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iPlant
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Chapter 2 - iPlant-driven research (written in 2008) << Chapter 1 Chapter 3 >>  This chapter is now available as a reading on
YouTube.Science is about money. Scientific facts are not so much discovered by intellectual curiosity as they are constructed by cash investments. Science is objective but also directed. Research equipment has a cost, as do scientists. Our initial large source of funding, the one that carried the first one hundred iPlants through clinical trials demonstrating their capacity to treat morbid obesity, was unexpected. We arranged to meet Aubrey de Grey in a pub in Cambridge in 2009. He surprised me by bringing chips to the table - I'd thought he would at the very least avoid saturated fats. "And you are confident patients undergoing this new form of deep brain stimulation therapy would willingly volunteer some of their free time to become conditioned to conduct biomedical research?" Aubrey asked. "Maybe initially they would be people from the obesity trials." Lucy said, "Initially. But we're convinced a lot of people with no clinical problems will want iPlants once we get them past clinical trials. And if we can show in concrete terms, in research hours and actual findings, just how much a single iPlant can contribute to medical science... It would be exactly what we need to generate public support and get a foot in the door on government funding. We considered a climate change oriented approach - iPlant-driven research into renewable energy - but that kind of science is unstructured and abstract; it's engineering, not lab work, takes years of training. SENS is different; you've worked out in detail what needs to be done, even for cancer (de Grey, 2005; de Grey et al, 2004). What you need is an army of motivated scientists to do it. This is that army." "Bunch of fat people in lab coats addicted to exercise and arbitrary research protocols" Ike said and sipped his pint. "Nooo..." Lucy said, "Let's say four hours of iPlant-driven research per week per participant, one hundred participants in the stage II trials and one year of actual trials. That's over twenty thousand research hours; something like £250.000 in saved research funding at a typical UK payrate. And that's from the clinical trials alone. You've estimated the full cost of SENS at $100 million per year. That's roughly twenty thousand volunteers working four hours a week. That's a lot of people, but say we advertise it as a Manhattan Project to cure cancer - you really think finding volunteers would be a serious problem? If it's safe and the initial clinical trials show how effective it is? If it requires no effort whatsoever?" "Mind control on a mass scale, ain't nothing like it" Ike said. "Ike! Fuck! What's wrong with you?" Meg punched Ike's shoulder. "Just sparing dr de Grey the trouble of listing reasons why he wouldn't want his reputable foundation associated with an existential bomb-shell like this one." "I'm not sure I accept your calculations." Aubrey said. "But apart from that, how would you organize tens of thousands of unskilled researchers? How exactly would you train them? What about laboratories and equipment and logistics?" "We're not sure" Lucy said. "We have a detailed plan for how to organize up to two hundred researchers across four universities. Basic molecular biology mostly, building on old protocols. It's tempting to go further and try and to model the Human Genome Project but we'd like to avoid having the Chinese play the role of Celera in all this. You know what their demographics look like. We also feel there's an event horizon shortly after a few hundred." "Things won't exactly stay the same after Hu gets his hands on this implant." Ike said. Aubrey coughed. He was looking out the window. "How far away from clinical trials are you?" "That depends on how much you want to invest." --- Friday. Me, Ike and Meg are in the new proteomics lab in Reading, tuning the reinforcement system. At least that's what we keep telling ourselves. Why we're really doing it... well that's the big question. Ike is still in the protein factory. Meg finished purification a few hours ago and said she'd give microarray imprinting another try even though it looks too complex for a protocol. I'm doing quality control. Proteomics is the ever-expanding region between cell biology and genetics. The science of proteins. The Reading facility is a high-throughput unit developing antibodies towards short, specific segments of protein (compare Nilsson et al, 2005; Uhlen et al, 2005). The segments are isolated in the protein factory and sent to a farm in Cardiff where they're used to immunize rabbits. The serum is returned to us and the antibodies are extracted by washing the diluted yellowish fluid through columns containing the target protein segments. The end product is a transparent liquid of pure, polyclonal antibody. I'm not sure how many thousand pounds they get for each millilitre. Quality control means