer retired the Monsanto brand. It's a real bad sign when a company whose most famous product is Zyklon B tells you that your brand is toxic.
Jesus Christ.. Imagine being in jail for selling weed to someone who wanted it, meanwhile everyone that orchestrated this is still relaxing on their yachts. Unbelievable.
I believe that some company monitors websites like reddit and twitter for talk about Monsanto or Big Oil (fracking) and that company pays shills to defend them.
Someone on reddit claimed he was on a US presidential campaign doing exactly that. Respond to posts with pre-made replies, if things got hairy, distract with humor or memes. Interestingly, they were aware when they were dealing with another paid shill from the opposing side.
After all those years on the internet I think I can also feel the impact of systematic forum activity; controversial topics that get swift, well articulated replies with links and upvotes. Another comment, declaring the winner of the debate!
Is it individual experts who weigh in, organically? Groups who are passionate about the topic and organize via Discord? Or professional shitposters and memers? Who can tell. But a few internet-addicted Reddit aficionados could cover a lot of topics in a lot of communities for a small salary and huge impact.
Hillary Clinton had a super PAC that did so openly:
"In April 2016, Correct the Record announced that it would be spending $1 million to find and confront social media users who post unflattering messages about Clinton in a "task force" called "Barrier Breakers 2016".[1][5] In addition to this, the task force aimed to encourage Sanders supporters to support Clinton and to thank both "prominent supporters and committed superdelegates".[6] The organization's president, Brad Woodhouse, said they had "about a dozen people engaged in [producing] nothing but positive content on Hillary Clinton" and had a team distributing information "particularly of interest to women".[7]"
I don't know why you're singling HRC (it also wasn't her but David Brock, which is ironically the kind of misinformation designed to make her seem ultra-nefarious that CTR was formed to combat) out here; literally every issue and political campaign has activists doing this. They're called messaging and persuasion campaigns, and they include everything from yard signs to forum posters to ad buys. Do you have an issue with conservatives or pro-life activists doing this?
Your sort of low effort knee jerk response to a well researched informative comment is precisely why it's so hard to have rational discussion online. Can you not stay on topic and refrain from instigating polarisation for one minute? Do you have an opinion on these "persuasion campaigns"?
It's not well-researched; it has a single Wikipedia link, which it doesn't even represent properly (literally the first thing it says is CTR was founded by David Brock). It's also not informative; it presents a slanted, highly selective case against Clinton and Democratic/liberal/progressive politics. It's the Fox News of comments. It's also not on topic; how is CTR relevant to glyphosate?
I do have an opinion: Citizens United should be overturned, or we should have an Amendment clarifying that money isn't speech, so we can get rid of Super PACs. I also think the advertising industry should be regulated such that it's a shadow of what it is today.
It's a Wikipedia link with 7 references that is utterly neutrally formulated. If you think that's even close to how Fox News presents their abhorrent lies you can count yourself lucky to have not watched it ever.
In the meanwhile you apparently hold an opinion that is perfectly in line with the argument of the parent that you somehow assume is in support of Republican/regressive politics for no good reason. If you've got a better example of a SPAC that funded internet trolls you could just post a single Wikipedia link to that instead of making vague statements about slant.
There's one thing that the republicans are right about, and that's that Wikipedia, HN and most of reddit are biased against them, and that's because they're biased towards the truth and the whole republican platform is based around denying reality.
I think the Wikipedia article is great; no issues with it. What I take issue with is what I pointed out: parent is singling out HRC for founding something she didn't even found, even when the first sentence of his source says someone else founded it, in an effort to make her look nefarious despite the fact that Super PACs are something both sides (first Republicans, then Democrats in order to keep up in this race to the bottom) do as SOP, and as all issue campaigns have done since there have been issue campaigns.
> If you've got a better example of a SPAC that funded internet trolls you could just post a single Wikipedia link to that instead of making vague statements about slant.
Sure, let me introduce you to the Willkies [0] and anti-abortion PACs [1]. Both examples of people pushing their issue opinions into the public square (with doctored content and a lot of money I might add) or directly into getting people elected to make policies they'd like.
> reality is biased against republicans
100% agree. My only thing here was taking HRC's campaign totally out of context. This is how US politics works since Citizens United (ironically also a case where a group of people wanted to release a super negative video about her in the political ad blackout period [3]).
I mean, it would be strange that in 2022 HN would not be included in continuous campaigns to maintain good PR and keep getting baseless positive opinions, seed doubt and confusion to any criticism.
I would expect any big multinational corp to have few permanent people / external agency on permanent contract just for this. And considering how these corps in discussion are almost cartoonishly evil, there is probably a lot of work being done constantly.
I mean, it’s what I’d do. The cost is quite modest compared to the ability to sway public opinion. I’m seeing aggressive defense of nuclear power too. Either I’m underestimating the number of pro nuclear evangelists or there’s a paid lobby.
