#Biotech Revolution

[nirdosh-jagota]

The Science Behind Immunotherapy: The Biotech Revolution in Cancer Treatment

The immune system is a remarkable defense mechanism designed to protect the body against threats. Yet, cancer often finds ways to bypass this system, allowing it to grow and spread unchecked. Immunotherapy has changed this reality by enabling the immune system to identify and destroy cancer cells effectively. This innovative approach leverages the body’s natural defenses, offering an alternative to traditional treatments like chemotherapy and radiation. By enhancing the immune system’s ability to recognize cancer, immunotherapy has become a powerful tool in the fight against this disease. In this article, I’ll explore how immunotherapy works, its types, recent advancements, and its impact on cancer treatment.

What Is Immunotherapy?

Immunotherapy uses biological methods to empower the immune system in its fight against cancer. Unlike treatments that directly attack cancer cells, immunotherapy strengthens or modifies immune responses to target tumors more effectively. It works by either boosting the activity of immune cells or providing artificial components, such as antibodies, to aid in the destruction of cancer cells. This method has shown success in treating various cancers, including melanoma, lung, and bladder cancers. By focusing on the immune system, immunotherapy provides a targeted approach that often reduces the side effects associated with traditional therapies.

Key Types of Immunotherapy

Several types of immunotherapy have been developed to tackle cancer in unique ways. Checkpoint inhibitors, for example, are designed to remove the brakes on the immune system. Cancer cells often exploit immune checkpoints—proteins that regulate immune activity—to evade detection. Drugs like pembrolizumab and nivolumab block these checkpoints, allowing T cells to attack cancer cells more aggressively. Another groundbreaking approach is CAR T-cell therapy, which involves modifying a patient’s T cells to recognize and destroy cancer. This personalized treatment has shown remarkable success in blood cancers like leukemia and lymphoma.

Monoclonal antibodies are another vital tool in the immunotherapy arsenal. These lab-engineered molecules bind to specific antigens on cancer cells, marking them for destruction by the immune system. Some monoclonal antibodies also deliver toxic substances directly to tumors, enhancing their effectiveness. Cancer vaccines represent yet another innovative approach, training the immune system to identify and attack specific cancer-associated antigens. Recent advancements in mRNA technology have significantly improved the development of these vaccines, making them more precise and effective.

How Immunotherapy Works

Immunotherapy addresses cancer’s ability to evade the immune system by enhancing the immune response in several ways. One key strategy is enhancing immune recognition, which involves exposing hidden cancer cells to immune surveillance. Tumors often disguise themselves to avoid detection, but immunotherapies can unmask these cells, prompting an immune response. Another critical mechanism involves modifying the tumor microenvironment. Tumors create an environment that suppresses immune activity, making it difficult for T cells to infiltrate and attack. Immunotherapy can alter this environment, making it more supportive of immune cell activity.

Checkpoint inhibitors, in particular, play a vital role by blocking proteins that deactivate T cells prematurely. This allows the immune system to sustain its attack on cancer cells without interruption. These combined mechanisms demonstrate the multifaceted ways in which immunotherapy enhances the body’s ability to fight cancer.

Recent Advances in Immunotherapy

The field of immunotherapy has seen rapid progress in recent years, driven by technological advancements. One of the most exciting developments is the integration of CRISPR technology with immunotherapy. CRISPR allows scientists to edit genes within T cells, enhancing their ability to target cancer cells more effectively. Early trials using CRISPR-modified T cells have shown promising results, paving the way for more precise and personalized treatments.

Combination therapies are another area of significant advancement. Researchers have found that combining immunotherapy with other treatments, such as chemotherapy or targeted therapy, can improve outcomes by addressing multiple pathways simultaneously. Personalized cancer vaccines are also gaining traction, with advancements in tumor profiling enabling the creation of vaccines tailored to individual patients. These innovations are helping to expand the reach and effectiveness of immunotherapy.

Benefits of Immunotherapy

Immunotherapy offers several distinct advantages over traditional cancer treatments. Its targeted nature ensures that only cancer cells are attacked, sparing healthy tissue and reducing side effects. This contrasts with chemotherapy and radiation, which can harm healthy cells and lead to significant complications. Additionally, immunotherapy has the potential to provide durable responses. Some patients experience long-term remission, with their immune systems continuing to protect against cancer even after treatment ends. The reduced side effects associated with immunotherapy make it a more tolerable option for many patients, improving their quality of life during treatment.

