Results for “plasma” 42 found
Why Vampires Live So Long
NYTimes: Two teams of scientists published studies on Sunday showing that blood from young mice reverses aging in old mice, rejuvenating their muscles and brains. As ghoulish as the research may sound, experts said that it could lead to treatments for disorders like Alzheimer’s disease and heart disease.
The key papers are here and here and here. Some of the papers are pointing to a specific protein but the last paper suggests that simple transfusions also work and that raises a number of issues of public policy. As Derek Lowe notes:
Since blood plasma is given uncounted thousands of times a day in every medical center in the country, this route should have a pretty easy time of it from the FDA. But I’d guess that Alkahest is still going to have to identify specific aging-related disease states for its trials, because aging, just by itself, has no regulatory framework for treatment, since it’s not considered a disease per se.
…You also have to wonder what something like this would do to the current model of blood donation and banking, if it turns out that plasma from an 18-year-old is worth a great deal more than plasma from a fifty-year-old. I hope that the folks at the Red Cross are keeping up with the literature.
Who is Juan Galt?
USA Today: Thousands of Venezuelans lined up outside the country’s equivalent of Best Buy, a chain of electronics stores known as Daka, hoping for a bargain after the socialist government forced the company to charge customers “fair” prices.
…Members of Venezuela’s National Guard, some of whom carried assault rifles, kept order at the stores as bargain hunters rushed to get inside.
“I want a Sony plasma television for the house,” said Amanda Lisboa, 34, a business administrator, who had waited seven hours already outside one Caracas store. “It’s going to be so cheap!”
…The president, who took over from Hugo Chávez in April 2013, appeared on state television Friday calling for the “occupation” of the chain, which employs some 500 staff.
“This is for the good of the nation,” Maduro said. “Leave nothing on the shelves, nothing in the warehouses … Let nothing remain in stock!”
…Daka’s store managers, according to Maduro, have been arrested and are being held by the country’s security services. Neither Daka nor the government responded to requests for comment.
In Atlas Shrugged‘s money speech Rand, drawing on Hayek, provides an implicit warning to Maduro and Venezuela:
…when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law–men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims–then money becomes its creators’ avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they’ve passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket.
The Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer
Nearly here:
SITTING down with the Inquire system is, at first, a lot like trying to cosy up to an intimidatingly dense biology textbook. Sure, its presentation on the iPad is slick, but that can’t hide the fact that you are in for a tough old read.
That is until you highlight the first bit of particularly impenetrable text. Suddenly a list of questions pops up in the right-hand margin. Touch one and you are whisked away to a Wikipedia-like page full of information specific to the concept you are stuck on. Terms like “chloroplast” and “plasma membrane” are succinctly defined, and the page explains how each concept fits into the wider field of biology.
Want to know more? Type in your own question and artificially intelligent software will construct a new page to answer your query.
The aim of Inquire is to provide students with the world’s first intelligent textbook, says its creator David Gunning of Seattle-based Vulcan. At first glance, the system just looks like an electronic version of Campbell Biology, the tome that forms the bedrock of biology classes for first-year university and advanced high school students in the US. But behind the scenes is a machine-readable concept map of the 5000 or so ideas covered in the book, along with information on how they are all related.
Headlines to live by
Giant plasma blob to deliver “glancing blow” to Earth.
The reality isn’t nearly as bad. Here is the on-line version of the WaPost article, with further explanation, and a toned down headline.
Organ Donors for Compensation
Today Alexander Berger will donate a kidney:
NYTimes: On Thursday, I will donate one of my kidneys to someone I’ve never met. Most people think this sounds like an over-the-top personal sacrifice. But the procedure is safe and relatively painless. I will spend three days in the hospital and return to work within a month. I am 21, but even for someone decades older, the risk of death during surgery is about 1 in 3,000. My remaining kidney will grow to take up the slack of the one that has been removed, so I’ll be able do everything I can do now. And I’ll have given someone, on average, 10 more years of life, years free of the painful and debilitating burden of dialysis.
Alexander doesn’t want any praise or talk of “heroic sacrifice,” that is part of the problem. He wants to normalize donation and he argues for compensation in a regulated market.
The people waiting for kidneys aren’t dying because of kidney failure; they’re dying because of our failure — without Congress’s misguided effort to ban organ sales, they would have been able to get the kidneys they desperately needed.
…There’s no reason that paying for a kidney should be seen as predatory. Last week, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals issued a ruling legalizing compensation for bone marrow donors; we already allow paid plasma, sperm and egg donation, as well as payment for surrogate mothers. Contrary to early fears that paid surrogacy would exploit young, poor minority women, most surrogate mothers are married, middle class and white; the evidence suggests that, far from trying to “cash in,” they take pride in performing a service that brings others great happiness. And we regularly pay people to take socially beneficial but physically dangerous jobs — soldiers, police officers and firefighters all earn a living serving society while risking their lives — without worrying that they are taken advantage of. Compensated kidney donors should be no different.
