11 ms·

Sergey Brin’s Search for a Parkinson’s Cure

136 points by thafman 16y ago

jleyank 16y ago
Data sample, n = 1. Michael J. Fox supposedly smoked like a demon in younger days. Has Parkinson's.
- faboo 16y ago
  "Cigarette smokers also seem to have a lower chance of developing Parkinson’s" I realize it's not really a science article (it's even possible all the information on Parkinson's came directly from Brin himself), but they didn't say cigarette smoking staved off Parkinson's completely - they said it lowered the odds of it developing. Thing is, the human body is so complicated, you can do all the right things and still come up on the short end. Load up on omega-3s and still get clogged arteries. Eat a well balanced diet and still get cancer. Doing the "right" things can only improve the odds - something's going to get to you in the end.
  - jodrellblank 16y ago
    "Thing is, the human body is so complicated, you can do all the right things and still come up on the short end" It's complicated, but it's not magic. If you are doing things to avoid a problem and you get the problem, then you were not doing "all the right things" - your understanding was wrong.
    - anamax 16y ago
      > If you are doing things to avoid a problem and you get the problem, then you were not doing "all the right things" - your understanding was wrong. Nope. "All the right things" isn't a guarantee and since you can't do anything about your dna, some folks are going to have risks no matter what they do. For example, you can get unlucky wrt a mutation or a cosmic ray.
pavs 16y ago
The world would be a better place if more young billionaires would have incurable diseases. On a serious note, I hope they can find a cure for him and millions of others who can do nothing about their illness other than playing a waiting game.
- orangecat 16y ago
  The world would be a better place if more young billionaires would have incurable diseases. They do. Aging may not technically be a disease, but it's currently unavoidable and cripples your body and often your mind. If I had a few extra billion dollars lying around, that's what I'd focus on.
- jeff18 16y ago
  What's really interesting about this is that he doesn't actually have the disease. Due to genetic testing, he may have an increased probability of getting it. >Many philanthropists have funded research into diseases they themselves have been diagnosed with. But Brin is likely the first who, based on a genetic test, began funding scientific research in the hope of escaping a disease in the first place.
temphn 16y ago
Just take a look at this silly hand wringing editorial about the innovation described in this article http://plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000965 http://plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pge... When the response to new and cool is "you didn't do it according to protocol", something is definitely wrong.
- thefool 16y ago
  The thing here is that this is the start of a different way of doing science, and as such you want to be careful of the precedents you set. It's a good thing that someone is thinking about how all this stuff is going to be protected. The protocol there is one of ensuring anonymity for people that want to remain anonomous. Making sure that that sentiment is retained moving forward is not a bad thing.
- mbreese 16y ago
  IRB review is a very important part of modern science, and the system is simply not setup to deal with research that hasn't been throughly cleared by a review board. You could consider IRB approval the first step in peer-review: your study is worthwhile and you aren't going to do anything unethical. IRBs are designed to protect the subjects/patients, the researchers, and the institutions. To skip that step is pretty unusual, and some hoops had to be jumped through in order to deal with it. I think the fact that the 23andMe study was published at all was a big leap, and represents the flexibility inherent in the scientific community. The response to "new and cool" wasn't "you didn't do it according to protocol". It was: since you didn't do it according to protocol, we need to verify that you did this ethically. Imagine what would have happened if they used someone's DNA in their study without their knowledge. When you're talking about publishing links between diseases and people's DNA, you better be damn sure you have permission to use their genetic data. That is what IRBs are good for. In a world where movies constantly are pointing out how scary/evil/unethical scientists can be (Andromeda strain, Splice), these checks are very important, even if it slows things down a little.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > Imagine what would have happened if they used someone's DNA in their study without their knowledge. When you're talking about publishing links between diseases and people's DNA, you better be damn sure you have permission to use their genetic data. Apart from privacy and "ownership of one's genetic material", why? Saying "Joe Smith's DNA contains a vital clue to solving parkinson's" doesn't affect Joe's ability to monetize. Saying the same about "unspecifed_37" doesn't affect anyone's privacy.