Challenges and Considerations

Despite its promise, immunotherapy is not without challenges. One of the most significant issues is variable effectiveness. Not all patients respond to immunotherapy, and researchers are still working to identify biomarkers that can predict response rates. Another challenge is the risk of immune-related side effects. Overactivation of the immune system can lead to inflammation or autoimmune-like symptoms, which require careful management. The cost of immunotherapy treatments also remains a barrier for many patients, highlighting the need for strategies to reduce expenses and expand accessibility. Addressing these challenges will be critical to ensuring that immunotherapy reaches its full potential.

Key Immunotherapy Techniques

Checkpoint inhibitors block proteins that suppress immune activity.

CAR T-cell therapy reprograms T cells to target cancer.

Monoclonal antibodies mark cancer cells for destruction.

Cancer vaccines teach the immune system to attack tumors.

The Future of Immunotherapy

Looking ahead, the potential of immunotherapy continues to grow. Advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning are helping researchers identify biomarkers that predict patient responses, enabling more personalized treatments. The use of CRISPR technology is likely to expand, offering even more precise ways to engineer immune cells for cancer therapy. Additionally, ongoing research aims to apply immunotherapy to cancers that have been resistant to treatment, broadening its scope. Combining immunotherapy with other emerging technologies, such as nanotechnology, could further enhance its effectiveness. As research progresses, immunotherapy is set to become a cornerstone of cancer care.

In Conclusion

Immunotherapy has redefined cancer treatment by harnessing the power of the immune system to target and destroy cancer cells. With its tailored approach, long-lasting effects, and reduced side effects, it has become an invaluable tool in oncology. Advancements in technology and personalized medicine are driving its evolution, offering new hope to patients worldwide. As we continue to explore and refine this biotech innovation, immunotherapy stands as a testament to the power of science in transforming lives.

[dailyanarchistposts]

Biotechnology and the future of humanity

The End Of Diversity

GM technology is also set to plunge countless thousands of people into poverty by using GM plants or tissue cultures to produce certain products which have up until now only been available from agricultural sources in the majority world. For example, lauric acid is widely used in soap and cosmetics and has always been derived from coconuts. Now oilseed rape has been genetically modified to produce it and Proctor & Gamble, one of the largest buyers of lauric acid, have opted for the GM source. This is bound to have a negative effect on the 21 million people employed in the coconut trade in the Philippines and the 10 million people in Kerala, India, who are dependent on coconuts for their livelihood. Millions of smallscale cocoa farmers in West Africa are now under threat from the development of GM cocoa butter substitutes. In Madagascar some 70,000 vanilla farmers face ruin because vanilla can now be produced from GM tissue cultures. Great isn’t it? 70,000 farming families will be bankrupted and thrown off the land and instead we’ll have half a dozen factories full of some horrible biotech gloop employing a couple of hundred people. And what will happen to those 70,000 families? Well, the corporations could buy up the land and employ 10% of them growing GM cotton or tobacco or some such crap and the rest can go rot in some shantytown. This is what the corporations call ‘feeding the world’.

Poisoning the earth and its inhabitants brings in big money for the multinationals, large landowners and the whole of the industrial food production system. Traditional forms of organic, small-scale farming using a wide variety of local crops and wild plants (so-called’ weeds’) have been relatively successful at supporting many communities in relative self-sufficiency for centuries. In total contrast to industrial capitalisms chemical soaked monocultures, Mexico’s Huastec indians have highly developed forms of forest management in which they cultivate over 300 different plants in a mixture of gardens,’ fields’ and forest plots. The industrial food production system is destroying the huge variety of crops that have been bred by generations of peasant farmers to suit local conditions and needs. A few decades ago Indian farmers were growing some 50,000 different varieties of rice. Today the majority grow just a few dozen. In Indonesia 1,500 varieties have been lost in the last 15 years. Although a plot growing rice using modern so-called ‘High Yielding Varieties’ with massive inputs of artificial fertilisers and biocides produces more rice for the market than a plot being cultivated by traditional organic methods, the latter will be of more use to a family since many other species of plant and animal can be collected from it. In West Bengal up to 124 ‘weed’ species can be collected from traditional rice fields that are of use to farmers. The sort of knowledge contained in these traditional forms of land use will be of great use to us in creating a sustainable future on this planet; it is the sort of knowledge the corporations are destroying to trap us all in their nightmare world of wage labour, state and market.