Here are further MR posts on organ donation and here is Jon Diesel on Do Economists Reach a Conclusion on Organ Donation.
Rewarding Altruism: Blood for Money
Do pecuniary incentives increase blood donation or do extrinsic incentives crowd out intrinsic incentives? In Rewarding Altruism (NBER, free) an important and impressive new paper Nicola Lacetera, Mario Macis and Robert Slonim analyze a field experiment involving some 100,000 donors and find that pecuniary incentives significantly increase blood donations. The field experiment covers a wide geographic area and the donors are tracked for a significant period of time after donating so the authors can look for geographic and temporal spillovers. The authors offered potential donors gift cards of $5, $10 and $15.
Subjects who were offered economic rewards to donate blood were more likely to donate, and more so the higher the value of the rewards. They were also more likely to attract others to donate, spatially alter the location of their donations towards the drives offering rewards, and modify their temporal donation schedule leading to a short-term reduction in donations immediately after the reward offer was removed. Although offering economic incentives, combining all of these effects, positively and significantly increased donations, ignoring individuals who took additional actions beyond donating to get others to donate would have led to an under-estimate of the total effect, whereas ignoring the spatial effect would have led to an over-estimate of the total effect.
Some of the increase in supply came from temporal substitution but this is not without value. Incentives are not just about increasing supply but also about increasing supply at the right time, i.e. when blood is most needed so it’s useful to have a lever that can influence when donations are made.
Crowding out did receive some support in an odd context. The authors found that donors who were surprised with a gift card after they had donated were less likely to donate in the future. Thus, the donors did not reciprocate the unexpected gift and may have felt that their altruistic intention was being undermined. Once again we see the overwhelming importance of context when trying to understand incentives. To paraphrase Mises, an incentive is not an objective fact but a subjective interpretation.
The authors did not find any decline in quality ala Titmuss. Indeed, this is to be expected since modern blood donation is not a random shout-out to people on the street but instead relies predominantly on repeat donors with a long donation history.
Gift cards of $5, $10 and $15 are small incentives and the authors suggest that the benefits from the increased supply far exceed the costs. It’s notable that it takes longer to donate blood plasma and as a result the U.S. blood plasma industry (the “OPEC of blood plasma”) has always relied on paid donors.
Here are my powerpoint slides on Incentives to Increase Organ Donation and here is an older post on sperm exports.
The Toilet Challenge
In our textbook, Modern Principles, Tyler and I write:
In the United States, diarrhea is a pain, an annoyance, and of course an embarrassment. In much of the developing world, diarrhea is a killer, especially of children. Every year 1.8 million children die from diarrhea. To prevent the deaths of these children we do not need any scientific breakthroughs, nor do we need new drugs or fancy medical devices. What these children need most is one thing: economic growth.
Economic growth brings piped water and flush toilets, which together cut infant mortality from diarrhea by 70 percent or more.
Bill Gates and the Gates Foundation think that some scientific breakthroughs are needed and they are putting millions into the Toilet Challenge a new project to build a better toilet.
“No innovation in the past 200 years has done more to save lives and improve health than the sanitation revolution triggered by invention of the toilet,” Sylvia Mathews Burwell, president of the foundation’s global development program, said in a statement. “But it did not go far enough. It only reached one-third of the world. What we need are new approaches. New ideas. In short, we need to reinvent the toilet.”
So what is wrong with the current commode?
It’s too expensive for people in the developing world; it requires water and a sewer-system hook-up, which aren’t always available; and it does nothing to actually treat human waste, said Frank Rijsberman, the foundation’s director of water sanitation and hygiene.
Gates is to be credited with taking on an important and unsung task. Some of the ideas he has spent money on, however, seem to be highly unrealistic. Consider:
Professor Georgios Stefanidis and his team at Delft University of Technology propose to develop a toilet system that will apply microwave technology to transform human waste into electricity. The waste will be gasified using plasma, which is created by microwaves in tailor-made equipment. This process will yield syngas, a mixture of carbon monoxide (CO) and hydrogen (H2). The syngas will then be fed to a solid oxide fuel cell stack for electricity generation. This toilet system will be able to serve single households or groups of households.
My rule is that any society capable of managing and maintaining such a system will already have flush toilets (either that or they live on the space station).
Assorted links
The Return of the Puppet Masters
In a post from a few years ago titled, Do you love cats?, I wrote this:
Toxoplasma gondii is a favorite parasite of evolutionary biologists because it has an incredible property. The parasite lives in the guts of cats where it sheds eggs in cat feces that are often eaten by rats. Now how to get back from the rat to the cat? Amazingly, Toxoplasma gondii infects the brains of rats making them change their behavior in a subtle way that increases the genetic fitness of the parasite. Toxoplasma makes the infected rats less scared of cats and so more likely to be eaten!
