I think the factcheck.org link you posted is quite good. I'm a scientist, but I'm not an epidemiologist. That said, I would communicate very differently than the way the National Academy did, when presented with the same data.

In a case like this, making a definitive statement that could reasonably interpreted by a non-scientist as "there's no link at all" or "it didn't happen" is ethically wrong. At a scientific conference, in front of an expert group of people, I would absolutely use your language, because it is factually correct. Factually correct, is not the appropriate or correct ethical bar when communicating science to the public. You can be factually correct, but lead an average person to an incorrect understanding. The ethical bar is higher than factually correct.

This philosophy of considering how non-scientists interpret your words, by the way, is mandated by the FDA for drug and diagnostic developers (and I do work in that field). It is not required that academics or the National Academy, or the NIH take this philosophy.

In this case, there is definitive evidence that SV40 causes cancer in cell culture, SV40 was active and present in the vaccine, and the epidemiologists have been unable to "prove a negative" (a refrain which is repeated appropriately by all the excellent scientists involved here). They've been unable to prove the positive either! Which is your point.

No, mRNA is messenger RNA. There's nothing spooky here, just decades of quiet research culminating in an effective treatment.

Methylation is something that happens to DNA or RNA naturally to help regulate expression (use by the cell) of the DNA or RNA. It's a natural process.

I'm a scientist, I'm going to try to answer this in the spirit that you're actually interested and not just another person who cares about the action of asking the questions more than learning the answers. Your questions are all reasonable!

It gets into the cell by being packaged in a special liposome shell. In scientific literature, we typically call the naturally occurring versions of these shells vesicles. What we've done with mRNA vaccines is we have borrowed the system by which our cells communicate mRNA with each other and we're sending our own manufactured mRNA messages. mRNA, by the way, stands for messenger RNA. It's a message. Although most mRNA stays in the cell that originated it, a lot of mRNA is moving from cell to cell in your body right now. You may be reading about links to mRNA and cancer. We learned about using vesicles to transfer external mRNA into cells in large part by studying cancer, but the messaging system is there and working fine in normal healthy cells as well. A lot of mRNA vaccine technology was developed as a prototype cancer therapy, and quickly repurposed for covid before any cancer therapy was finished.

Rather, this is like discovering that the DVD player manufacturers built a robot to test their hardware by inserting DVDs and using that robot to insert DVDs for us so that we don't have to do it by hand.

You are right now producing a lot of mRNA. Just like your naturally produced mRNA, injected mRNA will be degraded over time by the cells that use it (or may be destroyed by your immune system while the vaccine trains your immune system to attack viral proteins). The liposome that carries the mRNA falls apart quickly - a few hours. It is that liposome shell that necessitates the extreme storage conditions for the vaccine. The mRNA itself has a lifetime of a few days.

An interesting question. This is a real thing that happened: a virus infected the polio vaccine developed by Salk and that virus led to a significant global increase in cancer rates. In that case, the vaccine contained an active virus as a contaminant that replicated inside people, it wasn't intended to be there. It would be dishonest to suggest that such a mistake could never happen again, it could. In this case, the mRNA vaccines are synthetic. That means that they're not the result of growing anything (like almost all past vaccines), they are manufactured via a chemical process. This should drastically reduce the opportunity for any biological organism or virus to infect and contaminate the vaccine. In addition, our ability to test for infecting viruses is MUCH better today than it was 70 years ago.

This is a really insightful comment, and done much more respectfully than the "this is more mental masturbation by scientists" comment that's not as highly scored.

I am a physicist, and I've worked on a couple of "megaprojects" like this. The issue you're describing of not understanding "why are we doing this?" is actually a HUGE problem with modern physics (and a lot of science in general). If we, as scientists, can't describe why a set of work is helpful to the average person, then we're not doing our job.

There are echo chambers in large areas of modern physics that have lost sight of that to the degree that there are subfields of physics that can't even explain to other physicists why we should care about their work. They are supported by enormous bureaucracies that are part of that echo chamber and defend plans and budgets using paperwork and process friction. I think what I'm getting at is we should have a perspective that we in science serve society rather than the other way around.

The lawyers were fined $2M on a case with hundreds of millions of dollars on the line. It's almost certain that the lawyers made significantly more than $2M from Samsung on the case. The law firm in question is Quinn Emanuel, and they have annual revenue of over $1B. Despite the protestations of the parent, it appears legal journals interpreted these fines as a slap on the wrist.

Worth noting here: Apple also asked to see Samsung's sales data in the Epic case... because... why not?

ha, good point! That's exactly what my comment seems to suggest, and that would be stupid.