[dgspeaks]

The Rise of Biotech Wellness Tools: A Glimpse into the Future of Personal Health

The landscape of personal health and wellness is undergoing a significant transformation in a world where convenience and efficiency reign supreme. As technology continues to advance at a rapid pace, the integration of biotech wellness tools into our daily routines is becoming increasingly prevalent. With predictions pointing towards a future where individuals have greater access to at-home…

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[afeelgoodblog]

The Best News of Last Week

1. A branch of the flu family tree has died and won't be included in future US vaccines

A type of flu virus that used to sicken people every year hasn't been spotted anywhere on Earth since March 2020. As such, experts have advised that the apparently extinct viruses be removed from next year's flu vaccines.

The now-extinct viruses were a branch of the influenza B family tree known as the Yamagata lineage. Scientists first reported the apparent disappearance of Yamagata viruses in 2021.

2. Hospitals must obtain written consent for pelvic and similar exams, the federal government says

Hospitals must obtain written informed consent from patients before subjecting them to pelvic exams and exams of other sensitive areas — especially if an exam will be done while the patient is unconscious, the federal government said Monday.

New guidance from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services now requires consent for breast, pelvic, prostate and rectal exams for “educational and training purposes” performed by medical students, nurse practitioners or physician assistants.

3. Germany approves new law that will allow adults to carry up to 25 grams of cannabis for their own consumption and store up to 50 grams at home.

Germany's upper house, the Bundesrat, cleared the way to partially legalize cannabis on Friday. Adults aged 18 and over will be allowed to carry up to 25 grams of cannabis for their own consumption.

4. Tick-killing pill shows promising results in human trial | Should it pan out, the pill would be a new weapon against Lyme disease.

Tarsus Pharmaceuticals is developing a pill for humans that could provide protection against the tick-borne disease for several weeks at a time. In February, the Irvine, California–based biotech company announced results from a small, early-stage trial showing that 24 hours after taking the drug, it can kill ticks on people, with the effects lasting for up to 30 days.

5. Thailand moves to legalise same-sex marriage

Thailand has taken a historic step closer to marriage equality after the lower house passed a bill giving legal recognition to same-sex marriage.

It still needs approval from the Senate and royal endorsement to become law but it is widely expected to happen by the end of 2024, making Thailand the only South East Asian country to recognise same-sex unions.

6. French Revolution: Cyclists Now Outnumber Motorists In Paris

Official measurements have found that Paris is rapidly becoming a city of transportation cyclists. In the suburbs, where public transit is less dense, transport by car was found to be the main form of mobility. But for journeys from the outskirts of Paris to the center, the number of cyclists now far exceeds the number of motorists, a huge change from just five years ago.

7. 'Miracle' operation reverses blindness in three-year-old girl giving her 'promising' future

A three year old with a genetic condition that causes blindness is doing incredibly well after unique pioneering operation to restore her sight.

The UK is the only country performing keyhole eye surgery to inject healthy copies of a gene into sufferers’ eyes. It is being used to reverse blindness in children born with a rare condition which means they can only distinguish between light and dark. And it has given little Khadijah Chaudhry, born with Leber congenital amaurosis-4, a chance at seeing properly again.

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[andreablog2]

This all feels like a reverse Industrial Revolution. Like industrial devolution. We are not going to see any of these advancements in biotech, renewable energy, automation…come to light for a very very long time. Not even bc of suppression from the government but because of cultural attitudes toward technology shifting. People hate technology now and are generally pessimistic about it, during the Industrial Revolution there was an unreal amount of enthusiasm for it. Private science itself prioritizes competition w other countries and developing military tech more than anything. It boils down to who can put on the biggest dog and pony show and it’s been this way for a very long time. I think mass illiteracy is also going to contribute to a general preference for non science…rfk jr is crazy now but that’s just what’s next tbh…

[queereads-bracket]

Queer Fiction Free-for-All Book Bracket Tournament: Round 1D

Book summaries below:

The Locked Tomb series (Gideon the Ninth, Harrow the Ninth, Nona the Ninth, and others) by Tamsyn Muir

The Emperor needs necromancers.