fgimenez 16y ago
I'm a computer scientist working in a Parkinson's lab that is very closely tied to the names in the article. My main duty is data analysis simply because there is so much information to process. If you want some more information regarding state of the art treatments, our website is http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/bankiewicz http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/bankiewicz . I also maintain our website, so if you see anything that needs fixing, drop me a line :)
- mbreese 16y ago
  there is so much information to process This can't be overstated. The shear amount of data available for processing is huge. Google-scale. I'm not very familiar with GWAS studies (I'm more familiar with high-throughput sequencing), but these are O(N^m) scale problems (where m>=2).
  - carbocation 16y ago
    Let's see, how do I put this gently; the data generated by high-throughput sequencing blows the living hell out of GWAS data. One exome requires reading 30-60x of what's read in a standard GWA. (Not to mention that most people get GWA data on their next-gen sequenced stuff anyways.) You're in the most data-intensive part of the field... congrats! As you probably know better than I, we're still in the age of targeted sequencing and exome sequencing. Whole genome is just beginning to dawn. Where I work, filesystem I/O is the rate-limiting step for most of my (next-gen sequencing) experiments...
    - nir 16y ago
      Could non-blocking filesystem I/O (a la node.js: http://blog.kodekabuki.com/post/267934877/how-node-js-exposes-traditional-blocking-i-o-calls-in-a http://blog.kodekabuki.com/post/267934877/how-node-js-expose... ) improve that?
      - carbocation 16y ago
        I don't think I have enough low-level knowledge to answer that intelligently at the moment. What I can say is that we're hitting these problems despite being on Isilon drives. (I think that is orthogonal to your solution, but again am not all too familiar with the subject.)
MikeCapone 16y ago
I'm surprised that he didn't invest more than 0.3% of his net worth (if it really is $15B) into this. It's his choice, but I think that if I was in his position, I'd spend more than that (but yeah, I guess that's easier to say when it's not you). Maybe there are bottlenecks that make it so more money wouldn't speed things up, but I bet there are ways to use resources to help alleviate or remove these bottlenecks.
- napierzaza 16y ago
  I could be easily to do with how liquid all that money is too.
- rada 16y ago
  Why would it have to be a percentage of his net worth? He's contributed $50MM which he feels is enough to "move the needle". Medical research moves slowly and simply throwing money at it may not offer any incremental benefit. Edit: I thought I'd add an example, since my father has Parkinson's so I know a little bit about it. One promising area of research is stem cell therapy. However, one known side effect of stem cell injection is cancer. (It takes years to develop but there have been enough studies already to show a strong correlation). Now, Parkinson's doesn't kill per se - it makes life miserable towards the end, but as a rule, people with Parkinson's live just as long as people without. So let's say you had really high net worth and wanted to spend it all to cure Parkinson's. Would you be able to "buy" people to trade a low chance of improvement in their lifestyle for a very real chance of cancer? I don't think so. Of course, this is just one example, however, it shows that things are not that simple.
  - MikeCapone 16y ago
    I'm just saying what I would do if I was worth 15 billion and knew that I had a high chance of having a serious disease like that. Throwing money blindly at a problem doesn't always help, that's very true. But I'm sure there are many intelligent ways to use more than 50m effectively. You mention stem cell therapies; helping get them to the point where they don't cause cancer anymore might be an area of research worth pushing, especially if some of it is under-funded. Giving out scholarships to people studying in areas related to the disease might be a way to help improve the supply of researchers. And when you can't hire more people, you can usually upgrade the equipment with faster/better stuff (shortening the upgrade cycle might help accelerate progress). You could help pay for conferences where the leading minds working on the problem can meet and exchange information (and if there's already enough of those, you can help make them better). You can probably find high-risk/high-reward research projects that aren't getting funded through the regular channels because those usually favor low-risk/low-reward projects. Etc. But I repeat: What Brin did is awesome. Kudos to him. All I'm saying is maybe I'd do it differently if I was in his shoes.