There was a dutch researcher that claimed that their weed killer was responsible for the wiping out of many insects, notably bees and bumblebees, but possibly others.
The man was ridiculed by his professional peers, whom later turned out to be bribed. The researcher was fully correct.
I don’t know which thread it was but I have seen the same thing. Apparently considering a company’s past actions when judging their current actions is “childish” because all the bad people left after they got in trouble and everyone there is good now. What a load of crap!
Yeah it’s a tough one. A “company” is just a box with people inside. Or maybe a “separating the artist from the art” type exercise.
Bayer is a bit more nuanced for me than Monsanto
>As far as I’m concerned Bayer and Monsanto are like evil incarnate
Especially so when they were a subsidiary of IG Farben.
>The company had ties in the 1920s to the liberal German People's Party and was accused by the Nazis of being an "international capitalist Jewish company".[8] A decade later, it was a Nazi Party donor and, after the Nazi takeover of Germany in 1933, a major government contractor, providing significant material for the German war effort. Throughout that decade it purged itself of its Jewish employees; the remainder left in 1938.[9] Described as "the most notorious German industrial concern during the Third Reich"[10] in the 1940s the company relied on slave labour from concentration camps, including 30,000 from Auschwitz,[11] and was involved in medical experiments on inmates at both Auschwitz and the Mauthausen concentration camp.[12][13] One of its subsidiaries supplied the poison gas, Zyklon B, that killed over one million people in gas chambers during the Holocaust.[b][15]
The Allies seized the company at the end of the war in 1945[a] and the US authorities put its directors on trial. Held from 1947 to 1948 as one of the subsequent Nuremberg trials, the IG Farben trial saw 23 IG Farben directors tried for war crimes and 13 convicted.[16]
People who have been exposed to <everything possible in the world> got cancer, but that is meaningless in showing causation. Internal documents show concern, but show no evidence that it causes cancer, or that Monsanto had internal data showing it caused cancer.
This type of rhetoric isn’t helpful, except to companies and manufacturers looking to minimize the attention around specific products with known carcinogenic properties.
This type of rhetoric isn’t helpful, except to people who wish to replace basic critical thinking and healthy skepticism with vacuous opinionated polemics on evil corporations and their general evilness.
Glyphosate is the "penicillin of agriculture," a foundational discovery that has revolutionized the industry.
Glyphosate alone has not been found to be a strong carcinogen in scientific studies, but testing with the surfactants, adjuvents, and other additives with which it is normally used may increase the carcinogenicity.
Companies settle lawsuits all the time for claims they believe are meritlesss, for two reasons:
1. Going through a lawsuit all the way to conclusion, even if you win, is a long, expensive process that potentially exposes you to a considerable amount of negative publicity and causes a degree of internal chaos.
2. Juries are unpredictable and even a small chance of a bad outcome may be worth paying to avoid.
If this is to be believed, they've set aside _billions_ for cancer-related claims and pulled the product from the residential market, and there are still questions about the EPA's ruling that it is safe. Definitive, no, but certainly raises serious questions.
A surprisingly common form of conversational failure is when two (or more) parties are discussing some matter all with different ideas as to what is being discussed or the context of the discussion.
I'd run across a good description of that recently though I can't seem to recall where / find it presently.
It's not included in this discussion of Wiio's Laws, though there's enough other material there that's excellent guidance for communication that I'm linking it regardless:
You seem to be presenting this fact as some sort of that bayer is guilty, but it's not really convincing. For one, it's a 8 person jury in san francisco. I'd expect them to rule against bayer on ideological grounds (ie. little guy vs multi bililon dollar multinational corporation) alone. Second, if there's no scientific consensus on the effects of glysophate, I doubt a panel of laypersons would do better.
Perhaps, but there's also a reason most lawyers do their best to make sure their case is heard in a favorable jurisdiction. You can only strike so many jurors for something as banal as "doesn't like large multinational corporations", which it's not obvious that would entirely bias them.
It's not to say that every juror walked in already decided on it, but I'd somewhat expect a panel of urban CA citizens to be at least 60/40 in favor of a person against a big corp, and so if the evidence is already somewhat in that direction, then that's how it goes.
Why would that be? Lawyers aren't magicians, if the jury is predisposed to rule in certain way, the lawyer can flap their lips as long as they wanted, and change nothing. Ingrained convictions are remarkably hard to change, even if presented with undeniable contradicting evidence - see example of apocalyptic cults surviving failed prophecy repeatedly. Councils aren't wizards, and they can reject only so many potential jurors. If there are none to be found that would listen, then council can't do much.
There’s more than glyphosate in roundup. Also if glyphosate increased the risk of cancer, we would see cancer increase when it started to get widely used. Cancer rates except for skin cancer keep falling.
