8 ms·

It's wild that there is a completely alternate tech tree that just never found popularity in the west.

Zenst 5y ago
Often gets down to profit sadly and if a company is unable to copyright or patent such technology due to prior art, then the incentives as a company are not there. Sad I know, but the whole drug industry is primarily based around making money first. Which however coldhearted that sounds, is how business works. This is all something touched upon recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007863
- refurb 5y ago
  It’s more efficient and cheaper mass produce antibiotics that work on most infections than customize a phage for each patient.
  - Zenst 5y ago
    This has been a blessing and a curse, hence their overuse. Which has seen a diminished effect, leading us towards a stage that we are running out of antibiotics that work. Hence an increase in bacteria that has (due to excessive exposure), become antibiotic-resistant. Whilst this has been known for a long time, its an area of concern. [EDIT typo]
- rsynnott 5y ago
  I think this is less about profit, and more about the fact that it just really wasn't that interesting from the invention of antibiotics until antibiotic resistance showed up. By and large, there isn't that much profit in antibiotics these days; almost everything used in significant quantities is well out of patent.
- OneLeggedCat 5y ago
  Too true, unfortunately. Also, sick patients are more profitable than cured ones. Preventative medicine is less profitable than treating a developed disease, etc etc etc. The profit incentives in health care are perverse and misaligned, and in many cases delaying healing is more profitable than healing. This is why we need more world-wide government funding of research in curing and preventing diseases. If hypothetically a mixture of apple juice and turpentine were to cure COVID, we may never discover that, because 1) such a mixture would be extremely cheap and easy to make at home, and not really patentable, and therefore unprofitable, and 2) there may never be enough government medical research funding to discover it.
mschuster91 5y ago
The thing is, phages require a lot more effort than antibiotics at all stages from production over stockkeeping and selection (unlike antibiotics, phages are highly specific to bacterial strains) to administration. In the West, we simply used antibiotics which were good enough until a decade or two ago, so we didn't need to invest in phages.
- nikolay 5y ago
  We didn't use antibiotics, we abused them! For example, often doctors, instead of testing, and then prescribing a targeted antibiotic, give you on, two, three until you have an improvement without getting culture and prescribing the right antibiotic! Also, often, antibiotics are prescribed preventively for viral infection (like pneumonia), and not given ONLY when you have a proven bacterial infection, so, being lazy and cutting costs pretty much erase a whole arsenal of drugs!
  - mschuster91 5y ago
    Yeah, and add to that the abuse of reserve (!) antibiotics in farming to improve yield.
  - folli 5y ago
    To be fair, lab testing can take a day or more, if you need to include an antibiotics screen, even more. Sometimes an infection can get very severe in this time span, so sometimes antibiotics are given prophylactically without waiting for the results to come back. I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon, it should be possible to get the genome of the infectious bacteria/virus in a couple of hours with today's tech. You can even infer the antibiotic resistance from this info, so you'd know how to treat the infection in a very targeted fashion.
    - andai 5y ago
      >I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon What are the obstacles to this? I have been seeing articles lately about sequencing your own DNA at home in a few hours for about a thousand bucks. I guess the medical grade equipment has to be a lot more robust, so a lot more expensive? (And there might be an insufficient supply of biology interns to operate the equipment.)
littlestymaar 5y ago
It's not what happened: it was actually invented and developed in France by Félix d'Hérelle[1] (who taught George Eliava, the Georgian scientist responsible for the Soviet developments of the field) and used to be quite popular here too before it was supplanted by the antibiotics, more convenient and easier to industrialize, during the 70s. Having lost all that knowledge is really a pity, and it's quite fortunate that the Soviets then the Georgians kept it going. On a side note, d'Hérelle was a fantastic adventurer and his life is fascinating (the French version of [1] has a nice summary), even moreso than Yersin's (the discoverer of the bacteria responsible for the Plague[2], and founder of the city of Đà Lạt[3] in Vietnam). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_d%27H%C3%A9relle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_d%27H%C3%A9relle [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Lat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Lat
- Hoasi 5y ago
  > On a side note, d'Hérelle was a fantastic adventurer and his life is fascinating (the French version of [1] has a nice summary), even moreso than Yersin's (the discoverer of the bacteria responsible for the Plague[2], and founder of the city of Đà Lạt[3] in Vietnam) Did you mean Alexandre Yersin or was Félix d'Hérelle also in Việt Nam at the time?
  - littlestymaar 5y ago
    I meant Yersin. His biography is pretty awesome, yet d'Hérelle is still even more badass: France military deserter, he fled to Canada and founded an alcohol making business there, then in Mexico. Self taught biologist as a hobby (he dreamed of becoming the next Pasteur), he found a way to use a bacteria as a pest control against crickets before discovering the first known bactoriophage. He then developed a bacteriophage-based cure for dysentery, plague and cholera.
- cromka 5y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Yersin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Yersin Yersin somehow looks here like taken straight from the streets of Brooklyn.
kiba 5y ago
Solar phootovoltatic was an alternative tech tree that was discovered as early as 1839, basically during the industrial revolution. Imagine an alternative timeline where it was a discovered in a nation whose theology involved lot of plants and trees. Powering civilization itself based on solar energy would be a dream from the getgo, so you would have a lot of academic attention and research early on.
- Aachen 5y ago
  Wouldn't they be outcompeted by others? Even 2022 solar tech is less convenient than 1900s fossil fuel engines that can just run day and night (ignoring lung damage like we've historically been doing).
  - Retric 5y ago
    1900s was a long time out. From 1812 to 1880 steamships required sail backups. Without a massive investment in the technology steam would have stayed unreliable and expensive. Really what kickstarted the whole thing was pumping water from mines which didn’t need anything close to 24/7 operation and could thus handle the expensive, heavy, and unreliable nature of early steam engines.
    - Gravityloss 5y ago
      And it was hard to make a steam engine with the technology of the time. A well sealing piston. Heavy reciprocating mass. Valves. Hot high pressure steam. And internal combustion is a few levels up from there then. An electrical motor might have been a lot simpler.
  - kiba 5y ago
    Wouldn't they be outcompeted by others? Even 2022 solar tech is less convenient than 1900s fossil fuel engines that can just run day and night (ignoring lung damage like we've historically been doing). Not necessarily. Academic research needs not be 'practical' or be ready for commercialization, much like research into fusion.
- 5y ago