napierzaza 16y ago
Hehe. His "search" for the cure.
- napierzaza 16y ago
  I was just pointing out the amusing headline that Wired chose. On purpose I'm sure.
jessriedel 16y ago
If Sergey Brin thinks the current medical research establishment stifles certain kinds of research avenues, fine. But let's not cast this as him "proposing to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science". He's not the next Francis Bacon, and this isn't some deep insight into the nature of science.
- loboman 16y ago
  Why not? Can you explain?
  - kingkilr 16y ago
    Because he's not suggesting an experiment. This method involves taking data already obtained and doing analyses on it, to look for something, it's really a different way to form a hypothesis. After he finds something this way it'll go "back" to the standard rigors of the scientific method.
    - loboman 16y ago
      "it's really a different way to form a hypothesis" Isn't that enough?
      - makmanalp 16y ago
        By different, he doesn't mean revolutionary.
  - jessriedel 16y ago
    Because combing through large amounts of data in search of a hypothesis is as old as the hills. (In fact, the dangers of generating false hypotheses were already detailed on HackerNews a few days ago.) Brin isn't proposing some new way of doing science, he (I think) is just suggesting that the current mentality/funding-structure/whatever is not set up to support this type of analysis optimally.
- xcombinator 16y ago
rada 16y ago
The article sites the average American's risk of developing Parkinson's at 1%. I really question that. My husband's father died of Parkinson's several years ago, my own father is currently living with Parkinson's, my best friend's father has Parkinson, and so on. Am I the only one surrounded by Parkinson's disease, or is it a growing epidemic? I wonder if that 1% number is an old statistic. I can't find any sources, links?
- jerf 16y ago
  "Random is blotchy". At 1 out of 100, you don't have to know that many people who are able to get Parkinson's to have a non-trivial chance of seeing "more than expected" the number of cases. I don't know anybody with Parkinson's, and I "should", I know well more than 100 people who could have it, and if they did, I would know. And of all the people reading these comments and able to post, the odds that at least one would be in a "comment-worthy" blotch is basically 100%.
- pvg 16y ago
  You are confusing your personal experience with statistics. You can trivially find sources. Every single person you know might (unfortunately) have Parkinson's while the US population incidence remains around 1%.
  - rada 16y ago
    You are confusing your personal experience with statistics. We are not a bunch of 5-year olds around here, and I in particular am not so primitive as to think that the world revolves around me. There is nothing wrong with questioning mainstream journalism, especially when it's without citation and contradicts personal experience. You can trivially find sources. If so, wouldn't it be easy to paste a link, which is what I've requested in the first place? I hate the knee-jerk "google it" response - the person who gives it usually thinks that they are smarter than the person who asked for help in finding something, but all it shows is that you are (a) lazy and (b) disrespectful. Now, if you can provide sources, please do, and if you cannot, I respectfully ask that you please leave this thread to people who care to contribute something other than "google it, stupid".
carbocation 16y ago
This isn't a new kind of science, since this is the kind of science that we've been doing since ~2007-2008. They are basically describing GWAS.
- dminor 16y ago
  GWAS = Genome-wide association studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study
  - carbocation 16y ago
    Good link. At the end of the day, they're doing association studies... So they're taking a phenotype (even survey answers are a "phenotype" in a manner of speaking) and correlating it with a genotype (whether SNPs, exome data, or genome data). I'm a believer in this approach to science and am in no way poo-pooing their effort; I merely wanted to comment that, from the article's description of their approach, they're doing nothing iconoclastic.
danbmil99 16y ago
I think if I had that kind of knowledge of a fucked up disease hanging over my head, I'd put more than .3% of my net worth into the research. I'd want to REALLY move the needle, like alot.
mkramlich 16y ago
He of all people I would expect to just google for it.

