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This makes me mad. Billions are being poured into medical research and I wonder how much of it is being wasted. Several weeks ago I heard that some study conclu

• jfarlow 8y ago
  Don't let it make you mad - this is science. And this kind of refining progress is precisely how science should work. This is a good thing. Start with a toehold, and move inward. Cycle back when you realize your toe wasn't in quite the right place. But you couldn't have even gotten there without that toehold. We need controlled model systems to do science, even if the models are imperfect. And that's okay - the (good) scientists know this. If we had started with 'full' media from the beginning we'd still be describing and making media variants rather than getting any cancer research done. And we've done a hell of a lot of good cancer research since these media were defined. It's a little like the 'Standards' xkcd comic - if you make too many standards, the standards cease to be useful as a standard. Further, the effect of the media in this case here is likely more profound when doing 'biology' rather than 'biochemistry' experiments. And until recently, the cells themselves were toeholds onto real human biology; HeLa cells are very unusual, but we used them because we could reproduce the work between labs because the cells proliferated indefinitely. Who cares about a little unnatural media when the genomes of the cells are completely messed up. (And again, the use of HeLa cells taught us a LOT even if they were very not-normal). Normal human cells just don't last outside of a body - so if one insisted we only use normal human cells there would be zero research, and even less reproducible research because no one could use the same stocks. It's only and precisely because we do have a (admittedly flawed) standard that such a different and likely more natural media even can be objectively compared against. Biology has a lot of variables. You can't hold everything constant the way you'd like. So you pick just those that you expect will make the biggest differences. And we should certainly go back and check ourselves every once in a while to ensure we don't get lazy and assume a particular protocol should remain the same in the face of changes in the field. But I don't think that's the problem here. We're just better scientists now - and we're learning that our early assumptions can now be improved on. The article, especially in its final paragraphs is actually quite even handed. The title, however, is very much hyperbole.
  • Laforet 8y ago
    Well said, the shortcomings of EMEM and its variants are pretty well known. The only reason they have not been phased out seems to have more things to do with cost and institutional inertia. Microbiology used to be in a similar place not very long ago, with people trying (and failing) to grow every species in lysogeny broth, a formulation from the 1950s that is not even remotedly close to optimal for any bacterium including lab strains of E. coli. Improvements happened gradually and by the mid 2000s things have been turned around, with more efficient techniques as well as the ability to study things previously considered impossible to culture in a petri dish. I think a similar shift will eventually come to mammalian cell culture, however we probably won't realise until it has already happened.
• madhadron 8y ago
  How much is being wasted? A lot of it. But media is not one of the big problems. Media are formulated for various reasons. The first reason is to get something to grow in culture at all. This is hard. Most cells from mammals won't survive more than a few hours outside the body. Most bacteria won't grow in liquid culture. So the first thing a medium is formulated for is to get something to grow. Often you fail at this entirely. Leprosy is still cultured in armadillo footpads because we don't have a medium it will grow in. Penny Boston is probably the best in the world at this, and her artistry is basically thinking of what weird thing might put the right bits in medium to get some funny bug to grow. Rusty nails, for example. Getting a culture medium is a big deal. Next is getting a repeatable culture medium. Old microbiology papers regularly used beef heart broth. That's made by boiling beef hearts and adding a few things to it. The amounts in it are completely uncontrolled. If you try the same experiment two weeks later with stringier beef hearts, and you get different results, is that the broth? Maybe. So we get defined media, media that are repeatable. Weirdly, that may still involve ground up critters. Luria-Bertani broth, which is ubiquitous, includes ground up yeast. We know how to culture yeast into a repeatable ingredient, though. Then you have specialized broths. Can this organism produce its own ascorbic acid? Try to grow it in a medium without ascorbic acid. Once you get through a bunch of experiments like that, you end up with a minimal medium. Minimal media are incredibly useful for metabolism studies. Let me rephrase: they are essential for metabolism studies. And then there are selective media, such as 7H9 used for mycobacteria. Tuberculosis grows in it okay. Very little else does. That's really helpful because almost every culturable organism grows faster than tuberculosis, so without a selective medium, you pretty much always get contaminated cultures. And there are logistical issues. I know that if I grow my culture in a rich medium and then take cells from it and grow them in a minimal medium, I will get different results than if they were passaged through a minimal medium. That's not genetic, it's just physiological adaptation. But in tuberculosis, rich medium takes weeks to grow a culture in. Minimal medium takes months. Better to do a bunch of experiments in the rich medium to minimal medium, see if I find anything, then check if it's an artifact being held over from the rich medium. Cell culture studies aren't as long, but the same argument applies. Plus every time I start working in a new medium, I have weeks or months of experiments to calibrate it, make sure I know how it affects what I'm studying, and get the data to be able to compare it to my previous media. It's a big investment, so most labs will have a handful that they use. Meanwhile the organisms are also evolving under the selection pressures you're applying by growing them in these crazy environments. Formulating lab experiments that remain relevant to the world beyond is a difficult, detail driven subject and can go horribly wrong in many fascinating, mind bending ways. So there's a lot of wasted money in research, but it's not because of this stuff. This is table stakes, because biology is hard.