The Ninth Necromancer needs a swordswoman.

Gideon has a sword, some dirty magazines, and no more time for undead bullshit.

Brought up by unfriendly, ossifying nuns, ancient retainers, and countless skeletons, Gideon is ready to abandon a life of servitude and an afterlife as a reanimated corpse. She packs up her sword, her shoes, and her dirty magazines, and prepares to launch her daring escape. But her childhood nemesis won't set her free without a service.

Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House and bone witch extraordinaire, has been summoned into action. The Emperor has invited the heirs to each of his loyal Houses to a deadly trial of wits and skill. If Harrowhark succeeds she will become an immortal, all-powerful servant of the Resurrection, but no necromancer can ascend without their cavalier.

Without Gideon's sword, Harrow will fail, and the Ninth House will die. Of course, some things are better left dead.

Fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, humor, series, adult

The Dawnhounds by Sascha Stronach (The Endsong series)

A police officer is murdered, brought back to life with a mysterious new power, and tasked with protecting her city from an insidious evil threatening to destroy it.

The port city of Hainak is alive: its buildings, its fashion, even its weapons. But, after a devastating war and a sweeping biotech revolution, all its inhabitants want is peace, no one more so than Yat Jyn-Hok a reformed-thief-turned-cop who patrols the streets at night.

Yat has recently been demoted on the force due to “lifestyle choices” after being caught at a gay club. She’s barely holding it together, haunted by memories of a lover who vanished and voices that float in and out of her head like radio signals. When she stumbles across a dead body on her patrol, two fellow officers gruesomely murder her and dump her into the harbor. Unfortunately for them, she wakes up.

Resurrected by an ancient power, she finds herself with the new ability to manipulate life force. Quickly falling in with the pirate crew who has found her, she must race against time to stop a plague from being unleashed by the evil that has taken root in Hainak.

Fantasy, science fiction, biopunk, Māori, adult

[elbiotipo]

some stuff that inspires me when I write the Biopunks, in no particular order:

Argentine and Latin American memory: the weight of everything that came before us, all our victories and struggles, dictatorships, crises, revolutions and democracies. The characters are young, and yet they are defined by things that happened decades before they were born.

60s-70s counterculture: revolutionary students and hippies, the connection between ecology (bioengineering in this case) and spirituality, self expression in a repressive culture, the hope for a better world, for the world revolution... and how it all faded away and the legacy it left behind (papá cuentáme otra vez...)

Argentine Rock: A bit too wide since it covers everything from Te Hace Falta Vitaminas to Inconsciente Colectivo, but every chapter is titled after an Argentine rock song, it's intended to be the soundtrack.

Pirates of Silicon Valley: the movie yes, but more accurately the whole PC revolution, the dichotomy of open vs. closed source (in genomes this time), hacker (biohacker) culture, the rise of megacorporations vs academia vs subcultures... but this time it's genetics...

Neon Genesis Evangelion: for real, don't laugh. Exploring what they didn't talk about much: what is a world with billions dead? Ruined flooded cities contrasted with bright futuristic buildings, the UN taking over after a worldwide catastrophe with helicopters patrolling the skies, the contrast between high technological infrastructure and a mostly normal life.

Argentine fútbol: the canchita de barrio, even if it's a biotech club this time! Competition among institutes and among countries, the bioclub as a nexus for young people, pride on the camiseta, old glories, the joy of winning for your team... even if it's a bunch of nerds, it's really a story about a team on the C Nacional who wants to revive its old glories...

Art Nouveau: Not exactly the one from the early XX century, but the main art style everywhere. There were never real Art Nouveau skyscrapers and major buildings, now they are everywhere, and they are complemented and even made of biotechnology too, and how it contrasts with the sharper, more practical style of the post-Ecocide world.

Transhumanism: trascending the human form yes, but also all that's associated with it: the deep view of humanity's future, the potential of technology to change the nature of Homo sapiens and the biosphere itself, space colonization, inmortality, AIs and new sentient species, things that looked like fantastic dreams now are practical problems as technology advances...

Enviromental restoration: The world is not over, not if we have anything to say about it! A healing Earth and the scientific, technological, but also social, political and even spiritual debate on what shape should it take. Whole armies of people dedicated to regrowing forests, cleaning oceans and recovering wastelands, and what does it mean for a society which adopts an almost warlike approach to enviromental conservation and restoration.

