| ▲ | tbrake 12 hours ago |
| You should sell your services as a fortune teller, so bravely confident in asserting the value of every study before it's even conducted. "What kind of IDIOT wants to WASTE valuable TAXPAYER MONEY on gila monster venom research" - man currently on a GLP-1. |
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| ▲ | gjsman-1000 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Do you believe then that scientists should have a blank check for any form of science they would like to research? I don't. |
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| ▲ | estearum 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | I personally believe that we should have a crystal ball which will tell us the result and future applications of all currently-contemplated research projects. Then we just need to look into the crystal ball and pick the silly lizard venom studies that lead to life-changing and life-saving results for hundreds of millions of people, and we can ignore the silly lizard venom studies that yield nothing! Super easy! | | |
| ▲ | ModernMech 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | These discussions always go the same way: "We shouldn't be funding all this frivolous stuff!" "Okay, how would you figure out what to fund?" "We could assemble a panel of experts in the field, who have proven their merit by doing impactful research, and have them decide ultimately based on the merits of each proposal, the people who proposed it, the institutions backing them, the likelihood of success, whether they're worthy of funding. We should also make them explain as part of the proposal exactly how this will benefit not just their research area but also the broader community and world. Finally, we should meticulously track how they spend their money to make sure there's no funny business, and only give continued support to researchers who have proven they spend it wisely and their research has impact." (If people don't understand, this is currently how it's done) | | |
| ▲ | dnautics 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | > We could assemble a panel of experts in the field, who have proven their merit by doing impactful research, and have them decide ultimately based on the merits of each proposal, the people who proposed it, the institutions backing them, the likelihood of success, whether they're worthy of funding. We should also make them explain as part of the proposal exactly how this will benefit not just their research area but also the broader community and world. Finally, we should meticulously track how they spend their money to make sure there's no funny business, and only give continued support to researchers who have proven they spend it wisely and their research" This is not accurate. There is the first gatekeeper which is program managers and junior program managers which have to gloss over your project and pick you. They (especially the juniors) don't necessarily have a the sophistication to judge your project and so are easily swayed by hot topics or reaching claims of national security/health applications. Grants get awarded to people in the habit of telling little white lies about what their research is good for, then its people who are awarded grants that get promoted, and then those are the people who are reviewing projects, so being dishonest becomes cultural. Disastrous for science. | | |
| ▲ | ModernMech 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | How would you change the system so it doesn't create a culture of dishonesty and decisions aren't swayed by hot topics? |
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| ▲ | dnautics 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| The glp-1 story is super overblown. GLP-1s were a highly desired target LONG before gila monster venom was discovered to be an agonist. And it really was around the same time that lipid attachments were becoming appreciated for their half-life attenuation, so even if amylin (the company) never took on exenatide as a (shitty) drug candidate, proper glp-1s with lipid attachements were kind of inevitable. Obviously we can't know this for sure, but cmon. How much did gila monsters buy? Maybe a year or two? so, you should really recalibrate being taken in by just-so stories of basic science being SUPER important. |
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| ▲ | tbrake 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | the point was about the nonsensical nature of dismissing things out of hand just because you can't imagine a "practical application" for it on the spot. the earlier habener results that actually got us to glp-1s via anglerfish pancreas would have been similarly derided. substitute that in if it helps. | | |
| ▲ | dnautics 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, there's absolutely no way anyone would have ever identified any human hormones in humans without anglerfish research. | | |
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| ▲ | estearum 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | ...? Your rebuttal is that GLP was a highly desirable target for a long time before we stumbled upon a way to hit it... and this is evidence that the "stumbling upon a way to hit it" was not a super critical and super fortunate event...? > How much did gila monsters buy? Maybe a year or two? Why'd you put "a year or two?" here and not "a decade or two?" or "a century or two?" Do you have reason to believe it was a year or two away, sans Gila monster? If so, can you provide your reasoning? Per your own point, GLP was a desirable target for a long time without successful hits. We have plenty of targets that are desirable for decades without figuring out a way to actually drug them. | | |
| ▲ | dnautics 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Do you know the full story of glp-1 from a pharmacokinetic point of view? It seems not, since I explained clearly why I assigned a short time in my above comment. |
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