Kudos to the two physicists who plotted all objects in the Universe onto a single 2D plot, most of all for the breadth of their ambition, but also for planting their tongue firmly in cheek with a tiny, sub-Planckian-sized quip:

Humans are represented by a mass of 70 kg and a radius of 50 cm (we assume sphericity), while whales are represented by a mass of 10^5 kg and a radius of 7m.

Someone please update Wikipedia! (ᔥJason Kottke)

Target-based drug discovery is a waste of time, says a systematic review of 32,000 articles and patents from the last 150 years:

…only 9.4% of small-molecule drugs have been discovered through “target-based” assays. Moreover, the therapeutic effects of even this minimal share cannot be solely attributed and reduced to their purported targets, as they depend on numerous off-target mechanisms unconsciously incorporated by phenotypic observations. The data suggest that reductionist target-based drug discovery may be a cause of the productivity crisis in drug discovery.

So it would seem. And even those drugs initially developed to target a single protein or mutation end up having many more unanticipated effects. Back to the jungle and the ocean depths, then?

(ᔥDerek Lowe)

As a prolific child fabulist, I very much appreciated @ayjay’s reminiscence. Most people are, in fact, reflexive embellishers, but not everyone can recognize it in themselves or turn it into a healthy skepticism. At least that’s what I tell myself!

The NIH Clinical Center used to commission artwork for some of their lectures. Here is one for “Phobias and Panic Disorder” from 1985.

In retrospect, that friend worried about an eagle flying away with his toddler as prey wasn’t completely bonkers.

Derek Lowe writes about a recent Cancer Cell paper pitting glioblastoma cells against each other in a mouse model:

A single clonal line that hit on high Myc expression could outcompete fifteen thousand others from a standing start!

As someone who’s treated patients with Burkitt lymphoma, the Myc-dependent cancer, I can absolutely believe this.

From the archive: the author presenting some preclinical work on the cell cycle at the AACR annual meeting in Washington DC, circa 2017. Little did I know that six years later I’d be living just a few blocks down the street.

For your (and mine, time permitting) weekend reading, listening, and/or viewing pleasure: the Tim Ferris interview with Nassim Taleb and Scott Patterson. I sure hope you are familiar with the former; the latter is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal who also wrote a book about “black swan traders”, which, yes, is probably going to the pile the antilibrary. It is a 2-hour discussion rightfully described as a feast.

It’s been a while, but school is back in session and so are interesting online lectures. Here are a few I plan on attending, time permitting:

• Alpha Spending for Clinical Trials by Dr. James F. Troendle of NHLBI (Thursday, September 7, 3pm EDT)
• Varicella Zoster Virus in Glioma Etiology and Survival: Evidence of a Beneficial Virus? by Dr. Stephen Francis, UCSF (Tuesday, September 12, 2pm EDT)
• 2023 Judith H. Greenberg Early Career Investigator Lecture by Dr. Akhila Rajan, FHCC, and I know the title doesn’t tell you much but per the description “Dr. Akhila Rajan will discuss her research in a 30-minute talk on investigating how fat cells communicate with the brain, followed by a 30-minute live Q&A” (Wednesday, September 27, 1pm EDT)

One I absolutely must attend is held tomorrow (Thursday, September 7) at 6pm EDT, when I will talk about RNA cell therapy as the keynote speaker at the Maryland BioNetworking Summit, held at the BSE Facility at the Universities at Shady Grove in Rockville. It is in-person only and free to attend, if you register here.

Reading Adam Mastroianni’s latest article, about the vacuousness of psychology, and it looks like the world is ready for psychohistory. Now if only we had an intelligence greater than ours to develop it…