Our 7 year old son was just diagnosed with leukemia. Perspective? Happy endings? Tell me what to expect, because I can't make my brain work right now.

IGottaSnake · 1 month

That's what happens when you pour billions of dollars into medical research. Look at what we did with AIDS: it is now a chronic condition which you can live with indefinitely.

Humanity is awesome.

tip2tip · 1 month

Depending on the genre, Netflix's selection can be mediocre. As for making torrents safe, do you have any advice? I use RC4 encryption and PeerBlock. What else should I be doing? Do I need a proxy?

IGottaSnake · 1 month

Doctor here. Leukemia treatments have completely changed in the last 30 years. Even in the last 10. There is still a lot of variability between the different types, but prognoses are a lot better than they used to be.

For example, most Chronic Myeloid Leukemias can be treated with a simple pill. There are other types, of course, many of which require bone marrow transplants. These are no fun, but are much better than they used to be. Even modern chemotherapy drugs have improved - they work better and have fewer side effects than the ones your parents might have known.

As for how much you tell your child, the biggest mistake I see parents making is that they lie. Your child is smart. He will very quickly figure out that he is very sick. Don't insult him by pretending that he cannot understand. Children may not see the world in the same way that adults do, but this does not me that they do not comprehend. Be honest.

justicecallicles · 1 month

A normal cell already has a full set of DNA. If a sperm injected another set the cell would either interpret that as DNA damage and destroy itself (a process called apoptosis) or would continue trying to survive but fail because of the chromosome abnormality.

blaholmes · 1 month

As a doctor, I find your collective squeamishness amusing. In no particular order:

Diabetic ulcers so bad that toes have literally fallen off
Breast cancers that have eroded through the skin and become consumed by infection
Many scrotums too mangled to save. The worst is when they carry their testicles in, hoping we can reattach them. We can't
A reddit favorite: pooping during childbirth. Almost everyone does it

You put on a brave face for the patients, but sometimes it's fucking gross.

justicecallicles · 1 month

No, it could not. Digestive enzymes from the sperm's acrosome are not super-enzymes capable of digesting anything. They are only capable of digesting the very special (and very digestable) glycoprotein membrane of the egg cell, called the Zona pellucida.

OhSweetBalls · 1 month

You do not have any sensory apparatus inside your vertebral canal capable of producing that kind of sensation, so you cannot be feeling the fluid directly. And I find it unlikely that your cerebrospinal fluid is sloshing around enough to transmit waves. What exactly are you feeling?

CravenRaven · 1 month

Eh, HIV is unlikely to outpace our research at this point. Especially if it is well managed, the virus is replicating so infrequently that it doesn't mutate very much. And even when it does mutate, "it typically involves the gene encoding the HIV envelope (not the reverse transcriptase and protease genes), thus preserving susceptibility to the major classes of HIV enzyme inhibitors." The real problem is that nucleoside analogues are nauseating and teratogenic while the nonnucleoside inhibitors are hepatotoxic... and you need to be on both.

Shnauz · 1 month

No problem. In fact, you'll be glad to know that these problems are already taken care of.

Overpopulation was solved, scientifically, with the advent of safe and reliable birth control. Distributing that birth control is the only limitation, but that's just a religious/social science issue. Pretty simple, compared to the science side of things. I expect that any day now someone will sit down with world leaders and explain this wonderful technology. Birth rates should stabilize withing a generation.

The science of overfishing has also been solved. Don't fish so much. Period. Depending on the species and the location, we have lots of data on what level of harvesting constitutes a sustainable practice. The implementation of such limitations is simply a trivial matter for the politicians to sort out.

I think we can start by ignoring things like financial crisises, which are well outside the realm of science. After all, economics is a poorly-defined realm and no self-respecting scientist would bother with such muddy data.

Climate change is also scientifically dead. We identified the problem decades ago and gave politicians ample warning. We then laid the groundwork for new non-carbon emitting technologies like solar, nuclear, and wind. Presumably governments and corporations heeded our warnings and are rolling out the green-energy economy as we speak. The science is done here, it's just trivial things like business and governance from now on.

Pollution is yet another success story. We scientists have made low-emission vehicles are a reality, and air/water filtration systems of tremendous specificity are available to the marketplace. I expect that any day now some burly engineering types will carry out the simple business of implementing our designs.

So there you have it! Science has saved the world.

ArmedAndDangerous · 1 month

Oh sure, IgE antibodies have their uses. I tried to make it clear that I was only talking about the antibodies sensitized to allergens, but I can see how you might read it another way.

This language has high accuracy but poor specificity.

ArmedAndDangerous · 1 month

In a word, no. Allergies are caused by an inappropriate generation of IgE antibodies that, when activated by the allergen, cause mast cells to degranulate releasing histamine and inflammatory chemicals. If you could magically erase the allergy-causing IgE antibodies it would not harm your immune system one single bit.

And allergies do not indicate that your immune system is "strong" - you could easily have terrible allergies while your immune system is deficient in protecting you from other diseases. For example, you could have horrible IgE-mediated allergies while dying from AIDS.

streetlite · 1 month

You can now sequence a genome for about $4000. Compare to about $500,000 only 10 years ago. It is getting faster and cheaper every month. By 2020 it should be commonplace. The economics won't be a problem, the problem is what do we do with all that data?

tejon · 1 month

High doses may not be tolerable, but it could still be part of a combination therapy. Lots of work to do though.

tiotropium · 1 month

There is a world of difference between stupidity and ignorance.

alllie · 1 month

But no prisons would take them. No states would host the trials. Fox News was whipping loonies into a frenzy for months.

alllie · 1 month

No, I completely agree that it should have been closed. But how would you do it?

alllie · 1 month

Do you remember the public outrage when they suggested moving prisoners to Minnesota or whatever? Their hands were tied. What would you have had them do?

alllie · 1 month

It wasn't as simple as voting to close it. They had to find places to try and detain the prisoners there, and people were raising hell about moving them to supermax prisons and trying them in New York courts. So without a place to move these people, how do you close gitmo? Even if you wanted to close it, you couldn't vote to close it without a place to put these guys.

vation · 1 month

Also, there is mounting evidence that it cures regular warts as well.

vation · 1 month

Judging by your upvotes, people didn't already know this. Do people not understand how speakers and microphones work?

vation · 1 month

Walked home with just one boot? Better than not waking home at all.

alphanovember · 1 month

Twelve years ago no one got bent out of shape if you recorded songs off the radio and made a mix-tape for your friends. Unless you tried to profit off it, it was perfectly acceptable.

jojoplay · 1 month

That's fucked.

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