Often gets down to profit sadly and if a company is unable to copyright or patent such technology due to prior art, then the incentives as a company are not there. Sad I know, but the whole drug industry is primarily based around making money first. Which however coldhearted that sounds, is how business works. This is all something touched upon recently here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007863 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30007863

refurb 5y ago
It’s more efficient and cheaper mass produce antibiotics that work on most infections than customize a phage for each patient.
- Zenst 5y ago
  This has been a blessing and a curse, hence their overuse. Which has seen a diminished effect, leading us towards a stage that we are running out of antibiotics that work. Hence an increase in bacteria that has (due to excessive exposure), become antibiotic-resistant. Whilst this has been known for a long time, its an area of concern. [EDIT typo]
rsynnott 5y ago
I think this is less about profit, and more about the fact that it just really wasn't that interesting from the invention of antibiotics until antibiotic resistance showed up. By and large, there isn't that much profit in antibiotics these days; almost everything used in significant quantities is well out of patent.
OneLeggedCat 5y ago
Too true, unfortunately. Also, sick patients are more profitable than cured ones. Preventative medicine is less profitable than treating a developed disease, etc etc etc. The profit incentives in health care are perverse and misaligned, and in many cases delaying healing is more profitable than healing. This is why we need more world-wide government funding of research in curing and preventing diseases. If hypothetically a mixture of apple juice and turpentine were to cure COVID, we may never discover that, because 1) such a mixture would be extremely cheap and easy to make at home, and not really patentable, and therefore unprofitable, and 2) there may never be enough government medical research funding to discover it.

mschuster91 5y ago

The thing is, phages require a lot more effort than antibiotics at all stages from production over stockkeeping and selection (unlike antibiotics, phages are highly specific to bacterial strains) to administration. In the West, we simply used antibiotics which were good enough until a decade or two ago, so we didn't need to invest in phages.

