The editors still have not bothered to fix 'thermisol' in the summary - and it is even spelled correctly (thiomersal, or thimerosal) in the newspaper article....
just like the superconductors/semiconductors fiasco yesterday.
How can you believe you are intelligently discussing a science-related issue when you cannot even name the topic correctly?
No graphene anywhere in this (or any other) plane. You are confusing something.
The composite material are carbon fibers (essentially burned nylon), not graphene, nanotubes, buckyballs or anything similarly exotic. This is then drenched in polymer resin and backed. The polymer resin is the heaviest component in the overall composition.
How is this "invention" different from the established product BASF Micronal which has been available for a couple of years?
http://www.basf.com/group/corporate/en/brand/MICRONAL_PCM
Platinum complexes are a standard treatment for many cancers. They intercalate in DNA, especially in rapidly dividing cells, and block DNA transscription.
These contain isolated (but complexed) metal atoms, though, not nanoparticles. I do not know whether these compounds could also serve as effective electron sources on X-ray irradiation, or whether they might form nanoparticles in a tumor cell, or outside dead cells after killing them in their primary therapeutic function.
No reputable agency will let you sign up for just one or two months for service in a really foreign place. Preparation courses alone take already more time than that.
I suggest you find something useful to do locally.
I can imagine pulling off a successful IT start-up without formal education, but a biotech company (which is among the fields listed)?
You won't even get (legally) access to microorganisms and chemicals without excellent professional standing
Why is this kid having different results than what is documented already? If this work has been done already then this 16 year old's discoveries wouldn't be newsworthy now would they?
He is *not* having different results. That is the whole point.
Massive press hype, from reporters without science background who fell for the PR of the competition organizers.
You are forgetting that he was tutored by an academic, and winning first price in a competition sponsored by Big Pharma. Hardly outside the system.
There are X-ray structures of the protein(s) in question, with and without bound ligands. All published long before this guy started his work. And the drugs were designed by performing docking computations on the protein with the structure, and the most promising candidate structures were synthesized, binding verified, and some of them again solved as crystal structure. By looking at the docking poses, the structures were further refined by re-designing parts to better fit the protein.
Many posters here are assuming he worked on his own, brilliantly and single-mindedly breaking a new path. He did not. He worked in an academic lab and was tutored. The prof was of course well aware of the state of research. He had a bright pupil interested in learning about doing research. So he offered him to learn some of the tools of trade, on a realistic sample problem with known outcome. The guy went to work, learned a lot, made a nice poster (for a highschol student competition, not a scientific conference), and won a price for it. All very laudable and a nice achievement, but no ground-breaking genius moment.
Just to re-iterate it, the guy did not find anything which was not already known and published. He used known protein structures, known drug compounds, known binding sites, known ideas for combining drugs. So there was no original scientific research, and absolutely no novel cure, just ridiculous hype by the press. The guy mastered at age of 16 skills chemistry students are routinely acquiring at 22. Nice, but not world-shaking.
Yeah, but this is not how Slashdot works.
0 score for you! (not from me, obviously)...
No need to foam.
I already praised his efforts in another post. He did well, spent a lot of effort, learned something, and hopefully he will be motivated to study chemistry in university by this experience.
But he did not perform original research, and certainly did not find a cure for CF. He reproduced stuff well known among professionals. He certainly did not discover anything they overlooked.
Its the hype in the article and the Slashdot summary I am protesting against.
Thank you for so clearly demostrating what's wrong with the Pharmaceutical industry. First they brute-force through computer simulations looking for combinations that might work, then they file patents on those results as if they had done any actual research, and then just to add salt to the wound they don't even bring them to market and into the hands of patients or this kid wouldn't have even tried to do this experiment in the first place.
But then again, this is the kind of industry that blackmails governments for a living and even patents freakin' DNA so really, it shouldn't be surprising.
You are mistaken. The Vertex compounds are now in phase 3 clinical trials and will be marketed if nothing bad shows up (and if it did, it would be a financial disaster, Vertex and various foundations spent well over 100 mil USD on this project). Drugs without FDA approval (or the Canadian equivalent) cannot yet be bought in a pharmacy, that is the law. But be assured, Vertex certainly wants them on the market - otherwise there will be no recovery of expenses, and later proft.
Finally, drug combinations can only be tested in trials when the underlying single-compound drugs have been shown to be effective and safe.
The Vertex people did, and they rightfully received much praise for their results (these CF compounds are without precedent, providing a treatment option for a deadly disease).
But this has all been published, extensively, even in non-specialist journals (CE&N). *EVERY* professional chemist with a minimum interest in pharma research knows about the Vertex compounds, the different interaction points with the proteins, and the possibility of drug combinations.
Reproducing these results is a nice coursework problem, but not research. The novel results produced by what the guy did are ZERO. I am certain this project was a nice experience for him, and it may hopefully motivate him to study chemistry after finishing school. I wish him the very best for his further career.
But HE DEFINITELY DID NOT INVENT A CURE. Stating anything like that is ridiculous hype!
Sorry, but this is *not* any innovative science. Rather, it is a computational reproduction of facts already well known. Nothing more than a typical molecular modeling class assignment during a graduate chemistry education.
He did not invent any new drugs - the really breakthrough was by the researchers of Vertex Pharmaceuticals, see for example VX-770.
He did not discover the mechanism of action of the drugs. Rather, he took published protein structures and published compounds and re-ran some docking studies (of the same type Vertex and other pharmaceutical companies probably spend hundreds of thousands of processor hours on, with the difficulty that they had to check tens of thousands of compounds, not just two already known to work).
He was not the first to notice that different promising compounds in clinical trials have different points of interaction with the defective proteins of CF. Thinking that a drug combination may be useful is not exactly a new and brilliant insight, and this was for example even discussed a couple of months ago in CE&N (the general chemistry member journal of the American Chemical Society). I am very confident that is has been evaluated before, and probably there are patents already filed.
The only interesting point here is that the guy is 16,not 20 or 22 like the normal chemistry student. But then pressing the right buttons in a molecular modeling software is really not that difficult, especially when you already know the outcome you want to reproduce.
Why are posts of people demonstrably without knowledge rated "insightful" ?
"If the radiation detector is built with the proper non-removable shield then they will only be able to measure useful types of radiation"
Sorry, but such a shielding does not exist (in handheld devices, if you are willing to literally invest in a ton of electromagnets, this is a different matter).
In order to measure alpha particles, there must be the smallest possible amount of matter between the outside world and the detector. Your naive proposal in a post below to wrap the counter into a plastic bag which is swapped regularly to keep things clean results effectively in a 100% alpha radiation shield around your detector.
The problem is that alpha radiation from inhaled aerosol particles is the most dangerous component of what a broken reactor emits, and thus this it what really needs to be determined. If the radiation is blocked by a plastic bag, or dead outer skin cells, it is pretty harmless. But if you inhale, or eat, an alpha emitter and it makes a cell in your lung or stomach lining go cancerous, this is a very different matter.
So you want to shield the counter, and only measure beta and gamma, you are making the data even more useless than original (see my explanation before). Not what I call an "insightful" post.
When bad men combine, the good must associate; else they will fall one by one, an unpitied sacrifice in a contemptible struggle. - Edmund Burke
