Faculty of Medicine researcher Rachel Harding will be the first known biomedical researcher to welcome the world to review her lab notes in real time.
The post-doctoral fellow with U of T's Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) is also explaining her findings to the general public through her blog.
She hopes her open approach will accelerate research into Huntington's disease."This should drive the process faster than working alone," she says.
Article from University of Toronto: http://www.news.utoronto.ca/huntingtons-disease-university-toronto-researcher-first-share-lab-notes-real-time
Her 'blog' itself, for your critiquing! https://zenodo.org/record/45428#.VteOS-_R9qP (Zenodo. Research. Shared)
This, basically, was the way medicine used to be done: share, critique and collaborate. Here's hoping that she makes it so that all that is old is new again.
And how cool it would be if it was in the Stargate Command (SGC)
[Ed Note: Don't forget, that SoylentNews is contributing to the research efforts for Huntington's Disease as well. There is an official Folding@Home team for Soylentnews.org. Please take a look at the previous article and contribute some CPU cycles if you can.]
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[Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that takes advantage of otherwise idle computing resources on volunteer's computers to simulate how proteins fold and thus guide progress to finding a cure to diseases such as: Alzheimer's, Huntington's, Parkinson's, and many cancers. --martyb]
Back in February of this year, one of our site's members Sir Finkus introduced our community to Folding@Home with this story:
I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for SoylentNews. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.
There is more information on the project here , which explains it much better than I could.
Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!
That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.
On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.
tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319
We are pleased to announce that our SoylentNews Folding@Home team is now approaching the top 500 spot! Our team size has plateaued, but new members are welcome at any time. To put this milestone in perspective, since the time when the team started in mid-Februrary of this year, we have overtaken 229,814 teams!
We even have a channel, #folding, on IRC.
Official Stats:
http://fah-web2.stanford.edu/teamstats/team230319.html
http://fah-web.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=230319
Better Stats at:
Team Summary
Teams Overall Rank
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 501-600
Overtake Projections - Teams Ranked 499-500
Related Coverage:
Soylent News has a Top 1000 Folding@Home Team!
Huntington's Disease: University of Toronto Researcher is First to Share Lab Notes in Real Time
I've taken the liberty of setting up an official folding@home team for Soylent News. In case you aren't familiar with folding@home, it's a distributed computing project that simulates protein folding in an attempt to better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's and Huntington's.
There is more information on the project here, which explains it much better than I could.
Clients are available for Linux, OSX, and even Windows (if you swing that way), so come join our botnet!
That Other Site's team is ranked at 1817, so we've got some catching up to do.
On a personal note, my Dad carries the gene markers for Huntington's disease, and will eventually succumb to it. Research like this is very helpful for understanding, and hopefully developing treatments for it.
tl;dr Our Soylent News team ID is 230319
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @06:57PM
high impact journals don't like to publish articles with results that have already been well publicized. they're generally ok with conference presentations, but I think a blog and sharing of lab notes is a big no no.
no idea what kind of permanent position she will find if she doesn't have big impact publications...
by the way, my personal opinion is that publishers of scientific journals should be completely removed from the world, and a slightly modified arXiv should be used for all research, therefore eliminating this sort of problem. I was just commenting on the real world reasons for which most of us keep "lab notes" private.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by frojack on Friday March 04 2016, @07:21PM
high impact journals don't like to publish articles with results that have already been well publicized. ...no idea what kind of permanent position she will find if she doesn't have big impact publications...
The world is changing.
If her research pans out in any way, I can see a whole line of software products arriving that will keep the raw data, the analysis, even the computer code used to analyze the results, plus the step by step comments.
I think it would likely lead to MORE job offers, because people can see the quality of her work up front.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 4, Informative) by frojack on Friday March 04 2016, @07:04PM
I hope she controls comment, limiting them to people with some actual credentials in the field.
I can just see a horde of trolls descending on the blog and consuming all of her time fighting flames and trolls on the blog.
Even supposedly helpful suggestions (you should done this, why don't you look into that) could derail the research plan.
No, you are mistaken. I've always had this sig.
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Saturday March 05 2016, @06:12AM
One could limit comments from less than competent people by using a proper captcha. Say for example in computer science by requesting users to answer something like "what is the bit pattern if you have 0x5A and circular shift 15 bits to left and add an unsigned 5?" ..
(Score: 2) by maxwell demon on Saturday March 05 2016, @10:53AM
Circular shift? Did you mean rotate?
Anyway, you didn't specify the bit width, so the result is not well defined. On an 16 bit integer, the result will be vastly different than on a 64 bit integer.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1) by bitstream on Sunday March 06 2016, @03:24AM
You got a point! ;)
(Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Monday March 07 2016, @04:25PM
I hope she controls comment, limiting them to people with some actual credentials in the field.
Yeah, perhaps she should develop a Code of Conduct.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Sir Finkus on Friday March 04 2016, @08:26PM
Huntington's is a pretty rare genetic disorder. It's probably easiest to think of it as a combination of Parkinson's and Alzheimer's disease. People suffering from the disease lose cognitive function, and have involuntary body movements. It's hereditary, and based on what I've heard about it, offspring have about a 50% chance of developing symptoms. People can still carry the gene and be asymptomatic, but pass it on to their children.
It runs in my family. My dad has it, and my Grandfather had it as well. Luckily, I'm adopted, so I dodged that bullet. My siblings may not be so lucky.
It's rather easy to test whether somebody will develop symptoms, but many people don't want to get tested because there aren't any good treatments or cures for the disease (some promising clinical trials though).
Join our Folding@Home team! [stanford.edu]
(Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 04 2016, @09:57PM
I just see a single 9 mb .docx file dated Feb 1.