136 points by thafman 16y ago

jleyank 16y ago

Data sample, n = 1. Michael J. Fox supposedly smoked like a demon in younger days. Has Parkinson's.

faboo 16y ago
"Cigarette smokers also seem to have a lower chance of developing Parkinson’s" I realize it's not really a science article (it's even possible all the information on Parkinson's came directly from Brin himself), but they didn't say cigarette smoking staved off Parkinson's completely - they said it lowered the odds of it developing. Thing is, the human body is so complicated, you can do all the right things and still come up on the short end. Load up on omega-3s and still get clogged arteries. Eat a well balanced diet and still get cancer. Doing the "right" things can only improve the odds - something's going to get to you in the end.
- jodrellblank 16y ago
  "Thing is, the human body is so complicated, you can do all the right things and still come up on the short end" It's complicated, but it's not magic. If you are doing things to avoid a problem and you get the problem, then you were not doing "all the right things" - your understanding was wrong.
  - anamax 16y ago
    > If you are doing things to avoid a problem and you get the problem, then you were not doing "all the right things" - your understanding was wrong. Nope. "All the right things" isn't a guarantee and since you can't do anything about your dna, some folks are going to have risks no matter what they do. For example, you can get unlucky wrt a mutation or a cosmic ray.

pavs 16y ago

The world would be a better place if more young billionaires would have incurable diseases. On a serious note, I hope they can find a cure for him and millions of others who can do nothing about their illness other than playing a waiting game.

orangecat 16y ago
The world would be a better place if more young billionaires would have incurable diseases. They do. Aging may not technically be a disease, but it's currently unavoidable and cripples your body and often your mind. If I had a few extra billion dollars lying around, that's what I'd focus on.
jeff18 16y ago
What's really interesting about this is that he doesn't actually have the disease. Due to genetic testing, he may have an increased probability of getting it. >Many philanthropists have funded research into diseases they themselves have been diagnosed with. But Brin is likely the first who, based on a genetic test, began funding scientific research in the hope of escaping a disease in the first place.

temphn 16y ago

Just take a look at this silly hand wringing editorial about the innovation described in this article http://plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pgen.1000965 http://plosgenetics.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pge... When the response to new and cool is "you didn't do it according to protocol", something is definitely wrong.

thefool 16y ago
The thing here is that this is the start of a different way of doing science, and as such you want to be careful of the precedents you set. It's a good thing that someone is thinking about how all this stuff is going to be protected. The protocol there is one of ensuring anonymity for people that want to remain anonomous. Making sure that that sentiment is retained moving forward is not a bad thing.
mbreese 16y ago
IRB review is a very important part of modern science, and the system is simply not setup to deal with research that hasn't been throughly cleared by a review board. You could consider IRB approval the first step in peer-review: your study is worthwhile and you aren't going to do anything unethical. IRBs are designed to protect the subjects/patients, the researchers, and the institutions. To skip that step is pretty unusual, and some hoops had to be jumped through in order to deal with it. I think the fact that the 23andMe study was published at all was a big leap, and represents the flexibility inherent in the scientific community. The response to "new and cool" wasn't "you didn't do it according to protocol". It was: since you didn't do it according to protocol, we need to verify that you did this ethically. Imagine what would have happened if they used someone's DNA in their study without their knowledge. When you're talking about publishing links between diseases and people's DNA, you better be damn sure you have permission to use their genetic data. That is what IRBs are good for. In a world where movies constantly are pointing out how scary/evil/unethical scientists can be (Andromeda strain, Splice), these checks are very important, even if it slows things down a little.
- anamax 16y ago
  > Imagine what would have happened if they used someone's DNA in their study without their knowledge. When you're talking about publishing links between diseases and people's DNA, you better be damn sure you have permission to use their genetic data. Apart from privacy and "ownership of one's genetic material", why? Saying "Joe Smith's DNA contains a vital clue to solving parkinson's" doesn't affect Joe's ability to monetize. Saying the same about "unspecifed_37" doesn't affect anyone's privacy.