• kuroguro 8y ago
  But moderate amounts of coffee and alcohol are good for you... or was that sarcasm?
  • newnewpdro 8y ago
    There have been a number of articles relatively recently stating no amount of alcohol is safe to drink, it's a carcinogen.
    • coldtea 8y ago
      That could be both true and irrelevant when the other health related factors, plus the quality of life (social experience, etc) alcohol in moderation can enable is taken into account. Almost everything is a carcinogen. So we need to consider Amdahl's law and profile. He die from so many things that we do wrong (e.g. sedentary lifestyle, stress, lack of proper healthcare) that alcohol/coffee could be a very premature optimization. People in some of the so-called "blue zones", the places where people live most than everybody else statistically, drink a few glasses of wine a day.
    • rleigh 8y ago
      Yes, it's clearly bad news, but the world isn't quite so simple. The conclusions you draw depend upon the questions you ask. Suppose for a moment that what you say is completely true, and that there is a direct linear relationship between alcohol consumption and cancer incidence. Drinking more would clearly be detrimental. But would drinking moderately be an acceptable risk? It really depends upon whether alcohol has advantages which make it worth taking that risk. Given that it has its uses in social situations, and might help alleviate stress and help ones general wellbeing, it might well have advantages for promulgating the species and longevity. None of which is to say that being a carcinogen with a lot of other nasty effects is good, just that biology and human behaviour are very complex, and that there may be a host of subtle and not-so-subtle factors which also need to be taken into consideration.
• coldtea 8y ago
  >Several weeks ago I heard that some study concluded that moderate amounts of alcohol and coffee are good for you[0]...Argh. The sigh is because the result is trivial, or because it should be a priori false? Billions drink alcohol and coffee, so whether any "amounts of" them are good or not is important to study.
  • Osiris 8y ago
    I think the concern is that there are many studies that all contradict each other. I've read about how wine is good for the heart, while others show that any amount of alcohol leads to negative health effects. Maybe both are right because they measured very specific effects. People get tired of public health recommendations constantly flip-flopping (health effects of butter is another).
    • wongarsu 8y ago
      The human body is incredibly complex, and most studies look at incredibly specific effects. "increases lifespan by x years" takes decades to measure, but "increases blood cholesterol by x" can be measured much faster. So in the interest of getting papers published in reasonable timeframes most studies take the latter approach. Then comes media, sees "X causes blood cholesterol to rise, cholesterol is bad, so X is bad" which is a deeply flawed conclusion. Most things aren't universally bad (high blood pressure is bad, but if you raise your blood pressure through exercise that actually lowers blood pressure in the long run), and many negative effects are offset by positive effects not looked at in the study. I wouldn't read too much into anything that isn't a metastudy and took less than a decade to test. I think the current consensus about red whine is somewhere along the lines of: red whine is good for you, the more you drink the more that effect is offset by negative effects of alcohol, but in the amounts that were always recommended (about 1 glass a day) it's not a huge factor. But of course those are the harmless examples, there's also interference from industry groups interacting with the current publishing environment (see the whole "fat is bad for you" that we had going for decades for no good reason). So there is a lot of room of improvement.
    • tapland 8y ago
• acheron 8y ago
  Good Booze, Bad Booze: https://www.alcademics.com/2015/09/good-booze-bad-booze.html https://www.alcademics.com/2015/09/good-booze-bad-booze.html