Sure. Anything's possible. This is a fully generalizable argument. Maybe you, personally, cause 10% of the world's cancer, but other factors have caused an overall falling cancer rate, but when you, personally, die or turn off your magical cancer-causing powers, rates will fall even further.
Virtually everyone who eats food has been exposed to glyphosate at this point. You could use the same logic to conclude water is a carcinogen. Every case of cancer is clearly linked to water exposure.
Evidently they had internal communications coaching employees on how to communicate about glyphosate, knowing that it’s dangerous and that they can’t claim that it’s safe.
That’s just one damning factor, but there are more. For example, in multiple cases juries agreed that Monsanto has manipulated writing and data from studies of their products. Essentially Ghost writing studies to suit their needs.
While Monsanto was guilty, many companies and people settle for large amounts of money even when not guilty. Settling is often about cost not guilt. A company settles to reduce future risks and to stop unbounded lawsuit costs.
The claim was about companies that are actually not guilty, and while sometimes that's ambiguous it's up to IncRnd to cite an example where it actually is ambiguous or better for the company, with a payment of a billion or more.
Winning or losing a lawsuit of this type is not necessarily proof of guilt, or proof that roundup causes cancer. what it proves is that a jury was convinced that it does.
And we get guilt wrong in criminal trials all the time (see the number of people the Innocence Project has gotten off of death row because the person didn't do it). A jury saying one thing doesn't make it objective truth.
Roughly 90% accuracy. And the burden of proof is lower in civil cases.
Which isn't to say that a civil trial verdict isn't accurate to some extent - it just isn't absolute proof. There's some evidence in scientific literature about roundup's carcinogenicity at high doses (like what a farmer or landscaper would commonly encounter) and other various health issues at high dose. The big question is what happens at low doses and if it's impactful. The science is still out on that (and the alternative of lower agricultural output per unit of land area isn't really palatable from both a starvation risk perspective and a climate perspective).
No we don't. In criminal law the burden of proof is "beyond reasonable doubt". The bar is set much lower in civil law with the plaintiff only needing to demonstrate a "preponderance of evidence".
Behind a paywall so I can't see the details, but note that nowadays when you buy Roundup it has a lot more then glyphosate in it, and I trust that "a lot more" far less than if it was just glyphosate.
Not really, 10B just isn't very much. 95,000 cases are being settled for $25-250k a person, where individual cases are 9 digit awards and only require convincing a jury. 100, max 1000, out of those 95,000 people getting awards at jury trials is enough to make that cheaper. It'll be interesting to see what/if 3M settles earplug liability for. Talc powder liability has already cost JNJ over 5 billion, and that's with the Texas two-step.
Also, there's this:
> Part of the $1.25 billion will be used to establish an independent expert panel to resolve two critical questions about glyphosate: Does it cause cancer, and if so, what is the minimum dosage or exposure level that is dangerous?
> If the panel concludes that glyphosate is a carcinogen, Bayer will not be able to argue otherwise in future cases — and if the experts reach the opposite conclusion, the class action’s lawyers will be similarly bound.
I believe they mean it's a lot of money to the company, not the plaintiffs. $10B is a lot of money to any company.
You should see what Chevron has been doing to Steven Donziger for winning the $9.5B case against them for massively polluting the Amazon.
> The tribunal unanimously held that a $9.5 billion pollution judgment by Ecuador’s Supreme Court against Chevron “was procured through fraud, bribery and corruption and was based on claims that had been already settled and released by the Republic of Ecuador years earlier.”
That case?
Bayer settled the class action for 3 orders of magnitude less than some jury awards. They don't have to believe it causes cancer, just that a low percentage of juries can be convinced that making Bayer pay up is a good idea. Straightforward math. They still have 10s of thousands of other court cases to deal with, too.
They put him under house arrest and Chevron appointed their own judge in the case. It was all kinds of messed. That's just how powerful oil companies are. I mean, there's no question they've polluted to a massive degree in the Amazon.
The back and forth with regulatory agencies is so frustrating.
Another user here pointed out a while back that the better regulatory model, when it comes to health, is to put the onus on the supplier. We must scientifically prove the thing is safe to use, not have to prove it is unsafe to be removed.
This is essentially the model that we have with the FDA, right? And we have a bunch of problems with that too. I don't think there's a simple solution that just makes all scenarios better/easier/safer/whatever.
Perhaps we do have problems with that model. But are the problems of the "tens of millions of humans have potentially been exposed to this harmful compound and the result seems disastrous" variety? Or are the problems of the "it takes longer than normal" variety?
Because both are "problems". But I know which one I'd rather have as a society.
Sometimes the result actually results in millions of humans getting cancer as a result of inaction.
In most of the world (Canada, EU, Korea, Japan, etc.) sunscreen is regulated as a cosmetic, but in the US the FDA regulates it as an OTC drug. The last time an ingredient was approved for sunscreen use was in 1999, and in other countries there are more active ingredients with better properties than what is currently approved for use in the US.
The problem is that a good deal of the US approved list is basically off limits because they've since been shown to be unhealthy, and what's left on the list has challenging cosmetic properties to the point where people can't be convinced to apply sunscreen every day, because formulations do things like become oily and don't play nice with other cosmetics, or show up as chalky white pigment on any remotely dark skintones. https://slate.com/technology/2014/04/new-sunscreens-for-uva-...
Do the results seem disastrous? https://www.cdc.gov/cancer/dcpc/research/update-on-cancer-de... Cancer death rates in the US are going down. The primary one is lung cancer, though, and cigarette usage has been declining... so would love to see more incidence rates broken out into types, too. But it seems at least non-disastrous in death outcomes, so far, unless you have those other numbers handy and are going off of that.
You're overthinking this a little. If Monsanto comes up with a new weedkiller, they have to prove that its safe for humans before its put into use. It has nothing to do with restaurants. Obviously stuff would be grandfathered in as well. But its a fantastic idea going forward.
If you require farmers to use "approved" processes for farming, but you don't require grocery stores and restaurants to use those farmers, then they will simply buy food from farmers that don't follow those principles.
If we're talking about domestic farmers, they're going to get caught at the same rate regardless of what you tell grocery stores and restaurants to do.
If you mean international farmers, I think it's obvious you'd have to apply the same rules to imported food, so no they won't simply buy food that doesn't follow the rules.
But also, even if we did require grocery stores and restaurants to use certified farmers in some way, that wouldn't be hard at all! That's not even in the same ballpark as requiring scientific proof of chemical safety.
They probably haven't thought through all the good chemicals have done. If we stopped all progress in chemicals 100 years ago our world would like a very different place.
A less wealthy place where more people died of starvation.
Great, so we're just going to need a few long term clinical trials assessing the impacts of each of ingestion, skin contact, inhalation, eye exposure, etc. separately for childhood exposure, adult exposure, exposure during pregnancy, acute exposure, chronic exposure, and so on. 100 billion dollars and thirty years later, maybe you can start provisionally selling your slightly better scotch tape.
That’s a little disingenuous. Something like an herbicide that’s broadly applied to fruits and vegetables that millions of people are eating should be under far higher scrutiny than a niche product that has limited human contact.
Things that don't have much human contact in the general population can have significant human contact during the manufacturing process of products containing or processed with them.
> "...the existing classifications for glyphosate as a substance that causes serious eye damage and is toxic to aquatic life with long lasting effects should be retained.
> The committee found that the available scientific evidence did not meet the criteria to classify glyphosate for specific target organ toxicity, or as a carcinogenic, mutagenic or reprotoxic substance. "
One thing I've noticed with regard to all of the safety claims made about glyphosate is that it only claims that it's safe with respect to humans directly.
They never discuss what it might do to your gut biome. That seems like a curious omission, to me, for a substance like this.
Shouldn't that be a standard part of the risk analysis?
Yes that should be part of the full regulatory analysis, but then you're talking about active effect concentrations, which are generally going to be much higher than possible carcinogen concentrations.
>Shouldn't that be a standard part of the risk analysis?
To be fair all this stuff about "gut biome" causing everything from depression to obesity only got popular around the last few years, not a decade or two ago when the bulk of the studies were being done.
Just to play devil’s advocate for a second: the fact that the EU has banned glyphosate does not mean that it’s a confirmed carcinogen. It only means that it’s considered harmful, which it can be in many other ways apart from causing cancer.
This article a carefully crafted piece of propaganda disguising itself as journalism. This is part (banning herbicides and pesticides) of the green movement. Of course, they forget why we use them in the first place.
"We" use them in the first place because agribusiness wants to grow as much crops as cheaply as possible and consequences be damned as long as it cuts down on their expenses.
Monsanto also pushed the sterile lawn image in american culture. Cover your lawn in our herbicides and fertilizers and you can be a proud american lawn mower. Who cares if that means carcinogenic runoff into your lakes and rivers.
re the CPT codes--
27486 and 27487 are for total knee revisions, not for a first-time replacement. 27486 is used if you only revise 1 component (ie the femoral side or the tibial side). 27487 is billed when both components are revised.
Thank you! I appreciate the correction, and this exactly shows how challenging it is for the average consumer to actually use these chargemasters in the first place to do their own research.
My goal is building a SaaS to $500 MRR. I work in a non-tech field but have always enjoyed coding. This hasn’t led to a business because I have focused on features I thought would be useful and interesting but weren’t solving core customer problems. In 2022 I will focus on customer development first and build from there.
It’s kind of like anything in research, lots of small steps enable revolutionary breakthroughs every so often.