A World Health Organization mission to China to investigate the origins of COVID-19 reported earlier this week that it had ruled out the idea that the coronavirus pandemic could have sprung from a lab leak, but taken as a whole, the lab-leak theory remains a serious possibility; the World Health Organization’s investigative team will need to present any new evidence it used to rule out the theory when it releases its mission report.
Almost every day, we get the same questions from family, friends, and strangers who happen to find our emails: Which COVID-19 vaccine should I get? Should I wait to get the “best” vaccine?
Researchers from the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) have repurposed a component from a Microsoft Xbox 360 to develop a high-resolution large-volume nanoscale 3D printer with various applications in the medical sector.
The team took an optical pick-up unit (OPU) component from an Xbox 360 console to replace a conventional Stereolithography (SLA) optical system, in order to drastically simplify the SLA 3D printing system. With the OPU costing less than $5, the researcher’s solution could potentially increase the affordability of such equipment by thousands of pounds.
“With our 3D printer that can print micro and nanoscale 3D objects, we are able to go from tens of micrometers in printing resolution down to hundreds of nanometers without expensive specialized components,” said DTU PhD Student Tien-Jen Chang and research team member.
Posted in biotech/medical
Novartis Gene Therapies is planning to submit an investigational new drug application (IND) for OAV201, its Rett syndrome gene therapy candidate, by the end of the year, the company announced in a letter to the Rett community.
If the IND is approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), Novartis would be allowed to begin clinical trials to test the therapy in people with Rett syndrome.
“We recognize the significant unmet need among patients with Rett syndrome and want to again assure the Rett community that we are fully committed to pursuing a gene therapy for Rett syndrome, and that we are continuing our work with a sense of urgency and purpose,” the OAV201 development team at Novartis wrote in the letter, shared on the Rett Syndrome Research Trust’s website.
Dogs’ Highly Evolved Noses Can Rapidly Detect the SARS-CoV-2 Virus For some 15000 years, dogs have been our hunting partners, workmates, helpers and companions. Could they also be our next allies in the fight against COVID-19? According to UC Santa Barbara professor emeritus Tommy Dickey and his collaborator, BioScent researcher Heather Junqueira, they can. And with a review paper published in the Journal of Osteopathic Medicine they have added to a small but growing consensus that trained medical scent dogs can effectively be used for screening individuals who may be infected with the COVID-19 virus.
In a recent interview, he said the next big disasters facing humanity are climate change and bioterrorism.
Gates was asked about the next crises the world may have to confront.
Julian Huxley was part of the intellectual dynasty started by TH Huxley, and is more influenced by Buddhist ideas than Judeo-Christian. “T. H. Huxley was a paleontologist with a medical background who gained great prominence in the nineteenth century as one of the foremost defenders of Darwin’s evolutionary theory. Victorians were often inclined to see him as “the living embodiment of science militant,”(8) for Huxley actually clashed with contemporary defenders of Biblical supernaturalism in the name of science.(9) A very late product of his intellectual career, Evolution and Ethics (1893) shows him in a mellowed, reflective mood. The radical disjunction between the ethical and the cosmic processes such as is frequently highlighted here hardly squares with “orthodox” Darwinism; in fact Irvine has called Huxley’s effort in this context a “somewhat puzzling manoeuvre” that is “full of talk about Indian mysticism and of protest about the cruelties of evolution.”(10) Yet his overall treatment of his theme is not a matter that need concern us now.(11) What must be noted, on the other hand, is that in the course of his professed endeavor to inquire into the origin and the basis of ethical values from an evolutionary standpoint, Huxley indeed undertook a brief survey of the leading philosophies that had helped to form mankind’s conceptions of such values. He emphasized in this connection that India had engendered a distinctive outlook on life, and some of the ideas central to that outlook (as, for example, karman) actually made a notable impression on him. But it is upon a particular religion of Indian origin, namely Buddhism, that he chose to dwell at length and, I think, in a way that merits close attention.” Buddhism is” system which knows no God in the Western sense; which denies a soul to man; which counts the belief in immortality a blunder and hope of it a sin; which refuses any efficacy to prayer and sacrifice; which bids men look to nothing but their own efforts for salvation; which in its original purity, knew nothing of vows of obedience, abhorred intolerance, and never sought the aid of the secular arm; yet spread over a considerable moiety of the Old World with marvellous rapidity, and is still, with whatever base admixure of foreign superstitions, the dominant creed of a large fraction of mankind.”
A note on a Victorian evaluation and its “comparativist dimension” By Vijitha Rajapakse Philosophy East and West Volume 35, no. 3 (July 1985)
©by the University of Hawaii Press
British perceptions of Buddhism tended to be surprisingly vague during the early part of the nineteenth century. Even so reputed an “authority” on India at the time as James Mill, for example, does not appear to have known anything definite on the subject; his famous The History of British India (1818) incorporates some lengthy commentaries on India’s cultural and intellectual achievements, but save for a bare reference, Buddhism, significantly, escaped his consideration. Evidently, James Mill, to all intents and purposes, viewed India as home to a single indigenous religion, Hinduism.(1) These perceptions, however, changed in due course, thanks to the advance of Oriental scholarship, especially Western research on Buddhist textual sources.
Although some researchers are reluctant to share genome data, the field is generally viewed as generous compared with other disciplines. Still, the repositories meant to foster sharing often present barriers to those uploading and downloading data. Researchers tell tales of spending months or years tracking down data sets, only to find dead ends or unusable files. And journal editors and funding agencies struggle to monitor whether scientists are sticking to their agreements.
Data sharing was a core principle that led to the success of the Human Genome Project 20 years ago. Now scientists are struggling to keep information free.
UK-based BenevolentAI has dosed the first patient in its first-in-human clinical trial of its novel multi-target drug, BEN-2293, for treating atopic dermatitis (AD).
Designed and developed using BenevolentAI’s scientific and technical expertise, BEN-2293 is a potent and selective small-molecule Pan-Trk antagonist formulated for topical delivery.
BenevolentAI has dosed the first patient in its clinical trial of its novel multi-target drug, BEN-2293, for treating atopic dermatitis (AD).
With nine vaccines now showing they can powerfully prevent severe illness and death from #COVID19—and vaccines in short supply—researchers are mulling an issue that, even a few months ago, was only hypothetical: Should people mix and match vaccines that require two shots?
Scarce vaccine supplies ramp up interest in combining different doses.
