He also had a history of being screwed by people. The guy did a lot of good work, and arguably his attempt at patenting it was instrumental in preventing it from being patented. I don’t think that was his intention, but good came from it.
Venter is one of the many quacks who promised that he’d find the “aging gene” and switch it off. People threw a lot of money at him about twenty years ago.
Hmm, I have no expertise in this field. I recently read that aging happens, because when cells replicate their DNA a gazillion times, then sometimes they introduce slight inaccuracies or mistakes, which I guess, means tons of tiny chunks of our body will have slightly different DNA from what we got born with…?
From the little I’ve just read about telomeres, it sounds like they help to prevent some of these mistakes. Is that you mean?
IIRC, telomeres are essentially the self-destruct button for DNA. They get shorter everytime DNA replicates and when they are all used up, DNA stops replicating and the cell destroys itself. The telomeres help prevent too many mutations from building up or cancer from forming.
They was some research on animals that indicates that resetting the telomeres can extend the lifespan of the animal. But, without the telomeres, cancer and mutations eventually kill the organism.
Interesting. Yeah, it sounds like the only real way to prevent aging, would be to create a clone of yourself, let that clone grow up until their body is fully developed and then organ-harvest them to replace all of your organs one-by-one, until you’ve eventually ship-of-theseus-ed yourself. Well, and repeat that process every thirty years or so.
Certainly not quite as sexy of a process as some skincare lotions promise…
You would never be able transplant the brain, and it’s still subject to the mutations and telomeres. The only way would be to transplant the personality Altered Carbon style or completely cure brain cancer.
Yeah, that’s true. Maybe you could pull off two or three cycles without hotswapping the brain, but eventually you’d have to rejuvenate yourself by just teach everything you know to one of your clones.
…which sounds an awful lot like just having children. 🙃
I wonder if it would be possible to transplant to transplant the brain in pieces over several cycles? That way the brain could eventually be replaced by dupli-babies. Memory might become problematic though.
I’m not even sure what he’s talking about. Open access journals are the ones who charge authors to publish.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish. If you want your paper to be open access, you can tack on an additional open access fee so that your paper doesn’t end up behind a paywall. The last time I looked - and this was several years ago - the going rate for making your paper open access in a closed access journal was about $2-3k. We always budgeted for publication fees when we were putting together our funding proposals.
The fee structure is similar for open access journals, except that there’s not a choice about paying them. For researchers whose work isn’t grant funded, it generally means they’re paying out of pocket, unless their institution steps in.
I had a paper published in a small but (in its field) prestigious journal, and the editor explained to me that he only charges people who can afford it, and uses those funds to cover the costs of the journal. He explained that he had a paper from a researcher who couldn’t cover the publishing fee, and he let me know that I was helping out the other person, too.
What I don’t understand is how anyone how has gone through academia doesn’t know this.
Of course you can put it anywhere you’d like. Services like arXiv specialize in hosting pre-prints of published papers as well as white papers that only have an institutional association.
The problem is that the job of an academic is to publish. That’s how you build credibility and seniority. For it to count as a “published paper” it needs to have undergone peer review so that the people who want to read/cite the paper at least have the confidence that it’s at least been reviewed by other experts in the field.
There are some “journals” that will publish anything as long as they get their fees. Most academics are wise to that by now, but it can still impress people in business for whom a pub is a pub.
This guy probably lives in his own small world. If you want to publish in PLOS as a researcher from say Turkey or Uzbekistan or any other country where the value of your money is nil, you might easily have to pay your yearly salary or half of your funding to get a single paper published.
If you publish in a journal that has closed access, there is generally no fee to publish.
What field are you in? In the life sciences, there’s normally a fee to publish closed-access and a higher one for open-access. My last paper was open access and costed about 3500, compared to 1500 pay walled.
My background is in theoretical biology, but I was mostly publishing in public health, physics, and computer science journals. We paid for every paper because I feel very strongly about research being made available to everyone, especially in the case of publicly funded work. I just make sure to budget for it.
I had a couple of papers in one of the PLOS journals, which afaik are fee-only pubs.
It’s been about ten years since I’ve had to worry about publishing, as o decided to sell out and join a commercial company, and they’re pretty averse to publishing. My information might be out of date.
I do think the academic publishing industry is atrocious, however, and I have always encouraged people to check on sites like arxiv, the personal web page of the lead author, and as a final attempt contacting the lead author directly. Most journals that I dealt with permit authors to upload preprints to sites like arxiv, and if you do it with your final revision the only difference would be the formatting. Of course, that doesn’t count as a publication for academic purposes, and it doesn’t get around paying fees for the journals that charge them, but it is an avenue for people to make their research more globally available for free. I’m sure you know of that, I’m just mentioning it for students looking for a copy of a paper.
Depends. Many journals in Evolution/Ecology are still free to publish in non-OA. It’s becoming rarer though because many journals are switching to full (paid!) open access.
I am currently trying to publish in the European Journal of Psychology (EJoP), which is Open Access only. The fee is 750€, if I’m not mistaken, and you can apply for fee reduction. I have no idea how lenient/strict they are with that, or how much effort that would be. The department is covering the costs, obviously.
It depends on the journal. I’ve only published in medical related journals, but some journals don’t charge a fee if the article remains closed access. Some journals just have an embargo period, so you may be free to republish to pubmed central or something similar after a year or two. Open access of course always costs money, or more if they do charge a publishing fee. A lot of nih grants have requirements to make it open access within a year, so some publishers at least are just embargoing for a year now.
“…he sought funding from the private sector to start Celera Genomics. The company planned to profit from their work by creating genomic data to which users could subscribe for a fee.”
Not sure if you read your history book (the Bible), but he only brought 2 of everything. Including mosquitoes, flies, tardigrades, etc. Everything else died.
Noah would’ve been a genocide-complicit, doomsday cult prepper, similar to those who build private libertarian cities on the ocean or some planet as a climate adaptation strategy.
As written the only person who could have communicated that story is Lot himself. Coming out of the desert with only your two daughters and two babies seems like it might be good motivation to embellish
My ex-teamlead owns a yacht (if he didn’t sell it). The catch is that yacht is worth about $40 thousands, not $4 millions.
Also there was a person in USSR who built a yacht and circumnavigated the Earth on that, not everyone who do own a yach own that luxury slab of floating gold
It did float even though it was not new and not spacious. Then again, there are sail sport yachts that may be even cheaper but can’t be used as a home or to navigate an open water.
Some people live on yachts and that’s their entire home. So like a 70,000£ yacht, then like 300£ a month in slip (berth) fees, including electric and whatnot. I strongly considered it. It’s roughly the same cost but better than caravan living, IMO.
It’s a decent alternative to a landlocked home.
But yeah, millionaires with yachts are a different thing.
That’s a good use case. I’d be interested to know more about the idiosyncrasies that come with that lifestyle, like if they go out to sea when a storm is expected, or just weather it out in the harbor.
When covid came, the local 3D print clubs/maker communities got together and mass-printer a variety of ear savers for the full range of local healthcare workers and first responders, then expanded to essential workers like drug store and grocery workers, mail carriers and delivery persons. [It was a variety of styles for the ear savers, because different styles worked better for different people.] It was a great effort, and we remember and remain appreciative of the help and support our community gave us.
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