Now here is the kicker. Toxoplasma gondii also infects a lot of humans.
Now here is the latest research finding;
Toxoplasma gondii infects 20–60% of the population in most countries…We confirmed, using for the first time a prospective cohort study design, increased risk of traffic accidents in Toxoplasma-infected subjects…Our results show that …subjects with high titers of anti-Toxoplasma antibodies had a probability of a traffic accident of about 16.7%, i.e. a more than six times higher rate than Toxoplasma-free… subjects.
People with RhD blood factor have some protection – see the article for more. No word yet on whether this increases the probability of being eaten by cats although I suppose it would have to.
Do you love cats?
Toxoplasma gondii is a favorite parasite of evolutionary biologists because it has an incredible property. The parasite lives in the guts of cats where it sheds eggs in cat feces that are often eaten by rats. Now how to get back from the rat to the cat? Amazingly, Toxoplasma gondii infects the brains of rats making them
change their behavior in a subtle way that increases the genetic
fitness of the parasite. Toxoplasma makes the infected rats less scared of cats and so more likely to be eaten!
Now here is the kicker. Toxoplasma gondii also infects a lot of humans.
Make your TV a work of art
That’s right, put a digital copy of a masterpiece as a screensaver on your TV:
An expensive new digital television is big, beautiful, flat and can hang on the wall. Some might even consider the set a piece of art.
RGB Labs charges for subscriptions to images such as The Luncheon of the Boating Party by Pierre Auguste Renoir.
So why not display Picasso, Renoir, Monet and other masters on the screen itself?
Three companies have recently formed to help consumers do just that…
[One of them] Chandler’s company, Dream City, has acquired licensing rights to more than 1,000 pieces of art, including masterpieces from Cézanne, Van Gogh and Picasso. He sells them in $14.95, 30-piece collections as screensavers. A Web site offers step-by-step instructions on how to connect a PC to the TV and run a slide-show loop on your big screen.
The core idea came from Bill Gates:
Microsoft (MSFT) Chairman Bill Gates has displayed art on wall-mounted PC screens at his home for years. That’s where Chandler got the idea for Dream City.
He put a frame around a monitor hooked to an old PC, hung it on the wall and showed family photographs and art.
“At parties, people just stood there, mesmerized,” Chandler says. “I realized there was a business there.”
Here is the whole story, which includes a Renoir image on a big TV screen.
My take: The idea is a promising start, but I am repelled by the idea of copies of classic paintings in my living room. Looking at lower quality reproductions would depress me. It would also make me wonder why I cannot find anything more personal, more current, and more alive to enjoy. I am keener on the idea of art created especially for this medium, let’s hope that is forthcoming.
Addendum: Michael Giesbrecht writes: “You’re in luck, Tyler! Literally hundreds, if not thousands, of pieces of art, created especially for this medium, are taken to market each year, and have been for quite some time. Check out netflix.com. In the common vernacular, the medium is referred to as a “movie”. Many of them look great displayed on wall-mounted digital television screens.” You can put up a static image from these movies quite easily. I love Renoir but on my screen I want Blade Runner.
US Sperm Exports Explode; Canadians Upset
The US is a world leader in sperm exports primarily because sperm banks in the U.S. are run on a for-profit basis. As a result, US sperm is reckoned to be of high quality (we always knew this didn’t we?) particulary because the US version comes with a background on the vitals of the donor. Denmark also exports a lot of sperm because of high standards and demand for that blond, blue-eyed look.
Exports to Canada have increased in recent years because of a scandal involving poorly screened Canadian sperm. Canadians also import a lot of US eggs. The Canadian government, however, is apparently miffed as a new law is being readied that would forbid donations involving a paid donor. The law would not only make paid donation illegal in Canada it would make it illegal to use any paid-for sperm. Canadian couples seeking fertility options will suffer and who will benefit? I cannot think that this law is anything but spiteful and ridiculous. Is paying for sperm an original sin? As with other areas of Canadian medicine (see Tyler’s posts here and here), the rich will now travel to the United States for treatment.
Aside: The Canadian Health Official quoted here is ignorant or disengeneous when she says “We don’t buy or sell blood, or organs or tissues.” In fact, Canada also imports a lot of US blood plasma. Plasma takes longer to donate than straight blood and as a result altruistic donation rates are low and much of the world relies on paid-for US plasma for its life-saving properties. Similarly, donating eggs is not nearly as much fun as donating sperm so altruistic donation of Canadian eggs is unlikely to make-up for restrictions on the import of paid-for US eggs.
Thanks to Eric Crampton for the seminal email.