You don't have to go that far back. See the recent Surfside tragedy. Israel sent an elite rescue team and set up relief centers to assist displaced persons, regardless if they were Israeli or not.
Mostly it's hard to get from "here's a protein" to "here's a drug for that protein" for a variety of reasons.
1.) It's hard to know whether the candidate drug will bind. This is because while the physical principles are somewhat understood, they're way hard to compute and there are a lot of things that still need to be empirically determined. For example, if you have a protein structure, that's a single snapshot in a highly unusual environment for that protein (either a solid crystal or some form of NMR solution). It is often accurate, but a protein in a cell is always in thermal flux, getting knocked around by other proteins, and "breathes" so your structure may not reflect important biology. This also assumes you have a structure to go off of, but you don't always.
Models and computation are making progress in this particular area, but it's still nowhere near plug and play.
2.) Even if you have a drug that binds the protein of interest, it might be toxic, might bind to other things as well, might not last very long in the bloodstream, might not even get to the bloodstream in the first place if you take it orally. Tons of things can go wrong.
This area is still quite difficult for computation because the datasets aren't great and it's hard to get enough data to make progress.
3.) Assuming you have 1 and 2 covered, it's possible your protein is bad. Maybe it's not actually as important to the disease in practice and you don't actually alter patient outcomes.
For these reasons, in-silico drug discovery is still unreliable.
I'm working on a project that would try to address these shortcomings by taking a hybrid experimental-computational approach. Hopefully it works out :)
Need help? I'm a middle-aged computer engineer who went back to school for Biophysics. Just finished first year. Also have background in simulation for games.
The simulations can give you small steps, such as suggesting chemical alterations to your molecule that might have higher binding energy to a docking site that you're targeting, but that assumes that the docking site is stable, that there isn't nonspecific binding, and a whole host of other things, so the first thing you do with those possible changes is run them in a biological system, not a computer.
No one who knows what they're talking about would take the idea that you could do drug discovery entirely in a computer seriously at this point in time.
Do you propose IP be treated similarly to real property? Maybe require a permit from the government before one writes a book or song to ensure that work will be in the public interest?
The Wikimedia Foundation hosts collaborative projects which are not encyclopedias. WikiNews for instance cuts right into the heart of what EC is trying to stop. Really shows how much thought the EC put into their "arbitrary exceptions to appease powerful entities" strategy.
I think it is interesting to reflect on the idea that high technology builds on top of primitive technology. Just as he uses past tools to make more complex tools, every human era of technology builds upon the last. You could say primitive stone tools are in the recipe for developing an ICBM or a semiconductor if you go back far enough.
Not only can chaos be exhibited in fully deterministic systems, it can be exhibited in absurdly simple systems. The logistic map is an incredibly simple iterated function that exhibits highly chaotic behavior.
It remains one of most mysterious things in mathematics, as far as I can tell. Studying it has consumed a lot of very smart people's careers.
There are some corporate structures that seem better suited for owning real estate, like a Real Estate Investment Trust (REIT). Maybe there is a proxy "Google REIT" that is 100% owned by Google. Or some other proxy entity accounting stuff going on, such that Google is not "technically" the owner of the building, but a subsidiary with a different tax structure. I think that's what the parent meant.
> Maybe there is a proxy "Google REIT" that is 100% owned by Google.
There is no such thing under US law. A REIT must have at least 100 separate owners, and no group of 5 can own more than 50% in the second half of a given tax year.
IPOs tend to be a lot more valuable. It’s more an implication of a successful exit. In either case, you have to pay off your debt and preferred stockholders before you see a dime from a liquidation event. A low value liquidation can leave zero on the table for common stock holders.
I’d start with asking the questions: who was responsible for the contract and it’s implemntation, and what were their motives, incentives, qualifications and abilities. Then I would ask the same question, but what would the IDEAL motives, abilities, incentives and qualifications of that person be? Then try bridging those gaps....
Do you think this is a place where we could take notes from Estonia? X-Road[0] for example, they call their data exchange layer. I don't know exactly how it works, but it seems to specify some common protocol so various government (and private) services can all work together. I know their system is also very citizen focused, but perhaps something similar could reduce the costs of integrating the specific needs of specific state agencies with the overall set of services a state government provides/uses.
Speaking from afar, but I've noticed that Americans tend to feel very strongly about state rights and independence, as well as the opportunity for someone to profit somewhere. Wouldn't that work against what you're saying?
I do think it makes complete sense though - reinventing the wheel in each state is crazy.
I wonder if any state agency has ever hired and built a solution internally, proven its effectiveness, and then somehow sold it to other states?
It happens when practitioners generalize theorems to scenarios that look similar but don't apply. The common pattern is misapplying an infinite set theorem to finite set case. If you don't know about the theorem in question to begin with, there is no way for you to misrepresent it.
