Speaking of medicine, I'd like to bring up some of the metrics that are used to evaluate the cost/benefit of a drug. Think of an ID lock as being equivalent to the drug benefit; the number of deaths or injuries avoided with this technology (for guns, we would probably consider it more like a vaccine than a drug, since "deaths avoided" benefit includes both the owner and surrounding people). Likewise, side effects would be the number of deaths or injuries that would not occur in absense of this technology (because it failed to fire when needed, or malfunctioned in a lethal way).

Of course there are details that are must be thought through; for instance, if you consider reduction in suicides (suicide by a non-owner who obtains the weapon), do you credit the full "value" of a suicide avoided, or only the proportional reduction in suicide completion vs non-firearm attempts? Or, how do we evaluate the death of an intended target in terms of deaths caused/avoided; the situation can be rather complex when we consider the details of domestic violence murders.

The we ask, what is the Relative Risk of this technology? Is the number greater or less than 1? Then, some additional parameters we should need to consider include Number to Treat, from which we can start to consider the Pharmacoeconomics of the technology.

On the plus side for her, even if she contracts the virus the most likely outcome is that she will eventually clear it, as most infected individuals do. The risk for cervical cancer arises from the collision of a rather rare outcome with a extremely common exposure; nearly all sexually active adults will unknowingly carry HPV at some time in their lives. Unfortunately, the combination results in some 12,000 cases of cervical cancer per year, in the US.

The original research that identified the HPV-Cancer link actually had to study Nuns to find a sufficiently isolated population; the virus is actually rather common even in monogamous women. Men are not routinely screened for HPV status, and contrary to common belief infections does not necessarily result in genital warts -- for instance, high-risk strain HPV 16 is exceptionally good at producing invisible infections (which may be why it ranks among the more common of HPV strains, actually). These infections may persist undetected for anywhere from months to years, and while your daughter may remain virgin until her wedding night, the same might not be true for her husband (and oral sex counts as far as the virus is concerned, being related to risk of head-and-neck cancers).

An interesting bit of trivia: genetic material from high-risk strains of HPV can be found in some 15-25% of lung cancers tissue samples. We don't have sufficient evidence to make a claim for a causal relationship at this time, but it's a very interesting coincidence. Also interesting is that high-risk strains of HPV have also been found in the CNS of infants with certain forms of intractable epilepsy (Focal Cortical Dysplasia Type II-B). The more we look, the more places we are finding this virus.

Or Porn!

Cyberax is correct, and the main driving force behind the shift has been the FDA; they've been pushing hard for chemically-defined culture media, with elimination of serum-type materials whenever possible. Although bio-pharm materials are closely examined for both known and unknown pathogens, their concern is that animal derived substances may yet harbor pathogens too novel to be detected by conventional methods. We're used to defined media for microbes being simple and cheap, but the ones used for mammalian cells are more complex and frequently must be tailored to each particular cell lineage, with comparatively exorbitant costs.

In any case, if you've got the capability to do large-scale mammalian cell culture, you'd be a fool to use it for a product that sells for dollars-per-pound, when that capacity could be put to work performing contract manufacturing of bio-pharmaceuticals that sell for for thousands-of-dollars-per-gram.

For mild forms of mental illness (bearing in mind that what we call "mild" mental illness can be crippling and painful from the perspective of the individual), perhaps. I'm not sure I agree with the way you phrase your position, but it is at least a valid position.

But behavioral therapy supposes that patient has enough function to engage with the therapist; even in the days before neuroleptics, it was recognized that some forms of mental illness did not respond well to talk therapy. A severely disorganized schizophrenic will turn even the simplest statements into jumbled hash; a catatonic depressive might not have sufficient volition to even reply.

Therapy is pretty advanced when dealing with patients who can't function enough to take care of their basic survival needs -- I'm not talking about acceptance of particular choices or values (by society or by self), or even whether they fit in well enough to hold a job. Rather, individuals rendered unable to attend to basic functions like "avoid freezing to death in winter" or "obtain and prepare sufficient food to maintain life, without endangering others". In such cases it is often a useful adjunct, but supposes that the patient can improve enough to be establish some level of meaningful communication.

At the time I read Ender's Game as an adolescent, I thought it was awesome. Years later I picked it up again, and came to the same conclusion you did.

On the other hand, I didn't take much note of "Speaker for the Dead" as a young reader; it seemed a rather ho-hum sequel. I've since since changed my mind -- as a work of Science Fiction literature, it is the superior work. OTOH, Children of the Mind is still crap, Full Stop.

Same goes for the Slashdot story posting. The Slashdot summary and only linked article is useless to anyone who actually works with genetics and sequencing. As for the linked article, the more you know about the words being smashed together, the less sense it makes (the very definition of technobabble). It's a content-free wad of marketing promises.

There were some 80+ replies to this story by last night, and NOT ONE of them discussed anything specific to the actual device or technology featured in the story (so of course, that's why I had to do it :).

Samzenpus might as well have posted some bullshit that said something like "Genetic synergy innovates best-of-breed paradigm shift in DNA extraction for a win-win GATTACA future.. Discuss!". And, we would have probably gotten comments of approximately equal value in response, compared to what we're seeing here.

From the supplementary materials PDF, it looks like these particles are about 300nm in diameter. That's a fraction of the diameter of a single red blood cell, individual particles wouldn't be big enough to block even our smallest capillaries. However, 300nm is about the size of a large virus; I don't know how immunogenic these things are, but even if moderately inert they'd likely be targeted by our normal debris-removal functions, as the immune system really does not like virus-sized foreign particles.

I read through the entire article link, and didn't learn a whole lot about how it actually performs. The above paragraph was the only technical information included. From what I can see, neither really tests performance against really challenging samples with a lot of crud or difficult-to-extract material. We only have the PR blurb's claim that it's better than a typical Miniprep column.

Found a couple of papers that might be more relevant:
Size-Specific Concentration of DNA to a Nanostructured Tip Using Dielectrophoresis and Capillary Action (Has downloadable PDF)
Nanotips for single-step preparation of DNA for qPCR analysis (Paywall)

Ok, from the first paper, we find out what this is really for:

Basically, this is a special purpose method for concentrating extra-cellular DNA while leaving whole cell material intact. It's not meant to compete against a Miniprep, but analyze a whole different type of sample material; you are trying to fish out what genetic material is already floating around outside of your cells. Really a niche kind of research thing, I don't know if this will make a whole lot of impact, either practically, academically, or economically.

Stumbled upon a good review of the pharmacology of Acetaminophen-Alcohol interactions (from back in 2000). Apparently it's more complicated than I thought:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2014937/

I would caution though, that while normal humans have an enormous amount of extra functional reserve in their livers, this may not be true for chronic alcohol users. Even if the absolute pharmacological toxicity is identical (or even modestly lessened), the same overdose that a non-alcoholic recovers from, could be fatal to someone with pre-existing damage. In addition, the cognitive and psychological impairment produced by alcohol could make both accidental and deliberate mis-use of other drugs more likely.

Quite possibly -- there is always individual variation in response to substances; I would expect this to be doubly true for a pro-drug that requires further metabolism to activate. Unfortunately, I didn't find much in a quick search just now regarding variability in pain relief with acetaminophen, although there are plenty of studies examining variable responses regarding liver toxicty.