The issue here is the distinction between Prophylactic Vaccines and Therapeutic Vaccines .

The OP's confusion is understandable, as the vast majority of vaccines in clinical use are purely Prophylactic in nature, functioning solely as preventatives; these have little or no utility when administered after infection has taken place. Such vaccines are typically heavily dependent on Humoral Immunity, which may take several weeks time to reach maximum effectiveness, and maybe an additional dose or two.

This delay means the vaccine is of little use in acute infectious diseases (which run their course in a relatively short length of time). In chronic diseases, the infectious agent may be around longer, but usually by that time the immune system is already generating an appropriate response to the naturally occurring disease agent -- in other words, the advantage of the vaccine was purely in helping the immune system get there "first-est with the most-est", and you've already lost that advantage in waiting.

The number of Therapeutic Vaccines is relatively small, but a good example of one such entity is the Rabies Vaccine (which is both a Prophylactic and Therapeutic Vaccine) -- which manages to work post-exposure in part due to the time lag before the virus succeeds in penetrating the central nervous system. The case for most HIV therapeutic vaccine candidates I've seen, is in the argument that an HIV infection mis-directs the immune system that can be corrected; most such candidates attempt to enhance the Cell-Mediated Immune response, which appears to be particularly vital to the anti-HIV immune response. However, several such agents have been tried in the past, and all have failed in testing.

Jimmy Soul - If You Want To Be Happy (1963)

If you wanna be happy for the rest of your life
Never make a pretty woman your wife
So from my personal point of view
Get an ugly girl to marry you

Oh hey, You just helped me figure out what rhymes with "ritz" and "sits" and "pits". Thanks!

Ah yes, the Picked-Last-For-Kickball-Team non-tribe. We know of it.

In modern times, Artificial Heart designs have been diverging into two camps. This one belongs to the old-school cardiac mimics -- complex multi-chamber pumps designed to mimic the pulsatile flow of a natural heart. The bovine pericardium lining is a clever idea -- we already make bio-prosthetic valves (mostly from pig heart valves). As the material is non-living connective tissue, it doesn't raise the same acute rejection problems that living xeno-grafts have. And, while most patients with such valves still require permanent treatment with drugs to prevent clots, the required degree of anti-coagulation is much less than those required with mechanical valves.

The other school consists of the pulse-less turbine-type devices. Instead of mimicking a natural heart, these devices use a high-speed rotating impeller to drive fluid flow. It was once thought that the shearing forces of an impeller would result in too much damage to red blood cells, and that pulsatile flow of blood was a necessary feature physiological feature, but non-pulsatile later-generation Ventricular Assistive Devices have demonstrated this is not the case. Currently, all such devices are only used as adjuncts to a failing natural heart, and there are no such devices approved as complete replacements -- yet. Compared with their more complex cousins, these devices are smaller and lighter, and mechanically more robust. However, they suffer from issues with clots and damage to leukocytes, due to the artificial materials used.

In either case, it will be interesting to see how the devices performs out in the field. The expected Five-year lifespan of a unit doesn't sound like much, but keep in mind many patients will be elderly, and your goal may simply be to give them improved quality-of-life, until in a few years something else kills them instead.

You know, that might be part of the problem, too. With a 60-80 hour work week, how much time do you think software engineers have to participate in the community itself? A neighborhood isn't just a set of nice buildings you drive past in-between work/sleep cycles.

I've actually seen (and smelled) a case of Fournier's Gangrene.

What you're looking at on Wikipedia is a little misleading, as it is actually the aftermath of a surgical procedure in which necrotic tissue has already been stripped away. The typical appearance of a case would involve something more like painful and massively swollen testicles, with discoloration that may initially be reddish but rapidly changing to bluish/greenish color, with a foul odor. Externally visible tissue breakdown will eventually start to happen, but most cases end up in surgery well before that happens.

To borrow an old joke: Cellulosic Ethanol is the fuel of the future -- and always will be.