Argentine Academia: of course, since I'm on it. The eternal stress of writing grant plans and struggling with your director, trying to make the best of your little funding, making your obsolete equipment to last as long as possible, and managing great things with it.

[beebslolz]

Bruce Wayne’s financial history (minus the Batman expenses)

DISCLAIMER: THIS DOES NOT INCLUDE OTHER BIG AND OR UNNECESSARY USELESS PURCHASES!!!!

For example, in The New Batman Adventures episode 10, Bruce Wayne goes to an auction with Tim Drake. He ends up buying a rare magical artifact for his friend for one million dollars. Or another time like in Gotham the TV series season 4 episode 3, Bruce buys a knife for Two Million dollars. This also does not include any of his Batman expenses. Only Bruce Wayne’s purchases. Because I know the Bat-cave, the Bat-mobile, the Bat-computer, the Bat-suit, the bat-gadgets, etc, blah, blah, blah, all had to have costed a pretty penny. It would take forever to track down all of his expenses.

”How many companies does Bruce Wayne own?”

He owns six companies, not including any co-companies. He owns:

Wayne Enterprises (along with other Wayne companies)

Bruce Wayne has many companies under the Wayne name. Such as:

Wayne Biotech

Wayne Industries

Wayne Aerospace

Wayne Shipping

Wayne Foundation

Wayne Medical

Wayne Steel

Wayne Botanical

Wayne foods

Wayne Corp

Wayne Automotive

Wayne Pharmaceuticals

The Daily Planet

Yes, Batman actually gives Superman his salary. Bruce bought the ownership over the Daily Planet. Why? I dunno. He just did.

A Disco Club

In the Gotham TV show season 4 episode 7, Bruce Wayne has bought a disco club when they refused him entry.

A Hotel

Bruce bought a hotel in the movie Batman Begins because the two women Bruce was with wanted to swim in the pool but the manager asked them to leave so Bruce bought the hotel to change its rules.

A Bank

In The Justice League 2017 movie, Bruce bought a bank to pay off Clark’s debt.

Clark Kent : "Thank you, Bruce" is not enough for what you did.

Bruce Wayne : I just undid a mistake, that's all.

Clark Kent : How did you get the house back from the bank?

Bruce Wayne : I bought the bank.

A Record company

In the 1970’s Batman comic issue (Batman #222) Bruce Wayne invests in a record label known as Eden Records.

Questions:

“How rich is Bruce Wayne?”

This is a tricky question. The thing is, there isn’t really a set-in-stone answer. It depends on the comic, the writer, etc. but from what I have found, Bruce Wayne’s net worth is $80 billion dollars in Batman #93 (2018). Wayne Enterprises is estimated to be worth at around $31.3 billion dollars, and I’ll have to assume the rest is from his other smaller companies and or his investments that have been proven to be profitable and successful.

“How did Bruce Wayne get so rich?”

He was rich even before he was even born. His wealth comes from his long line of family. When Bruce’s great, great, great grandfather bought property back when Gotham was more of a small town and less of a busy city. This real estate fortune grew rapidly overtime and was passed onto Bruce’s great grandfather, Alan Wayne. Alan was the one who developed the railroads as well as the shipping ports and chemical plants in Gotham city. And this all happened during the Industrial Revolution. Bruce’s grandfather, Patrick Wayne, then inherited the companies that Alan had built. Patrick then created the Wayne Corporation, AKA Waynecorp after the Great Depression and the company expanded into technology. They then supplied the American army with aircraft’s and ships during the pacific war. Then this company was passed onto Bruce’s father, Thomas Wayne, who built Gotham’s monorail, and then Bruce eventually inherited it himself.

[sunsetmountainlion]

How did Adam even come up with the idea for the Exorcists in the Biotech AU?

The beginnings of the idea began to come to him during the kickoff of the Industrial Revolution. At that point domestication was not a new idea, he and Eve invented it, and neither was the idea of using members of a species to fight others of their own kind, the prime example of this being his family’s tamed wolves.

He’d joked before that it would be really convenient if they could just domesticate a few demons to sic on their own kind, get them so fixated on fighting and killing each other that they forgot about Heaven. It was never a serious suggestion, just his shitty sense of humor.

