Comments by "Theodore Shulman" (@ColonelFredPuntridge) on "Gravitas: Fauci's farewell briefing goes off the rails" video.
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@dedetudor. Ummmm... No, that's not the "very definition" of "synthetic biology" although making mutants is one part of synthetic biology. Some synthetic biology goes way beyond just making mutants. For instance, making living organisms which store genetic information in forms other than DNA or RNA, or in mixed DNA+RNA genomes, or, which have an expanded toolbox with more amino acids in it than the standard 20 common amino acids (along with an expanded genetic code which tells the organism's protein-synthesis apparatus when and where to put the additional amino acids).
In other words, synthetic biology is much much more complicated than you imagine (going by your comment).
There are also forms of synthetic biology which are simpler than making mutants. Hybridomas, for instance, are synthetic biological organisms, but I worked with them for many years before I ever made any mutants!
And in order to determine whether it's dangerous or not, you would need to study the subject for, probably, five or six years, at least. As it stands now, you are like someone who does not know any of the rules of boxing, but tries to referee a professional championship bout. You see one fighter knock the other down, and you think "ahh, he scored!" but you don't realize that the knock-down punch was an illegal backhand, and that the one who threw it should be penalized and lose a point, not gain one.
(The answer, of course, is: some forms of synthetic biology are dangerous, and other forms are much less so.)
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@emackg1 As a retired immunochemist (practical monoclonal-antibody chemist) I can tell all these turkeys commenting here: Fauci's scientific career impresses and amazes everyone who knows anything about his field; I should say, everyone who knows about any of his fields. Sure, he's a bureaucrat now, but that happens to most research scientists: as you mature, you pretty much stop doing experiments, and write about what your grad students, post-docs, and technicians do. And he still does epidemiology, which is a true-blue science but requires no experiments, just observations and discussion.
Pretty much all the criticisms of him are based EITHER on lies, OR on the fallacy that changing ones position on a question when new data come to light is somehow a flaw or a fault; in real life, it's an essential virtue. The trouble in the world is caused by scientists who FAIL (or refuse) to change their positions when new data come to light.
A few days ago, Fauci was asked, in an interview, what he would have done differently if he could go back in time to 2018 and re-live the whole COVID experience. He answered: "If I were to do something differently, I would have put more effort into trying to explain the uncertainty of the situation and not make it seem that when I say (this) today, that absolutely that’ll never change.”
And that is also what he meant when he said that some of his critics were actually objecting not to him but to science. He was talking specifically about the critics who blasted him for saying one thing one week and changing his tune the next week. That's not just him; every scientist worthy of the name does that. And THAT is what he meant when he said "they're not really criticizing me ; they're criticizing science itself."
His job was never to deal with COVID, or Ebola, or HIV. His job - and he's one of the very few who can do it well - is to advise us on how to deal with a pathogen more terrifying than any of them: the dreaded Pestis WeDontReallyKnowYetWhatTheHellItIsOrWhatItsGonnaDoNext.
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@ChalrieD LOL
A multiclade env-gag VLP mRNA vaccine elicits tier-2 HIV-1-neutralizing antibodies and reduces the risk of heterologous SHIV infection in macaques.
Zhang P, Narayanan E, Liu Q, Tsybovsky Y, Boswell K, [...] Carfi A, Fauci AS, Lusso P. Nat Med. 2021 Dec;27(12):2234-2245.
Pathogenic mechanisms of HIV disease.
Moir S, Chun TW, Fauci AS. Annu Rev Pathol. 2011;6:223-48. doi: 10.1146/annurev-pathol-011110-130254. Review.
Novel vaccine technologies for the 21st century.
Mascola JR, Fauci AS. Nat Rev Immunol. 2020 Feb;20(2):87-88. Free PMC article. Review.
From mRNA sensing to vaccines.
Fauci AS, Merad M, Swaminathan S, Hur S, Topol E, Fitzgerald K, Reis e Sousa C, Corbett KS, Bauer S. Immunity. 2021 Dec 14;54(12):2676-2680. Free PMC article.
Measles in 2019 - Going Backward.
Paules CI, Marston HD, Fauci AS. N Engl J Med. 2019 Jun 6;380(23):2185-2187. Free article. No abstract available.
[........]
For instance.
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@ChalrieD Fauci, a "very average" scientist? If he were, how would you know? Have you read any of his scientific papers? Do you know what scientific work won him the National Medal of Science, which he got in 2005? Average scientists don't usually win the National Medal of Science. That is for the top, the cream - kind of an American Nobel Prize - for world-changing scientists like Donald E. Knuth, Thomas Starzl, Carl Djerassi, John Tukey, Bruce Ames, Melvin Calvin, and Glenn Seaborg - scientists whose work really changes the world and improves everyone's lives.
