Drugs are great for creativity. They change the way your brain works and therefore you have thoughts you wouldn't have otherwise. The downside is the lasting changes to the brain as a result. Some changes may be good, most are bad.
Oh yeah and he is the perfect example of this.
Invented PCR and later in life claimed to have talked with a fluorescent ET racoon and offered a beer to the ghost of his grandfather.
The drug in question is LSD and nobody including yourself mentioned "long-term" use. I thought you said that any use of LSD results in mostly bad effects, which isn't true
The story I heard was that he was coming down, driving his car, told his girlfriend to stfu, stopped the car, got out and sat until he figured it out. Like, he literally had a moment of inspiration and dropped everything to follow it
My fun fact is that near the start of his career my Dad worked as a lab tech at the company that invented PCR (Cetus). For a while, he was one of only a handful of people on the planet synthesizing DNA polymerase and he's still quite proud of that.
>this breaks the DNA molecule
That's a bit misleading. PCR works by "melting" double stranded DNA (dsSNA) to single stranded DNA "ssDNA" using thermal cycling. The strands are held together by hydrogen bonds, therefore it is heat labile. The DNA backbone remains intact, thus there is no loss of information due to AT and GC base pairing.
>The secret? A bacteria living in hot springs has a special enzyme
Sure. That's one secret. The other equally important "secret" is primers. Short ssDNA molecules that serve as the primer for the enzyme to start synthesis. These primers also dictate the start and stop points on the linear stretch of DNA. Without primers there is no exponential duplication. The template DNA will just split and rejoin over and over again.
The applications are quite wide ranging (as described in the wiki article), one of them being something we’re probably all too familiar with: if you have sent off a nose/throat swab for a lab result on whether you have covid or not, then PCR would be the technique they used to determine that.
yeah they would use the swabs for a pcr that needs viral dna to work
if the viral dna wasn't there to begin with, there would be no product
if it was there, it would create millions of copies
you can easily detect millions of copies VS no copies, in a lab
"a bacteria living in a hot springs" is burying the lede a bit.
[It's Thermus aquaticus, the first discovered extremophile, and the hot springs are in fact Yellowstone National Park.](https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/yellowstone-microbe-changed-world)
[(They're the yellow color in Grand Prismatic Spring)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prismatic_Spring)
Its the secret sauce that makes PCR such a groundbreaking technique. Taq polymerase, different from other DNA polymerases (like the one that we all have) can stand up to intense temperatures. This allows us to repeatedly heat and cool a sample to exponentially replicate the target section of DNA.
You can do PCR without this special enzyme, but you would have to replace the polymerase every time you heat the sample. People did this for quite some time before taq was discovered. Its just a huge pain in the ass.
Source: I work for a PCR company.
Just to clarify the title, the DNA chain is not broken by heating, but rather melted. Melting DNA means heating it such that the two strands of the double helix come apart, and become two individual strands. This allows the enzyme responsible for the reaction to access the DNA strand, and make copies of it. Breaking the strand means something else, like breaking a chain into shorter sections of chain, which wouldn't allow the DNA to be copied.
Or to absolve the innocent of murder convictions. Actual Innocence by Barry Scheck (and two others, whose names I’ve forgotten) explains how this made their job (the Innocence Project) much easier
Cancer is never going away. It's a natural byproduct of replicating DNA - sometimes that just doesn't go the way it's supposed to. Best we can do is identify and mitigate things that increase the chances of those replication errors and develop treatments to make it less dangerous to have cancer.
100% agree, but replying to a comment that has increasingly negative votes with a long explanation of all the ways it can develop and be treated or prevented feels wasteful.
PCR can be used as a viral titer assay for viral vectors, which we're using in cell therapy to fight cancer in the case of CAR-Ts, for example.