The government has tons of experts and in this field already and reams of reports on this issue already at hand.

The solutions I'm suggesting are things semiconductor experts in DoD have been talking about for years. There are multiple studies done every year on this, DARPA has put together programs on this, paying academics to study it, the National Academies have written reports on this. Biden can pick a report he likes, or pick the group he wants to trust. After 20 years of seeing studies and being part of some of them, I have very little belief that another study is going to result in action.

A study and and 100 day blue ribbon committee... that will solve it!

How about a 0% interest loan program to the people in North America willing to build and expand their fabs?
How about a grant system to pay for the engineering necessary to re-open rare earth mines in California while meeting environmental laws and expectations?

If we enable domestic fabs to increase automation via low-cost (or free) capital and not make them pay out of pocket for environmental upgrades, I think we could make domestic fabs economically competitive. This was the problem with the tariffs: there was no incentive to invest in domestic PRODUCTION, there was only a penalty for domestic CONSUMPTION.

It's better than that. The "currency" of science is a citation. Nature is a highly regarded journal because they tend to publish papers that they think will be highly cited (and they're usually correct).

By publishing in Nature, AND by having Musk as a co-author, the academics on this study are going to see a nice boost to their citations.

So: good for SpaceX business, good for employees, good for the academics doing the test, and good for our understanding of COVID in general (I'm a scientist, and if I could have self-funded a study like this, I would have, it's a good study)>

You're making an inherently conservative argument (don't change things because they're working well enough).

I think for those of us inside science, it's pretty clear that things are not working well enough. Much of science today is not reproducible. It is very hard to see that there is a difference between "good" science and "crackpot" science if the result of both is a journal paper that is of no use to anyone. Maybe, though, you're not seeing the suggestions from people in science. Here are some of the things we're talking about:

- For an organization to claim overhead for a worker on a grant, that worker must be treated as a full time employee. Even if they're students or on a fellowship, they should have the same employment protections as everyone else.
- The R&D tax credit should be split to separate scientific research from things like development of commercial software and business practices. Scientific research should be prioritized.
- Grant review committee members should all be paid by the government for their work to enable a wider pool of people to participate.
- Grant review committee composition should always include some non-scientists and some non-academic scientists.
- Granting agencies should be required to define quantitative and verifiable success metrics for most grants.
- OSTP (now a cabinet agency) should lead phase out of journal publication citations as a tracked metric for grantees.

As a commercial scientist, I find this characterization very odd . Universities do not "get" money from us in private industry, they "extract" it via massive teams of lawyers. Maybe they'll occasionally they'll do it with a smile.

You know, that's not really important. I totally agree the system is dysfunctional, and I think we all in science have similar ideas of what needs to change.

It comes down to two things:
1) Labor practices. In industry (in most places in the US and Europe), if a project is shut down, or a budget dries up, or someone gets promoted and is now too expensive, and you need to lay off staff, you cannot simultaneously or soon after hire staff with similar job descriptions. (Yes, people get away with doing this, but you're not supposed to be able to do it.) Universities, though do get to do this. This provides a perverse incentive toward high lab turnover to keep labor costs low (and overhead high - the priority of the administration). This is worst with grad students and postdocs. A simple change would be to treat workers at a university the same as workers in industry, whether students or not.

2) Incentives. The grant-and-publish system of science has run its course. It's become political, entrenched, unforgivably sloppy, and encourages ivory tower building rather than real problem solving. It's been about 50 years since the citation system was created, and about 30 years since granting agencies started prioritizing publication impact factors as metrics of success, it's time to change again. The metrics of success for science "programs" should be around impacting people outside of science. (A "program" here is as used in granting agencies - it's the collection of all the projects, grants, and contracts put together to answer a question or develop a technology. It's easy to apply "program" over many years to a single lab or to a company as well.) There are many ways this could be done, from tracking public interest (clicks, reads, whatever) to tracking quantitative achievements (project derived reduction in CO2 for climate researchers, for example). It would be messy, and difficult, and not as simple or fast as "h-index" but when we started off judging ourselves via citations, that seemed very difficult at the start as well.

Looking at "markup" from COGS is irrelevant here. Apple does not pay for the development of the apps, this is not a grocery store where they have to buy an app copy to sell an app copy. I think the term you're actually looking for is "margin" which is the % profit on a product sold. Apple does have some costs running the app store and famously has high margins on all of its products.

10% margin is more or less the average. Apple is above 20% (sometimes well above that) which is considered high margin.

Musk did Tenev a favor here, and I wouldn't be surprised if Vlad asked him to do this.

The reporter missed the relevant details of Musk's history, which is that he absolutely hates short sellers and is very public about that. He is very credible as interlocutor representing the anger felt by Robinhood users concerned that there was some "shady business" done to the benefit of the short sellers.

The most important part of the conversation is that their clearing house requested a $3 billion deposit for them to continue trading Gamestop stock, and that this was a very unusual request.

Who is Robinhood's clearing house?
Why was Robinhood requested to put such a large deposit down?

There was a missed opportunity here for Vlad to deflect some of the anger toward his company and his platform toward someone else that may be more deserving of the public's attention right now.

The Great Depression was very much international. Depending on which economist you read, the Great Depression may have been triggered by the UK coming off the gold standard. One of the first effects was a run on banks, with major banks closing in the US and continental Europe. The effects were most severe, perhaps, in Germany and the US.

The de-coupling of major currencies and international trade from gold spread the Great Depression from there quite effectively.

Generally, the speed with which a country switched off the gold standard and switched to something else (usually silver) correlated with the recovery speed from the Great Depression.The US fit that model well. A few places, like China, already used silver to back their currency and escaped most of the turmoil of the Great Depression.

I am a scientist.

Trump wasn't wrong that science was politicised in the most general sense. Of course, he had no solution and lacked an actual understanding of what's been wrong.

The problem is the granting system. Science is dominated by the contract research market, and scientists are focused above all else on landing their next grant. This incentivises framing research results for committee approval, while gaining positions in and connections to those committees. Independently provable results mean less than political maneuvering, press releases, and the social media following of the lead investigator of a project.

A review of how Trump distorted scientific results isn't going to solve these fundamental issues (but making the National Science Advisor a Cabinet level position might help - something Biden is also doing).

The system put in place in the 1990s at the end of the cold war has done great things for science. It's brought us a long way, but it's run its course. It's been 30 years. It's time we start working on the next system.

That's the short version. If you're wondering what happened in the 1990s, a few big changes were made in an effort to reduce waste in government spending and refocus scientific work away from defense related spending:
- We moved away from a system that emphasized block grants (limited SOW, open ended) to a system that emphasized categorical grants (detailed SOW, task oriented).
- We removed the requirement that federal contractors spend 15% of their budget on auditable basic research.
- We moved the focus of national labs from research to contracting and tech transfer.
- We consolidated government agencies responsible for transitioning research into technology into the agencies responsible for basic research.
- We removed most restrictions on using international students to work on federally funded research.

The result was that we reduced the cost/paper and cost/PhD trained. We also reduced the costs for non-scientific materials purchased by the government. We reduced the overall amount spent on government R&D while quantitatively increasing scientific output. We also increased international cooperation in science. These are all good things.

We've defined R&D in industry for tax purposes to include writing commercial software. While that's great, it distorts the numbers and makes it appear that industry has picked up funding for basic research when that's not happening at all.

Now, we have an oversupply of experienced scientific labor, while funding too training projects. We've abused the "amateur status" of most working scientists (students, postdocs) to justify exempting scientific work from many labor laws. We have placed too much power in the hands of the scientific journals and in the hands of grant selection committees. This has prioritized work that is "interesting" over work that is useful. Science is now something the government drives, from salary ranges to research priorities, with a few notable selections. For most scientists, progressing in your career requires getting the right results at the right time and having the connections to get those results published in the right journals. We have created an incentive structure that values short term "feel-good" results over long term progress.

We (in science) have seen the results of this - a real reproducibility crisis, a lack of trust or meaningful interaction between scientists and everyone else in society, and a bunch of former colleagues and students who feel mis-used by the system for good reason.

Instead of moving backward, I think we should adjust what we have now. Require grantees to treat scientific workers on R&D grants as internal full time employees (this would be a very big change). Separate the R&D tax credit into science and technology and adjust incentives to prioritize science. Include more diversity on grant review committees - at least 20% non-scientists, at least 20% non-academic scientists. Pay grant review committee members or their employers for their work so that review committees are not just people representing organizations who have the financial ability to volunteer. Allow OSTP to impose internal metrics on agencies funding science so that our leadership (i.e. Congress or the President) can actually hold the scientific bureaucracy accountable and we can break away from impact factor as the only metric we track. Some programs might be judged based on economic effects such as private investment raised and others might be judged on environmental metrics such as amount of CO2 removed. Now I've gone on too long...

I think you need to look into the kinds of trades being discussed in TFA. In this case, not being able to trade DOES lead to people losing money.

This is about people playing chicken with each other with options and shorts, and RH limiting the trades of its customers increases the risk of those customers' options and shorts.