WordWorks

Would be interesting to see the changes over the coming weeks.

“Chrome is not going to replace Windows. A computer requires an operating system such as Windows, Apple’s OS X or Linux to make the machine work. It does, however, have the potential to do what Mr. Gates feared: make the choice of operating system less important.”

Does Windows Still Matter? – Business, Power and Deals – Executive Suite blog – NYTimes.com.

Joe Nocera, said it well. The operating system is fast being made irrelevant by the internet. Google leap frogged Microsoft by releasing the chrome browser. The OS is irrelevant or more aptly, Windows is dispensable.

Why doesn’t abstinence-only education deter teens from having sex? Consider this R-rated experiment, led by the behavioral economist Dan Ariely and neuroeconomist George Loewenstein. They began by asking twenty-five male undergraduates at UC-Berkeley a series of provocative sexual questions. The first set of questions concerned their sexual preferences. Could they imagine having sex with a 60 year old woman? What about getting sexually excited by contact with an animal? Did they like getting tied up during sex? The next set of questions dealt with sexual morality. Would the male students slip a woman a drug to increase the chance that she would have sex with them? Would they keep trying to have sex after their date said “no”? The final set of questions was about safe sex. Would the men insist on using a condom? Is it safe to have unprotected sex if you “pull out” before ejaculation?

The Frontal Cortex : Teens and Sex.

The problem is that, nor does the educational programs that advocate safe sex. It is a problem of the “intervention” – namely abstinence education or safe sex education not having the desired effect in the study populace – the message is not getting across. The above study is a reflection of that. Maybe it has something to do with the the methods used.

The traditional way to attenuate a virus is through trial and error — a process of selecting harmless versions. But now, attenuation can be engineered. The idea is to rewrite some of the virus’s genes using “slow” combinations of codons. The virus makes the same proteins it did before, but it makes them so slowly that an infection cannot get going.

In a recent series of experiments investigating whether such engineering actually works in practice, polioviruses with rewritten genes were 1,000 times less efficient than the viruses found in the wild. This successfully rendered the virus harmless while still letting the immune system get a good look at it: mice that had been exposed to the engineered version were immune to wild poliovirus, whereas mice that had not been were not.

Braking the Virus – Olivia Judson – Evolution – Opinion – New York Times Blog.

An interesting concept. Attenuation of bacterial strains to prevent disease and make vaccines have been well known for many years and gave us disease fighting tools such as BCG. The current tuberculosis vaccine is a live vaccine derived from Mycobacterium bovis and attenuated by serial in vitro passaging. All vaccine substrains in use stem from one source, strain Bacille Calmette-Guérin. However, they differ in regions of genomic deletions, antigen expression levels, immunogenicity, and protective efficacy.

BCG vaccine, which is derived from an attenuated strain of the mycobacterium bovis when given to people helped mount an immune response that would help in case the real thing – Mycobacterium tuberculosis came along. 

Tuberculosis is an infectious disease of enormous global importance. It is estimated that about one third of the human population is latently infected with Mycobacterium tuberculosis with 1.6 million people dying annually from the disease. The currently employed tuberculosis vaccine, Mycobacterium bovis Bacille Calmette-Guérin (BCG) was originally derived from a virulent strain of M. bovis back to 1921, by repeated passages on potato slices soaked in glycerol-ox byle. The primary attenuation is attributed to loss of RD1 locus, which affects a protein secretion pathway. Subsequent propagation of BCG in several laboratories around the world resulted in further in vitro evolution, which is still ongoing. 

It would be interesting to see where the new technique of attenuation, applied to viruses, would take us. Hopefully it would help us mount an adequate response – no pun intended – to the present day scourge, HIV. The HIV virus replicates rapidly and changes a lot in the interim such that the body is unable to adequately mount a response [1]. The immune system is also unable to get a “good look” at the virus as the envelope is hidden by various proteins. Virus attenuation may be able to slow down HIV replication enough to help the body form truly neutralizing antibodies. 

References

1) An HIV vaccine–challenges and prospects.