4 ms·
Humans are squandering antibiotics for the most inane uses, rapidly growing superbugs and resistance along the way. This will become a major public health crisi
by notadoc 9y ago
Humans are squandering antibiotics for the most inane uses, rapidly growing superbugs and resistance along the way. This will become a major public health crisis if nothing is done about it sooner than later.
- erikpukinskis 9y ago> rapidly growing superbugs We can outsmart them. We have biochemistry and flocks of 30 year old PhD students. They have a random number generator.
- okket 9y agoBut they have huge, I mean really, really huge numbers. And their generation time is measured in hours.
- dokein 9y agoNot "a" random number generator, but rather trillions of random number generators running in parallel.
- throwaway5752 9y agoThe sad thing is that this understates the parallelism of the evolutionary process by ... many orders of magnitude. A single human gut has on the order of 100 trillion bacteria. Also, the gp poster seems to be unaware of plasmids and conjugation process, too. (unless it was sarcasm that went over my head, which it very well may have been)
- erikpukinskis 9y agoI would gladly take 1000 vacuum tubes over 100 trillion random number generators.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoSame thing
- sandov 9y agoAnd a natural machine learning algorithm.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y agoUnfortunately many from the 30 year old flocks are finding the best ways to optimize ad revenue because that pays many times more than biochemistry.
- erikpukinskis 9y agoThose who resist the temptation and stay focused on disease eradication will be wealthy beyond their wildest dreams
- jdietrich 9y agoTell that to Edward Jenner or Jonas Salk. Unless you're referring to spiritual wealth, nobody has ever got rich by eradicating a disease.
- whyenot 9y agoFor the "they" side you elided natural selection, lateral gene transfer, and generation times measured in hours.
- notadoc 9y agoSo why aren't we then? The market is failing on this.
- enord 9y agoIn an age of increasing nationalistic sentiments and military escalation, it's become a common trope that there's almost no one left to remember the tragedies of WWII. Coincidentally there's certainly nobody alive who remembers the previous pandemic, Spanish Flu. (I say "previous" - there's an ongoing pandemic of HIV/aids, albeit a more gradual affair, but that's happening to Other People (TM))