fgimenez 16y ago

I'm a computer scientist working in a Parkinson's lab that is very closely tied to the names in the article. My main duty is data analysis simply because there is so much information to process. If you want some more information regarding state of the art treatments, our website is http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/bankiewicz http://neurosurgery.ucsf.edu/bankiewicz . I also maintain our website, so if you see anything that needs fixing, drop me a line :)

mbreese 16y ago
there is so much information to process This can't be overstated. The shear amount of data available for processing is huge. Google-scale. I'm not very familiar with GWAS studies (I'm more familiar with high-throughput sequencing), but these are O(N^m) scale problems (where m>=2).
- carbocation 16y ago
  Let's see, how do I put this gently; the data generated by high-throughput sequencing blows the living hell out of GWAS data. One exome requires reading 30-60x of what's read in a standard GWA. (Not to mention that most people get GWA data on their next-gen sequenced stuff anyways.) You're in the most data-intensive part of the field... congrats! As you probably know better than I, we're still in the age of targeted sequencing and exome sequencing. Whole genome is just beginning to dawn. Where I work, filesystem I/O is the rate-limiting step for most of my (next-gen sequencing) experiments...
  - nir 16y ago
    Could non-blocking filesystem I/O (a la node.js: http://blog.kodekabuki.com/post/267934877/how-node-js-exposes-traditional-blocking-i-o-calls-in-a http://blog.kodekabuki.com/post/267934877/how-node-js-expose... ) improve that?
    - carbocation 16y ago
      I don't think I have enough low-level knowledge to answer that intelligently at the moment. What I can say is that we're hitting these problems despite being on Isilon drives. (I think that is orthogonal to your solution, but again am not all too familiar with the subject.)

MikeCapone 16y ago

I'm surprised that he didn't invest more than 0.3% of his net worth (if it really is $15B) into this. It's his choice, but I think that if I was in his position, I'd spend more than that (but yeah, I guess that's easier to say when it's not you). Maybe there are bottlenecks that make it so more money wouldn't speed things up, but I bet there are ways to use resources to help alleviate or remove these bottlenecks.

napierzaza 16y ago
I could be easily to do with how liquid all that money is too.
rada 16y ago
Why would it have to be a percentage of his net worth? He's contributed $50MM which he feels is enough to "move the needle". Medical research moves slowly and simply throwing money at it may not offer any incremental benefit. Edit: I thought I'd add an example, since my father has Parkinson's so I know a little bit about it. One promising area of research is stem cell therapy. However, one known side effect of stem cell injection is cancer. (It takes years to develop but there have been enough studies already to show a strong correlation). Now, Parkinson's doesn't kill per se - it makes life miserable towards the end, but as a rule, people with Parkinson's live just as long as people without. So let's say you had really high net worth and wanted to spend it all to cure Parkinson's. Would you be able to "buy" people to trade a low chance of improvement in their lifestyle for a very real chance of cancer? I don't think so. Of course, this is just one example, however, it shows that things are not that simple.
- MikeCapone 16y ago
  I'm just saying what I would do if I was worth 15 billion and knew that I had a high chance of having a serious disease like that. Throwing money blindly at a problem doesn't always help, that's very true. But I'm sure there are many intelligent ways to use more than 50m effectively. You mention stem cell therapies; helping get them to the point where they don't cause cancer anymore might be an area of research worth pushing, especially if some of it is under-funded. Giving out scholarships to people studying in areas related to the disease might be a way to help improve the supply of researchers. And when you can't hire more people, you can usually upgrade the equipment with faster/better stuff (shortening the upgrade cycle might help accelerate progress). You could help pay for conferences where the leading minds working on the problem can meet and exchange information (and if there's already enough of those, you can help make them better). You can probably find high-risk/high-reward research projects that aren't getting funded through the regular channels because those usually favor low-risk/low-reward projects. Etc. But I repeat: What Brin did is awesome. Kudos to him. All I'm saying is maybe I'd do it differently if I was in his shoes.