The Industrial Revolution got people thinking in ways they hadn’t before, and the tech boom on Earth also caused a tech boom in a much more advanced Heaven.

As fear of what Hell’s booming population could do to Heaven should they decide to attack grew among the council, Adam began thinking more about that old domestication idea of his. He shared his thoughts with a few friends of his, and things spiraled from there. Those friends became the first surgeons and technicians.

[young-royals-confessions]

Responses to my job ask!

Thanks to all who wrote in, and thank you to the anon who suggested doing this—I found it so interesting to read the responses!

Occupations of Young Royals Confessions readers:

I'm an esthetician

I'm a videogame localization tester 😊

I am a teacher at a private school, and the history class I teach focuses primarily on revolutions and decolonization movements around the world. Working at a private school (but not being the same social class as most of my students) gives me a lot insights into the frightening soft power world of Hillerska.

I work in higher ed communications.

I used to be a civil servant, but got fed up with politics (and my bosses) and quitted. Now I currently don't work anywhere - keep my household, take care of my family and of myself.

I'm disabled. Was a teacher before.

I‘m a Marketing Manager :)

I am a teacher, I teach English at a secondary school in Europe.

I’m a graphic designer

Social worker :)

I have an engineer degree but now I work in the social field as a project manager.

Marketing manager by day, fic writer by night 🦸🏼‍♀️

I'm a train planner (shout out I've you've never heard of it before) and a freelance interpreter.

I’m an accounts administrator 📊

I'm an analytical chemist

Stay at home parent! 👶🏻

I work in a public university, writing grant applications and funding proposals, to persuade philanthropic organisations and individuals to fund our research and scholarships.

Casual retail worker, also meant to be a student but not currently at school lol

I’m a small business owner, selling handmade crafts and illustrations ☺️

I’m working as a Laboratory manager in a Biotech Company but I’m a pro in doing all things yr instead

I’m currently a full time student at uni but in my free time I help kids/teens with their homework

I’m a preschool teacher, work with kids aged 1-3. Sadly can’t read fanfic under the desk.

I work in a municipality where I help politicians and officials (no clue if that's the correct translation) with everything they need to keep the town and people happy. It's really interesting to sit behind the scenes and watch big decisions being made.

I'm a History of Latin America professor in an university and I'm also a second time PhD student. I also give surprise tests to my students to deal with my Young Royals feelings lmao

[biopractify]

🧬 How Bioinformatics is Revolutionizing Pharma & Drug Discovery 🚀

🔬 Bioinformatics is changing the way we develop medicines. From AI-driven drug discovery to genomics-based precision medicine, biotech is making healthcare smarter, faster, and more personalized. But how exactly is it transforming the pharma industry? Let’s explore!

📖 Keep scrolling to uncover how AI, data science, and bioinformatics are shaping the future of medicine!

✨ The Impact of Bioinformatics in Drug Discovery

🔹 1. Finding the Right Drug Targets Faster

📌 Old Way: Scientists spent years identifying potential drug targets. 🚀 Now: AI & bioinformatics analyze vast genomic datasets to find disease-related genes in hours!

💡 Example: AI-driven analysis helped identify key targets for cancer immunotherapy drugs like Keytruda (pembrolizumab).

🔹 2. Computational Drug Design & AI-Powered Screening

💊 Why waste years testing thousands of compounds?

Bioinformatics speeds up drug discovery through virtual screening & molecular simulations.

AI models predict how different drugs will interact with the body.

🔥 Pfizer used AI-driven bioinformatics to speed up the development of COVID-19 antivirals!

🔹 3. Personalized Medicine & Biomarker Discovery

✨ Not all treatments work for everyone. Bioinformatics makes medicine more precise!

Identifies genetic markers for disease risk.

Develops customized treatments for cancer & genetic disorders.

Predicts how patients will respond to a drug before prescribing it.

💡 Example: The breast cancer drug Herceptin was developed using bioinformatics to target HER2-positive patients.

🔹 4. CRISPR Gene Editing & Next-Gen Therapies

🧬 Bioinformatics guides CRISPR gene editing, helping scientists:

Design gene therapies for rare genetic disorders.

Reduce off-target mutations for safer treatments.

Improve DNA sequencing for precision medicine.

🔥 Companies like Intellia Therapeutics are using AI-powered bioinformatics for gene editing!