taking a sample of the finished product, pipetting it onto glass microarrays containing twenty different sets of protein fragments, incubating and washing the slides, running them through a scanner and going through the resulting images to make sure the antibody sticks to the right fragment and the right fragment only. Maybe it sounds difficult but it's not. It's about two hundred separate behaviours, none of which require knowledge of what a protein or an antibody is. It's surprising how much of science consists of these monotonous construction lines; so called 'protocols', and how much money is spent getting people to do them. The reinforcement system I've developed this week adds rewarding dopamine pulses at thirty-two points along the protocol. Another round. One more. Then I'm probably done. It's not gonna get much better than this. Picking up the vials from the freezers and carrying them over to the bench. You can tell which ones are Ike's from the labelling. OK. Four at a time. I plug in and carefully read the labels, entering the letters slowly on the computer as I go along. One. Yea, just right. Makes you wonder how you just did that. Makes you think about the motion of your arm, the fingers on the keyboard, the muscles in your fingers. Mindfulness meditation comes to mind but of course it's nothing like it. Two. What is it this experience, what is it? It's a pulse of dopamine of course, mostly prefrontal cortex, and a weak tail of serotonin, which, if the scans are any good, seems to be better... work better... if it's focused along the ventral branches. But that's not it, there's something to this. Three. Summers from when I was twelve years old or so visualize quite a lot these days. I was happy in a very different way back then, unrestrained. Plastic? Remembering learning to do somersaults in a field or a garden. Four. Ouch. Ooouch. Not right. Way too hard. Ike's right: you can't do more than three in a row if they're identical, even though you want to. I tell the computer to randomize the dopamine outwards on the last pulse next time; to push it more towards the edges. Next time... hah... This segment might be a bit too good, despite that last one. I make a note of it, put the music back on and start diluting PBS for the first microarray. Chapter 3 References de Grey ADNJ (2005) Whole-body interdiction of lengthening of telomeres: a proposal for cancer prevention. Front Biosci 10, p2420-2429. de Grey ADNJ, Campbell FC, Dokal I, Fairbairn LJ, Graham GJ, Jahoda CAB, Porter ACG (2004) Total deletion of in vivo telomere elongation capacity: an ambitious but possibly ultimate cure for all age-related human cancers. Annals NY Acad Sci 1019, p147-170. Nilsson P, Paavilainen L, Larsson K, Odling J, Sundberg M, Andersson AC, Kampf C, Persson A, Al-Khalili Szigyarto C, Ottosson J, Björling E, Hober S, Wernérus H, Wester K, Pontén F, Uhlen M (2005) Towards a human proteome atlas: high-throughput generation of mono-specific antibodies for tissue profiling. Proteomics 5(17), p4327-37. Uhlén M, Björling E, Agaton C, Szigyarto CA, Amini B, Andersen E, Andersson AC, Angelidou P, Asplund A, Asplund C, Berglund L, Bergström K, Brumer H, Cerjan D, Ekström M, Elobeid A, Eriksson C, Fagerberg L, Falk R, Fall J, Forsberg M, Björklund MG, Gumbel K, Halimi A, Hallin I, Hamsten C, Hansson M, Hedhammar M, Hercules G, Kampf C, Larsson K, Lindskog M, Lodewyckx W, Lund J, Lundeberg J, Magnusson K, Malm E, Nilsson P, Odling J, Oksvold P, Olsson I, Oster E, Ottosson J, Paavilainen L, Persson A, Rimini R, Rockberg J, Runeson M, Sivertsson A, Sköllermo A, Steen J, Stenvall M, Sterky F, Strömberg S, Sundberg M, Tegel H, Tourle S, Wahlund E, Waldén A, Wan J, Wernérus H, Westberg J, Wester K, Wrethagen U, Xu LL, Hober S, Pontén F (2005) A human protein atlas for normal and cancer tissues based on antibody proteomics. Mol Cell Proteomics 4(12), p1920-32. |
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At the International Neuromodulation Conference in Seoul
(September 2009) Does secularism fuck you up? (pt.2, pt.3) (June 2009) What we need to accelerate biomedical research and fight aging (May 2009) I can has freedom and dignity? (April 2009) Using Medtronic's Reclaim implant to generate artificial motivation (March 2009) Wired-article-induced neuroscience rant (March 2009) Riding a bike (December 2008) How compliant do we want our children to be? (December 2008) Thoughts on forks (December 2008) Aging (November 2008) Brainbeat (October 2008) |
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What the blogs say |
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The iPlant: Making life easier for the lazy?
(June 2009)
Enogamez iPlant (June 2009) Something Awesome iPlant Brain Implant Advocated for Self-Improvement (June 2009) Technovelgy iPlant - the motivational implant (June 2009) Futurismic A prosthetic motivational system (April 2009) Emerging Ideas Self-determination for the 21st century (April 2009) psique The iPlant (May 2008) Brain Stimulant |
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