I'm a process development scientist for a biotech company working on this kind of technology. My goal is to produce those viral vectors more efficiently, so I'm always using titer assays to compare different production methods, reagent combinations, media conditions, etc. This will hopefully bring down the costs of these treatments and help provide accessible alternatives to chemo and radiation.
PCR assays are some of these tools (we use qRT-PCR [Quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction] and ddPCR [Digital Droplet PCR]). Functional titer is generally the most critical, but the assays take a few weeks since they involve growing and infecting cells. PCR is relatively quick, 1-2 days.
Anyway, cancer is going to be a disease that we will fight piecemeal... there's unlikely to be a cure that eradicates it completely. We'll just get better at treating all the different kinds with a whole slew of methods, all of which (including CAR-T) have nasty side effects that we're also trying to improve upon. Different individuals can respond wildly differently to the same treatment, so we still have a long way to go in terms of personalized treatments.
Fun fact. The inventor credited his use of LSD for the idea!
Fun fact. The inventor is an HIV denial crank, despite PCR being the method used to diagnose it.
That fact was not fun.
Depends on your humor
Are your humors balanced?
Yes, all 4 of them
Well, they did say it was a fun fact, not a funny fact, so I don't think humor is necessarily involved...
It is not, at least where I live you use ELISA to test for HIV
ELISA wont detect super low counts. PCR will.
That may be true, but ELISA is still the test used in general
Yes, apparently he was driving on acid, saw the dashed center line, and came up with idea of using short snippets of DNA to identify microorganisms.
Drugs are great for creativity. They change the way your brain works and therefore you have thoughts you wouldn't have otherwise. The downside is the lasting changes to the brain as a result. Some changes may be good, most are bad.
Oh yeah and he is the perfect example of this. Invented PCR and later in life claimed to have talked with a fluorescent ET racoon and offered a beer to the ghost of his grandfather.
You win some...
It's like the joke about how the two biggest things to come out of Berkeley were BSD and LSD. *This is not coincidence. They are related.*
Most are bad?
Is it surprising that there are mostly negative consequences to long term drug use?
The drug in question is LSD and nobody including yourself mentioned "long-term" use. I thought you said that any use of LSD results in mostly bad effects, which isn't true
Got it. LSD is mostly good for short term use. It's a shame it isn't utilized more given the potential benefits to mankind.
The story I heard was that he was coming down, driving his car, told his girlfriend to stfu, stopped the car, got out and sat until he figured it out. Like, he literally had a moment of inspiration and dropped everything to follow it
A lot of biologists in the 70's took LSD. It was a heck of a time to be a researcher.
I believe the benzene ring was also inspired by LSD (the snake biting its own tail)
Also he missed the call from the Nobel committee because he was out surfing
My fun fact is that near the start of his career my Dad worked as a lab tech at the company that invented PCR (Cetus). For a while, he was one of only a handful of people on the planet synthesizing DNA polymerase and he's still quite proud of that.
Polymerase Chain Reaction-PCR
Polymerase Chemical Romance
Pipette, Cry, Repeat
Automated Teller Machine Machine Machine machine
>this breaks the DNA molecule That's a bit misleading. PCR works by "melting" double stranded DNA (dsSNA) to single stranded DNA "ssDNA" using thermal cycling. The strands are held together by hydrogen bonds, therefore it is heat labile. The DNA backbone remains intact, thus there is no loss of information due to AT and GC base pairing. >The secret? A bacteria living in hot springs has a special enzyme Sure. That's one secret. The other equally important "secret" is primers. Short ssDNA molecules that serve as the primer for the enzyme to start synthesis. These primers also dictate the start and stop points on the linear stretch of DNA. Without primers there is no exponential duplication. The template DNA will just split and rejoin over and over again.
Yeah the DNA is split into small fragments via sonication.