napierzaza 16y ago

Hehe. His "search" for the cure.

napierzaza 16y ago
I was just pointing out the amusing headline that Wired chose. On purpose I'm sure.

jessriedel 16y ago

If Sergey Brin thinks the current medical research establishment stifles certain kinds of research avenues, fine. But let's not cast this as him "proposing to bypass centuries of scientific epistemology in favor of a more Googley kind of science". He's not the next Francis Bacon, and this isn't some deep insight into the nature of science.

loboman 16y ago
Why not? Can you explain?
- kingkilr 16y ago
  Because he's not suggesting an experiment. This method involves taking data already obtained and doing analyses on it, to look for something, it's really a different way to form a hypothesis. After he finds something this way it'll go "back" to the standard rigors of the scientific method.
  - loboman 16y ago
    "it's really a different way to form a hypothesis" Isn't that enough?
    - makmanalp 16y ago
      By different, he doesn't mean revolutionary.
- jessriedel 16y ago
  Because combing through large amounts of data in search of a hypothesis is as old as the hills. (In fact, the dangers of generating false hypotheses were already detailed on HackerNews a few days ago.) Brin isn't proposing some new way of doing science, he (I think) is just suggesting that the current mentality/funding-structure/whatever is not set up to support this type of analysis optimally.
xcombinator 16y ago

rada 16y ago

The article sites the average American's risk of developing Parkinson's at 1%. I really question that. My husband's father died of Parkinson's several years ago, my own father is currently living with Parkinson's, my best friend's father has Parkinson, and so on. Am I the only one surrounded by Parkinson's disease, or is it a growing epidemic? I wonder if that 1% number is an old statistic. I can't find any sources, links?

jerf 16y ago
"Random is blotchy". At 1 out of 100, you don't have to know that many people who are able to get Parkinson's to have a non-trivial chance of seeing "more than expected" the number of cases. I don't know anybody with Parkinson's, and I "should", I know well more than 100 people who could have it, and if they did, I would know. And of all the people reading these comments and able to post, the odds that at least one would be in a "comment-worthy" blotch is basically 100%.
pvg 16y ago
You are confusing your personal experience with statistics. You can trivially find sources. Every single person you know might (unfortunately) have Parkinson's while the US population incidence remains around 1%.
- rada 16y ago
  You are confusing your personal experience with statistics. We are not a bunch of 5-year olds around here, and I in particular am not so primitive as to think that the world revolves around me. There is nothing wrong with questioning mainstream journalism, especially when it's without citation and contradicts personal experience. You can trivially find sources. If so, wouldn't it be easy to paste a link, which is what I've requested in the first place? I hate the knee-jerk "google it" response - the person who gives it usually thinks that they are smarter than the person who asked for help in finding something, but all it shows is that you are (a) lazy and (b) disrespectful. Now, if you can provide sources, please do, and if you cannot, I respectfully ask that you please leave this thread to people who care to contribute something other than "google it, stupid".

carbocation 16y ago

This isn't a new kind of science, since this is the kind of science that we've been doing since ~2007-2008. They are basically describing GWAS.

dminor 16y ago
GWAS = Genome-wide association studies http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genome-wide_association_study
- carbocation 16y ago
  Good link. At the end of the day, they're doing association studies... So they're taking a phenotype (even survey answers are a "phenotype" in a manner of speaking) and correlating it with a genotype (whether SNPs, exome data, or genome data). I'm a believer in this approach to science and am in no way poo-pooing their effort; I merely wanted to comment that, from the article's description of their approach, they're doing nothing iconoclastic.

danbmil99 16y ago

I think if I had that kind of knowledge of a fucked up disease hanging over my head, I'd put more than .3% of my net worth into the research. I'd want to REALLY move the needle, like alot.

mkramlich 16y ago

He of all people I would expect to just google for it.