nikolay 5y ago
We didn't use antibiotics, we abused them! For example, often doctors, instead of testing, and then prescribing a targeted antibiotic, give you on, two, three until you have an improvement without getting culture and prescribing the right antibiotic! Also, often, antibiotics are prescribed preventively for viral infection (like pneumonia), and not given ONLY when you have a proven bacterial infection, so, being lazy and cutting costs pretty much erase a whole arsenal of drugs!
- mschuster91 5y ago
  Yeah, and add to that the abuse of reserve (!) antibiotics in farming to improve yield.
- folli 5y ago
  To be fair, lab testing can take a day or more, if you need to include an antibiotics screen, even more. Sometimes an infection can get very severe in this time span, so sometimes antibiotics are given prophylactically without waiting for the results to come back. I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon, it should be possible to get the genome of the infectious bacteria/virus in a couple of hours with today's tech. You can even infer the antibiotic resistance from this info, so you'd know how to treat the infection in a very targeted fashion.
  - andai 5y ago
    >I hope the massive advances of sequencing will reach the clinics soon What are the obstacles to this? I have been seeing articles lately about sequencing your own DNA at home in a few hours for about a thousand bucks. I guess the medical grade equipment has to be a lot more robust, so a lot more expensive? (And there might be an insufficient supply of biology interns to operate the equipment.)

littlestymaar 5y ago

It's not what happened: it was actually invented and developed in France by Félix d'Hérelle[1] (who taught George Eliava, the Georgian scientist responsible for the Soviet developments of the field) and used to be quite popular here too before it was supplanted by the antibiotics, more convenient and easier to industrialize, during the 70s. Having lost all that knowledge is really a pity, and it's quite fortunate that the Soviets then the Georgians kept it going. On a side note, d'Hérelle was a fantastic adventurer and his life is fascinating (the French version of [1] has a nice summary), even moreso than Yersin's (the discoverer of the bacteria responsible for the Plague[2], and founder of the city of Đà Lạt[3] in Vietnam). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_d%27H%C3%A9relle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F%C3%A9lix_d%27H%C3%A9relle [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yersinia_pestis [3]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Lat https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Da_Lat

Hoasi 5y ago
> On a side note, d'Hérelle was a fantastic adventurer and his life is fascinating (the French version of [1] has a nice summary), even moreso than Yersin's (the discoverer of the bacteria responsible for the Plague[2], and founder of the city of Đà Lạt[3] in Vietnam) Did you mean Alexandre Yersin or was Félix d'Hérelle also in Việt Nam at the time?
- littlestymaar 5y ago
  I meant Yersin. His biography is pretty awesome, yet d'Hérelle is still even more badass: France military deserter, he fled to Canada and founded an alcohol making business there, then in Mexico. Self taught biologist as a hobby (he dreamed of becoming the next Pasteur), he found a way to use a bacteria as a pest control against crickets before discovering the first known bactoriophage. He then developed a bacteriophage-based cure for dysentery, plague and cholera.
cromka 5y ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Yersin https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandre_Yersin Yersin somehow looks here like taken straight from the streets of Brooklyn.

kiba 5y ago

Solar phootovoltatic was an alternative tech tree that was discovered as early as 1839, basically during the industrial revolution. Imagine an alternative timeline where it was a discovered in a nation whose theology involved lot of plants and trees. Powering civilization itself based on solar energy would be a dream from the getgo, so you would have a lot of academic attention and research early on.

Aachen 5y ago
Wouldn't they be outcompeted by others? Even 2022 solar tech is less convenient than 1900s fossil fuel engines that can just run day and night (ignoring lung damage like we've historically been doing).
- Retric 5y ago
  1900s was a long time out. From 1812 to 1880 steamships required sail backups. Without a massive investment in the technology steam would have stayed unreliable and expensive. Really what kickstarted the whole thing was pumping water from mines which didn’t need anything close to 24/7 operation and could thus handle the expensive, heavy, and unreliable nature of early steam engines.
  - Gravityloss 5y ago
    And it was hard to make a steam engine with the technology of the time. A well sealing piston. Heavy reciprocating mass. Valves. Hot high pressure steam. And internal combustion is a few levels up from there then. An electrical motor might have been a lot simpler.
- kiba 5y ago
  Wouldn't they be outcompeted by others? Even 2022 solar tech is less convenient than 1900s fossil fuel engines that can just run day and night (ignoring lung damage like we've historically been doing). Not necessarily. Academic research needs not be 'practical' or be ready for commercialization, much like research into fusion.
5y ago