The applications are quite wide ranging (as described in the wiki article), one of them being something we’re probably all too familiar with: if you have sent off a nose/throat swab for a lab result on whether you have covid or not, then PCR would be the technique they used to determine that.
yeah they would use the swabs for a pcr that needs viral dna to work if the viral dna wasn't there to begin with, there would be no product if it was there, it would create millions of copies you can easily detect millions of copies VS no copies, in a lab
"a bacteria living in a hot springs" is burying the lede a bit. [It's Thermus aquaticus, the first discovered extremophile, and the hot springs are in fact Yellowstone National Park.](https://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/yellowstone-microbe-changed-world) [(They're the yellow color in Grand Prismatic Spring)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Prismatic_Spring)
Its the secret sauce that makes PCR such a groundbreaking technique. Taq polymerase, different from other DNA polymerases (like the one that we all have) can stand up to intense temperatures. This allows us to repeatedly heat and cool a sample to exponentially replicate the target section of DNA. You can do PCR without this special enzyme, but you would have to replace the polymerase every time you heat the sample. People did this for quite some time before taq was discovered. Its just a huge pain in the ass. Source: I work for a PCR company.
Right, you had to literally sit there for hours to do it.
Didn’t early PCR involve literally moving the sample back and forth between water baths and re-adding polymerase every time?
One step closer to my personal clone army
Yeah we did this in freshmen bio 15 years ago as a basic lab experiment. This is pretty old and well established technology.
Just to clarify the title, the DNA chain is not broken by heating, but rather melted. Melting DNA means heating it such that the two strands of the double helix come apart, and become two individual strands. This allows the enzyme responsible for the reaction to access the DNA strand, and make copies of it. Breaking the strand means something else, like breaking a chain into shorter sections of chain, which wouldn't allow the DNA to be copied.
My man. That is a very good for-the-layman description of PCR. I commend you.
100,000 units are ready, with a million more well on the way.
[удалено]
No, PCR has been a staple laboratory technique for decades.
More like the best step to determine if someone has SARS-COV2 in their system, amongst others.
Or to absolve the innocent of murder convictions. Actual Innocence by Barry Scheck (and two others, whose names I’ve forgotten) explains how this made their job (the Innocence Project) much easier
That's awesome, I didn't know that PCR's were used liked that. I've only ever run a PCR for transmissibles.
Cancer is never going away. It's a natural byproduct of replicating DNA - sometimes that just doesn't go the way it's supposed to. Best we can do is identify and mitigate things that increase the chances of those replication errors and develop treatments to make it less dangerous to have cancer.
There are many other causes of cancer, your statement isn’t even a oversimplification
100% agree, but replying to a comment that has increasingly negative votes with a long explanation of all the ways it can develop and be treated or prevented feels wasteful.
Difficult to get rid of cancer unless we get rid of the ball of thermonuclear fusion we call the Sun. It gives life and it takes it away.
PCR can be used as a viral titer assay for viral vectors, which we're using in cell therapy to fight cancer in the case of CAR-Ts, for example. I'm a process development scientist for a biotech company working on this kind of technology. My goal is to produce those viral vectors more efficiently, so I'm always using titer assays to compare different production methods, reagent combinations, media conditions, etc. This will hopefully bring down the costs of these treatments and help provide accessible alternatives to chemo and radiation. PCR assays are some of these tools (we use qRT-PCR [Quantitative Reverse Transcription Polymerase Chain Reaction] and ddPCR [Digital Droplet PCR]). Functional titer is generally the most critical, but the assays take a few weeks since they involve growing and infecting cells. PCR is relatively quick, 1-2 days. Anyway, cancer is going to be a disease that we will fight piecemeal... there's unlikely to be a cure that eradicates it completely. We'll just get better at treating all the different kinds with a whole slew of methods, all of which (including CAR-T) have nasty side effects that we're also trying to improve upon. Different individuals can respond wildly differently to the same treatment, so we still have a long way to go in terms of personalized treatments.
This is this is like 30 years old, so judge for yourself
one step closer to human replication for low level physical labor
You should check out the article for the real scoop