From a chemistry or molecular biology perspective the concept looks great -- similar Hexose sugar units are in Sugar / Starch / Cellulose, so why not use the most abundant and cheapest material? The problem looks different from the perspective of evolutionary biology, however. Naturally occurring Cellulase enzymes, sourced from a wide range of different organisms, have each undergone a long process of optimization through evolutionary history. Yet every enzyme remains extremely slow and inefficient (compared to enzymes that process sugars and starches). Why is that?

I believe the reason is that Cellulose (or rather, the Cellulose-in-Lignin composite matrix that plants use) is the end result of a very long evolutionary arms race between plants and their consumers. It has evolved to be resistant to microbial degradation -- never totally resistant, but just tough enough to ensure no critter gets a free lunch out of digesting it.

Of course, not all Cellulosic Ethanol need be derived from purely microbial techniques; chemical and chemical/biological hybrid processes might break the evolutionary deadlock. Others have suggested engineering the starting material itself, starting with plants designed to produce more easily digestible Cellulose (which brings up the problem of how well they would defend themselves against insects and pathogens). Unfortunately, in each of these alternate solutions, the amount of work needed is enormous, and it is possible we are simply out of time, with regards to the funding for this sort of research.

A bit of perspective here. I worked out the numbers once, and found that a typical CFL has about as much mercury as ~5lbs of swordfish steaks. So if a CFL is a serious mercury contamination risk, then all over the U.S. there are seafood vendors who are shipping around what are essentially batches of mercury contamination, for people cook and eat.

I'd like to propose a name for this new venture, "Windows Alternative: Nokia + Google Android", or WANGdroid .

GM and Chrysler didn't defaud their owners (the shareholders, i.e. Wall Street).

Both Enron and MCI pumped up their reported earnings and other financial stats through accounting fraud on a staggeringly huge scale, inflating the values of their stocks (and the executive's stock options). The car makers merely lost truckloads of money -- which is bad business but not a crime, although many Americans seem to treat it as such.

Dunno, does Goonswarm count? :)

The Chimeric Antigen Receptor T-Cell (CAR-T) technique actually requires a new lineage of modified cells to be created for each individual patient, engineered from each person's own immune cells. Unfortunately, this is an expensive and time-consuming task, and scaling to mass-production will be very difficult.

A second problem is that cancers may have differences from normal cells, but the differences are subtle compared to a microbe or virus -- precisely because they are not foreign, they are "us" in a sense, being born from our own normal cells. With exceptions (too few exceptions, unfortunately), there is no "cancer antigen" that marks it as being such. In this case, the patient has a cancer that arises from B-Cells. So what they've done is create a T-cell that ignores the usual proscription against attack the Self, and indiscriminately kills all B-cells (healthy or cancerous), wiping them all out.

Of course, B-cells are what produce Antibodies for us, so afterwards each patient needs a steady supply of IVIG (produced from the Antibodies in donated blood or plasma) to replace the Antibodies they are no longer producing. Still, it beats dying of Leukemia.

A bit of medical history: Prior to the 1920's or so, ketogenic states were commonly encountered in two medical conditions: Epileptics, and Type I diabetics.

For epileptics, a ketogenic diet was one of the few methods of seizure control available, prior to the invention of anti-epileptics -- the whole goal was to run your brain mostly on ketone bodies. It's still used in some difficult cases, although it takes a great deal of discipline and attention, as the requirements are stricter than what a weight-control ketogenic diet requires.

For the Type I diabetics, a ketogenic diet (with intake set at near-starvation levels) was the only way to keep them alive, prior to the discovery of insulin -- but it could not keep them healthy, as they gradually wasted away and either died in a state of starvation, or in a state of diabetic keto-acidosis. Once mass-produced insulin became available, the skeletal figures of diabetics plumped up, and the ketogenic diet fell by the wayside.

Unfortunately, these two medical uses of the ketogenic diet also meant that the ketogenic state became associated with disease conditions, and thus something to be avoided.

Indeed. There have been a number of studies that have sought to compare self-reported caloric intake data to objective measurements of actual values, and under-reporting is rampant:

Validity of U.S. Nutritional Surveillance: National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey Caloric Energy Intake Data, 1971–2010: