Thiago Carvalho @cyrilpedia@qoto.org

The confluence of this technology with the information ecosystem that we described in our paper from a couple of years could be an epistemic catastrophe.

https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2025764118

I’m coming to think that releasing these tools was a reckless act with the potential to generate negative externalities we have barely started to imagine.

The threat isn’t rogue superintelligence. It’s bullshit at unprecedented scale, reflected back upon itself and iteratively amplified.

As part of our ongoing SARS-CoV2 Receptor Binding Domain series, below is a 3D print of the SARS-CoV1 RBD. This model was used to compare against SARS-Cov2, RATG13, and the Pangolin Virus receptor binding domains for insights about subsequent mutations.
https://biologicmodels.com/pdb/5x58/sars-cov1-spike-glycoprotein-5x58/

Ever wondered how many symptoms make up all of adult psychopathology described in the DSM-5? It’s 628!

How many do you think repeat across multiple diagnoses? If you answered 231 symptoms repeating a total of 1022 times (median 3 times per symptom, range 2-22), good job!

🧵

So Jamie Uhrig is my hero. This is what medicine and public health is. Speaking out for your patients, for the health of the marginalized. Wish others in our fields had half the courage he does. https://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/nyc-crime/ny-rikers-doctor-banned-slamming-correction-department-to-sue-nyc-20230320-vonrg4eeqreibbpuzdd7tua3ei-story.html

T cell-based therapies can cause cytokine release syndrome (CRS), a potentially lethal cytokine storm. Steroids and blocking antibodies usually help, but not all patients respond. Guo et al. found that mice with a defective adrenal stress response had a high risk for lethal CRS. However, pretreatment with low-dose steroids protected the mice, suggesting that pretreating patients with relative adrenal insufficiency with steroids may prevent lethal CRS. https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/scisignal.add4900 #science #immunology

4 YEAR OLD: I can't sleep, Daddy. I'm afraid of Frankenstein.
ME: Don't you mean Frankenstein's monster?
4 YEAR OLD: I do not. Personally, I find unethical and irresponsible scientific practice far more terrifying than any monster and so should you.

New lecturer opportunity in my dept (@EP_UCL):
---
RT @nicholaraihani
🚨Job🚨 Lecturer in Experimental Psychology (3-Year) This is a great opportunity for an early ish career researcher who wants to transition to a fellowship / PI position. Seeking people with interests / expertise in social evolution broadly defined. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/work-at-ucl/search-ucl-jobs/details
https://twitter.com/nicholaraihani/status/1638601284491042817

But, soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

#Australia #Shakespeare

Circa-Mid-1850s. One of the earliest photos of a Native American, this one showing a pet wolf. Unlike the many fearsome myths created about wolves by settlers, Native Americans maintained a close and respectful relationship with wolves and had domesticated them to become pet and working animals for hunting and carrying packs.
Source : Indians and Thier Dogs.#nativeamerican #Indigenous

Another hot-off-the-press preprint on #Drosophila host - #microbiome interactions:

Lactobacillus plantarum is resistant to host #antimicrobialpeptides (AMPs) thanks to characteristics of its peptidoglycan that make its cell wall less sensitive to AMPs than other #bacteria. 🦠

Definitely adding to my reading list! Congrats to Aranzazu et al. and Igor Iatsenko, whose new lab has been knocking it out of the park! ⚾

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2023.03.21.533593v1

@cyrilpedia

Excellent quote. But then!

"I spent 13 years at NIMH really pushing on the neuroscience and genetics of mental disorders, and when I look back on that I realize that while I think I succeeded at getting lots of really cool papers published by cool scientists at fairly large costs---I think $20 billion---I don’t think we moved the needle in reducing suicide, reducing hospitalizations, improving recovery for the tens of millions of people who have mental illness. I hold myself accountable for that."
https://www.wired.com/2017/05/star-neuroscientist-tom-insel-leaves-google-spawned-verily-startup/

The thing that keeps me optimistic (and sane) comes from not from our scientific leaders, but from philosophy: #hasokchang

"If we hit upon some stable and effective classificatory concepts in our inquiry, we should cherish them (calling them “natural kinds” would be one clear way of doing so), but without presuming that we have thereby found some eternal essences. The old familiar metaphor of “carving nature at its joints” should be replaced by a humbler motto: “suck it and see.” Here the notion of epistemic iteration becomes important again. It is logically possible that there might be a static system that serves all our purposes. More likely, however, what we need, and what we have in most successful sciences, is a steadily evolving system."
https://doi.org/10.1093/med/9780198796022.003.0029

Fascinating insights into the past and future of psychiatric diagnosis:

In the US, psychiatric disorders are classified via a manual called the DSM. In early versions of the DSM, diagnoses were linked, in part, to their suspected causes. This changed in 1980 with the DSM-III, where disorders were classified purely by their symptoms, an "atheoretical" approach. The spirit was two-fold: 1) We don't actually know their causes and 2) We need to create more consistency around how patients are diagnosed. That was a lot better, but it also came with it's own host of problems.

Among them: the same symptoms show up for a lot of different disorders, and there's suspicion that the diagnostic classes aren't quite right. We're now up to the DSM-V and a recent preprint quantifies just how overlapping the symptoms are there: there are 202 diagnoses; 628 distinct symptoms, and 37% of symptoms are repeated across multiple diagnoses. In an extreme case, every symptom of every diagnosis in the Bipolar and Related Disorders chapter is repeated in other chapters:
https://psyarxiv.com/u56p2/

How can we do better? First, by agreeing to maintain the DSM while trying to find a better diagnostic scheme (that's called pluralism). Then there are two paths forward. The first is one in which we pinpoint biological and nonbiological causes and reincorporate them into the diagnostic scheme (there's a lot of work going on this realm but it's proving to be really hard, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20595427/). The second is to reclassify everything using more quantitative approaches: https://hitop.unt.edu/sites/hitop.unt.edu/files/Kotov_et_al_2017_-_HiTOP.pdf