4 ms·

Rough comments here... I admire the spirit of DIY in his project. He asked for and received good data, consumed the process and risk, and proceeded. He wasn't t

Rough comments here... I admire the spirit of DIY in his project. He asked for and received good data, consumed the process and risk, and proceeded. He wasn't trying to save the world, he took a calculated risk on himself, and wrote a blog post about it. I'm most happy to have the process demystified for me. I don't think the world would be a better place if more people made their own vaccines unless there was some ubiquitous, reliable material testing procedure that we can't imagine yet. I do think I'd like a person like that to be my neighbor if society were to collapse, or maybe in general that would just be a good time.

dcposch 6y ago
The negativity might be warranted if they had encouraged other people to follow, or if they were trying to DIY-vaccinate others. But that's not what happened here. These are two capable adults experimenting strictly on themselves and being transparent about it. That deserves respect. You might think "that seems like a stupid risk, I would never do that", and that's a fine take. But don't judge. Where's the "hacker" in hacker news if everyone immediately reaches for admonishment and appeals to authority. A lot of people in these comments overestimate how clean and linear and officially-sanctioned scientific progress is, especially in biomed. In the 1980s, an Australian doctor suspected that ulcers are caused by a specific kind of bacterial infection. At the time, the medical consensus was that ulcers came from stress and diet. His ideas and evidence were ignored. So he drank a beaker of H. pylorii culture, got an endoscopy before and two weeks later, and demonstrated convincingly that he'd given himself ulcers this way. He ended up winning a Nobel prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall
- PoignardAzur 6y ago
  My thoughts exactly. The level of contempt and tribe-bashing ("screw these rationalists who think they're smarter than us!") in this thread is depressing.

dcposch 6y ago

The negativity might be warranted if they had encouraged other people to follow, or if they were trying to DIY-vaccinate others. But that's not what happened here. These are two capable adults experimenting strictly on themselves and being transparent about it. That deserves respect. You might think "that seems like a stupid risk, I would never do that", and that's a fine take. But don't judge. Where's the "hacker" in hacker news if everyone immediately reaches for admonishment and appeals to authority. A lot of people in these comments overestimate how clean and linear and officially-sanctioned scientific progress is, especially in biomed. In the 1980s, an Australian doctor suspected that ulcers are caused by a specific kind of bacterial infection. At the time, the medical consensus was that ulcers came from stress and diet. His ideas and evidence were ignored. So he drank a beaker of H. pylorii culture, got an endoscopy before and two weeks later, and demonstrated convincingly that he'd given himself ulcers this way. He ended up winning a Nobel prize. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barry_Marshall

PoignardAzur 6y ago
My thoughts exactly. The level of contempt and tribe-bashing ("screw these rationalists who think they're smarter than us!") in this thread is depressing.