🔹 5. AI-Optimized Clinical Trials & Drug Repurposing

👩‍⚕️ Clinical trials cost billions. Bioinformatics helps optimize them!

Predicts side effects using AI.

Finds new uses for existing drugs (like how Remdesivir was repurposed for COVID-19).

Helps pharma companies save time & money while improving success rates.

💡 Example: AI-driven bioinformatics helped repurpose existing drugs for rare diseases!

🚀 The Future of Bioinformatics in Pharma

💡 The biotech revolution is just getting started! Expect to see: ✅ AI-powered drug design in real time. ✅ Nanomedicine & regenerative therapies. ✅ Affordable personalized medicine.

✨ What excites you most about the future of bioinformatics? Drop your thoughts in the comments! 💬👇

[dailyanarchistposts]

Biotechnology and the future of humanity

The development of the technology of Genetic Modification (GM) stretches back decades but most people have started to become aware of its implications only during the 90s. First Monsanto introduced rBST, a GM growth hormone designed to increase milk yields in the US. After some controversy the EU decided to ban its import into Europe, a decision that is likely to be overturned by the World Trade Organisation (WTO) soon. Then in 1996 shipments of soya beans genetically modified to be resistant to Monsanto’s herbicide Roundup started to arrive in this country, prompting public disquiet. The sacking of Dr Puzstai from the Rowett Institute for claiming that consuming GM potatoes harmed rats provoked quite a food scare frenzy in the capitalist media. But the “Frankenstein Foods” paranoia also tended to obscure the environmental and social disasters that will follow if the corporations carry out their plans to introduce GM on a large scale. To quote Vandana Shiva “It seems that the Western powers are still driven by the colonising impulse to discover, conquer, own, and possess everything, every society, every culture. The colonies have now been extended to the interior spaces, the ‘genetic codes’ of life forms from microbes and plants to animals, including humans.”

[warrioreowynofrohan]

Jurassic Park Daily: Introduction - The InGen Incident

Oh wow, this is a blast from the past!

Jurassic Park was published in 1990, and I remember in the 1990s and early 2000s genuinely thinking that, as the introduction says, biotechnology was going to be the next frontier of science to revolutionize society. When the intro speculates “By the end of the decade [biotechnology] will have outdistanced atomic power and computers in its effect on our everyday lives”, by computers it means the start of personal computers - the centrality of the internet to modern life, the development of social media, smartphones, and tablets were all in the future.

So the prediction was way off. Advances in communications have remained the major technological advance affecting daily life for the three decades since Jurassic Park was published, and while biotch has made advances and remains regularly in the news, any changes it has brought in daily life pale in comparison to those. Additionally, other people did see the same things Crichton did, and the field of bioethics took off in consequence.

The emphasis on the commercialization of molecular biology as opposed to other scientific fields in the introduction is particularly striking, given the absolute centrality of business to the ‘tech sector’ - computing and the internet having become so big that ‘tech’ has come to be understood as referring specifically to them. That STEM means mainly private enterprise, not academic research, is something we’ve come to almost take for granted now.

That’s not to say biotech has had no impact on life - it’s widened our ability to modify crops beyond what we could do with hybridization, it’s improved medicine, and people use it to get geneological imformation - but it has proved far more complex than people expected, and the real technological revolution was elsewhere.

(Realized that the way this post is written could give the impression that the intro is a sort of topical preface by Crichton rather than part of the story, so to clarify: that is not the case. The intro is part of the story. And I like the way that we’re told the broad strokes of how things will end - the main events will involve a small number of people on an island in Central America over a couple days, many of those people will die, and InGen will go bankrupt - at the beginning, with the suspense in the book coming from the details.)

[highladyluck]

Tag Game: 9 Favorite Characters

I was tagged by @anyboli, @asha-mage, and @spectrum-color (Stop! stop! I’m already tagged!)

Aladdin (Disney’s Aladdin)

This is definitely where my love of the rogue-with-a-heart-of-gold archetype started. Lay the blame squarely at his bare feet. I watched all the sequels including the direct-to-VHS Aladdin and the King of Thieves.

2. Mat Cauthon (the Wheel of Time series)

He’s 12 different literary/historical/mythological references slapped together, chained to a lovable rogue archetype, rolled in accessories, doused in foreshadowing, and given #vampireproblems. He probably has ADHD and dyslexia and definitely has anxiety. I’m obsessed with him and I have the essays to prove it.