And I'm waiting for you to answer my question: what is the main difference between the life-cycles of retroviruses and coronaviruses (both of which store their genetic information in the form of RNA, not DNA), and what are the main consequences of the differences for the patients? Someone like you, who thinks he can judge the quality of Dr. Fauci's work, must surely know the answer.....
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@ChalrieD Once again, you don't know what you're talking about.
If anything you said about yourself were true, you wouldn't need to look up the answer to my question; you'd be asking why I asked you such an easy question. Also, you would know that many great scientists are not good speakers.
His track record of important papers in first-rate journals (like, for instance, PNAS, and NEJM), and in what you might call "ordinary science journals" (like, for instance, Journal of Immunology ) is one which any scientist would envy. You can find impressive work by Fauci as far back as the 1970s. For instance (and notice how many of these papers he's senior author - the last author on the paper - of. That means he's ultimately responsible for the work - it's his lab. The first author is usually the person in the lab who did the work.)
* Adjuvant effect of cholera enterotoxin on the immune response of the mouse to sheep red blood cells.
Northrup RS, Fauci AS. J Infect Dis. 1972 Jun;125(6):672-3.
* The relationship between antibody affinity and the efficiency of complement fixation.
Fauci AS, Frank MM, Johnson JS. J Immunol. 1970 Jul;105(1):215-20.
* Correction of human cyclic neutropenia with prednisolone.
Wright DG, Fauci AS, Dale DC, Wolff SM. N Engl J Med. 1978 Feb 9;298(6):295-300.
* Activation of human B lymphocytes. III. Concanavalin A-induced generation of suppressor cells of the plaque-forming cell response of normal human B lymphocytes.
Haynes BF, Fauci AS.
J Immunol. 1978 Mar;120(3):700-8.
1980s:
* A clinicopathologic correlation of the idiopathic hypereosinophilic syndrome. I. Hematologic manifestations.
Flaum MA, Schooley RT, Fauci AS, Gralnick HR. Blood. 1981 Nov;58(5):1012-20.
* Characterization of a monoclonal antibody (5E9) that defines a human cell surface antigen of cell activation.
Haynes BF, Hemler M, Cotner T, Mann DL, Eisenbarth GS, Strominger JL, Fauci AS. J Immunol. 1981 Jul;127(1):347-51.
* Chromobacterium violaceum infectious and chronic granulomatous disease.
Macher AM, Casale TB, Gallin JI, Boltansky H, Fauci AS. Ann Intern Med. 1983 Feb;98(2):259.
* Human T4+ lymphocytes produce a phagocytosis-inducing factor (PIF) distinct from interferon-alpha and interferon-gamma.
Margolick JB, Ambrus JL Jr, Volkman DJ, Fauci AS. J Immunol. 1986 Jan;136(2):546-54.
1990s:
* Kinetics of cytokine expression during primary human immunodeficiency virus type 1 infection.
Graziosi C, Gantt KR, Vaccarezza M, Demarest JF, Daucher M, Saag MS, Shaw GM, Quinn TC, Cohen OJ, Welbon CC, Pantaleo G, Fauci AS. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1996 Apr 30;93(9):4386-91.
* Presence of an inducible HIV-1 latent reservoir during highly active antiretroviral therapy.
Chun TW, Stuyver L, Mizell SB, Ehler LA, Mican JA, Baseler M, Lloyd AL, Nowak MA, Fauci AS. Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A. 1997 Nov 25;94(24):13193-7.
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@ChalrieD RE: " the first author did the work, last author’s lab, and everyone else pitched in significantly. "
And that is exactly what I said. Except that where you wrote "pitched in significantly", I wrote "took some data that appeared in the figures" or some such, which means exactly the same thing.
And institutions are not, usually, "INCOMPETENT and CORRUPT or not; they are always somewhere in between. It's not a question of whether an institution like NIDA is incompetent or not or corrupt or not; it's not one or zero; it's a question of HOW MUCH incompetence or corruption there is in the institution.
In any case, what we were discussing was whether Fauci is an important scientist. The answer is, now he's a bureaucrat, (which is what many great scientists aspire to be) but in his heyday he was a groundbreaking, foundational immunologist and epidemiologist.
(My personal favorite scientist in USA (judging by his work, not by his character), the great PG Schultz, recently became chairman of his department, and seems to have stopped doing science altogether. But no one says he's not a great scientist; he's on the short list for a Nobel Prize.)
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