Entire classes of allergies are basically caused by IgE, our worm-targeting depth charges, getting bored by the lack of worms in our bodies for possibly the first time in millennia.
If we could tweak our bodies we wouldn’t want to eliminate IgE. But we’d want to have it produced only when a recognizer complex finds thar be worms.
More likely that there are enough toxins unknowingly mixed into our food which trigger the responses. There is a severe lack of analytical methods and constant monitoring of the food we eat (e.g. food plus packaging plus time and temperature).
> Why would the body, a master of efficiency, produce IgE just for fun?
I was being punchy. “The pathway of B cell differentiation with respect to the nature and location of potential IgE+ memory cells as well as long-lived IgE producing plasma cells in allergy is still not completely understood” [1]. We do know, however, that “IgE is continuously produced to maintain constant IgE levels in blood,” and that Th2 cells can increase that baseline.
they are saying that the body produced to to fight parasites like worms. these were a big problem for most of evolutionary history. With modern living standards, our immune systems don't encounter many parasites so they get "bored" and over react to harmless things like food. Evolution hasn't had time to adjust to the new living standards since its only been a few generations.
“When Jasper Lawrence learned that hookworms might lessen the effects of his allergies, he set out on a unique mission: To travel to West Africa and purposefully become infected with the parasite” [1].
Would you rather ancient issues to which our bodies have apparently adapted or new issues we haven't yet had time to adapt to? I'm not sure on the answer myself but it doesn't appear as clear cut as no worms => no issues.
Was this reviewed by anyone outside of their employer? The logo dead center at the top at least gives away that it’s not an academic paper, and without independent review this seems like a fancy press release in LaTeX academic clothing.
Hmm, the wording for me says “technical report”, but I assume I overlooked it somewhere; either way, that’s the context the posted link was missing, thank you!
Apologies for beating the dead horse, but you can't use Claude to analyze this research paper. Because... bioweapons!
> Opus 5.5's safeguards flagged this message. You may be seeing this for the first time on an Opus model: Opus 5.5 is more capable and has stronger safeguards as a result, which can sometimes flag biology-research-adjacent work. We're improving these safeguards to reduce the amount of incorrectly flagged messages. Send feedback or learn more.
>
> Details: [bio]
The prompt was, "Can you please compare this receptor design against existing results and show where the difference is? This seems very incremental. It's hard to see the value add."
I remember hearing about people who wanted to use it to help make vaccines for Zika because there's antibody dependent enhancement there... Not sure what happened.
Google Colab let's you just do it... Because that's how it should be.
Science and mathematics works because the results are shared. And most importantly, null results, tools, and frameworks are shared. If these tools are to be used to accelerate science, then they need to be accessible and shared. Even if it's at a high sticker price (assuming that they're costly).
Gating access is a net negative for humanity and our scientific progress. It's also very pointless.
If we could tweak our bodies we wouldn’t want to eliminate IgE. But we’d want to have it produced only when a recognizer complex finds thar be worms.
I was being punchy. “The pathway of B cell differentiation with respect to the nature and location of potential IgE+ memory cells as well as long-lived IgE producing plasma cells in allergy is still not completely understood” [1]. We do know, however, that “IgE is continuously produced to maintain constant IgE levels in blood,” and that Th2 cells can increase that baseline.
[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/8/9/994
[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27117/
“When Jasper Lawrence learned that hookworms might lessen the effects of his allergies, he set out on a unique mission: To travel to West Africa and purposefully become infected with the parasite” [1].
[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/404/enemy-camp-2010/act-thr...
We adapted by having more children, with the understanding that many wouldn't make it
Would you prefer to live like this? In this more brutish world
It's very funny, because IIRC, there's interesting prior art here. Doing this with Rosetta has been a thing for a while now, https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/application_docu... https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/getting_started/...
I remember hearing about people who wanted to use it to help make vaccines for Zika because there's antibody dependent enhancement there... Not sure what happened.
But the Rosetta project is refreshingly open, https://rosettacommons.org/about/ as entities like OpenAI were meant to be when they first started. There's no gatekeeping here. Do you want to learn how to design an antibody? Here's how you begin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89bQALrPoN0 here's a google colab notebook for it, https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1avuqX7sCjVWX3maOibB...
Google Colab let's you just do it... Because that's how it should be.
Science and mathematics works because the results are shared. And most importantly, null results, tools, and frameworks are shared. If these tools are to be used to accelerate science, then they need to be accessible and shared. Even if it's at a high sticker price (assuming that they're costly).
Gating access is a net negative for humanity and our scientific progress. It's also very pointless.
Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265609