3. Fortuona Athaem Devi Paendrag (the Wheel of Time series)

Liking Mat is the gateway drug to liking Tuon, at least in my case. She’s so fucking weird and mysterious and infuriating and I really wanted to understand her and her role in the story. Then I wanted to figure out how to fix her. Now I still want all that but also I want to make her worse, make her make other people worse, and just generally Put Her In Situations. She is endlessly fascinating to me and I want to chew on her until I rip out her squeaker. Then I will put in another squeaker and the process will begin again. My username, originally chosen because somebody else snagged matrimonycauthon, has very appropriately become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

4. Ael i'Mhessian t'Rllalielu (the Rihannsu series)

No one should be surprised that I love Diane Duane’s take on the Romulans, and Ael is the archetypal honorable Romulan type that Star Trek originally introduced. As the aunt of the Romulan Commander in the Enterprise Incident (the Federation steals technology from the Romulans) she has good reasons to hate Captain Kirk and the Federation personally- but as the tagline says, when there is no help from her friends, she turns to her enemies. She’s the star of the Rihannsu Star Trek novels: start with either My Enemy, My Ally for the first book or the omnibus Rihannsu: The Bloodwing Voyages.

5. Tertius Lydgate (Middlemarch)

I was trying to sum up what I like about him and I think it’s something about the quiet tragedy of good intentions and ambition getting banally corrupted by unquestioned systems, practical considerations, and bad but personally inevitable choices. If you’ve ever worked in nonprofits or a b-corp, you may recognize yourself in Lydgate in a way that will make you uncomfortable. Or maybe it’s just me? Anyway, go read Middlemarch. It is always the right time in your life to read Middlemarch.

6. Tau-Indi Bosoka (The Masquerade series)

I’m love them! Tau-Indi is such a sweet person, and they follow a favorite character arc of mine: characters whose assigned or chosen role is to be the best representative & highest expression of their specific ethical and political milieu, and then they experience or learn something that forever disqualifies them from their former role, and then they have to keep on existing and build their sense of morality and place in the world from the ground up, on firmer foundations than the ones they started with. Also an excellent foil to Baru.

7. Miriam Beckstein (the Merchant Princes series)

Merchant Princes is basically an isekai story where a biotech journalist finds out she’s a long-lost heir to a group of alternate-universe-teleporting refugees. It’s not actually very fun for her at first, but she’s making it work. I love competence porn and she definitely delivers, and there’s also a very sweet slow-burn romance tied up with her funding and leading the socialist revolution of yet another alternate universe.

8. Glimmer (new She-Ra)

Glimmer? She’s just my bisexual teleporting deeply morally questionable power fantasy, it’s not that deep. Also she’s hot and I love her hair.

9. Mark Pierre Vorkosigan (Vorkosigan series)

What an incredible foil! Every time I read him I’m so impressed by how fucked up he is and how hard he’s working to figure out who he is and develop in a direction he chooses. Control issues, daddy issues, sexuality issues, identity issues… he’s an entire wall of magazines and I think he’s just great.

Tagging: @unmarkedcards @veliseraptor @ameliarating @gunkreads @liesmyth and anyone else who wants to do it

[landrysg]

Here is one very simple way to see the distortions embodied in [taxing unrealized capital gains]. … Say you have a start-up, and it becomes valued at $10 billion after a quick growth spurt. But still you aren’t making money yet, but nonetheless your overall portfolio is reasonably liquid because your last company did well and you sold it. So, if I follow Jason [Furman] and the plan document correctly, in the year after that valuation you have to pay one-fifth of the tax liability on that gain, or say one-fifth of one-fourth of the $10 billion, or $500 million … Obviously you can vary these exact numbers, but the general point remains. … That just seems like a bad investment to me! … Then suppose that, the year after, the start-up crashes and has to be liquidated at a very low value. There isn’t any refund from the tax man. So you have lost not only your investment but … [significantly] more, again noting the exact numbers can vary a bit here. … Why would you enter into deals like this? But of course a lot of start-up sectors have return structures very much like that, namely some high initial valuations but with reasonably high percentages of a later crash. Venture capital drives so much of the most productive sectors of our economy, so why are we whacking it like this? When so many promising developments in biotech and green energy seem to be on the way? Why should we want to crush venture capital like this?