Thursday, October 02, 2025

Making Antibodies as Ubiquitous as Aspirin

A longish history of serum therapy, with recent advances: Making Antibodies as Ubiquitous as Aspirin at Works in Progress 

Diphtheria, the strangling angel, was one of the great killers of children in the 19th century. The infection owes its lethality to a potent toxin released by the bacteria Corynebacterium diphtheriae. Diphtheria toxin destroys the heart, lungs, and liver. In the late stages of disease, the infected are suffocated by a buildup of dead, grey, tissue in their throats. Most victims were children under five; before modern treatments, as many as half of infected babies and toddlers died. There was little parents and doctors could do against the scourge, until biotechnology provided the first answer.

And 

But it was just in the past decade or so that the technology matured enough to give us multiple new approvals per year; the FDA only recently approved the 100th monoclonal antibody drug. To turn antibodies into a scalable technology, as we had done previously with small synthetic molecules, we needed to stack many improvements in manufacturing. With these advances, came synthetic processes that made far more diseases treatable. 


Wednesday, October 01, 2025

Well, I'm Impressed

 I was looking for something else but was mesmerised by this.


 

MAGA Fury

Do the WaPo and NYT describe everything that conservatives complain about as "fury?" This time it's MAGA furious at Bad Bunny being picked. Are they?  Football fans are pretty used to not liking the Super Bowl halftime show, because it tends to be someone who is supposed to attract the semi-fan, often female, who doesn't watch that often. They want those extra eyeballs for the commercials. I haven't seen it mentioned on conservative sites yet.  I suspect there will be some grousing. 

Fury. Well, I'm sure there are some people furious about Bad Bunny who are big Trump supporters, but I'll bet they get over it. Are their opponents trying to conjure it, trying to make people believe it, or projecting how they spend their mornings onto other people's screens? 

113

I put up 113 posts in September, well above my previous record.  I have exceeded 90 only twice, and only gone above 80 less than ten times.  I don't know why, because this was also a month with many links posts of about five each. Those total 74 more, so that is 187 for the month. In 2014 I only did 209 posts for the whole year!  I don't know why that was either.  One month had only five and another only six that year.  I am still reprising links from 2012 and should get to 2014 soon enough, and maybe I will figure it out then. I don't recall an especial busyness. 

Links

Grim did compile a list of likely effective gun control measures a few weeks ago, and ones that Second Amendment purists could sign off on.  But I still think this is funny from a decade ago. Yes Virginia, There Is Some Effective Gun Control. 

The baby bust and partisanship 

Strong female partisanship is an important part of the story. In the United States, women have stronger partisan identities than do men. Women are also more polarized than men in their partisan affect, liking their own party and disliking the other more strongly. This gender gap is wholly caused by white female Democrats, however; black women and men show no differences in polarization, and Republican women and men show none, either.

Communal Narcissism  Rotate the traditional definition of narcissism - I am the smartest, most popular, most dominant - ninety degrees and you get the communal narcissist - I am the most moral, the most helpful. But are they? Do they walk the walk?

When I was a boy, my social studies book would call them Laplanders, or Lapps, a remote exotic people that somehow lived off reindeer herding. Now my son knows a few Sami in Norway, where dried fish is as important as reindeer to their sustenance. Nomads to Natives tells their ancestry

From the Arthurian site I linked to about a week ago, The Northern Arthur. He dismisses the theory I had repeated about five years ago that "Arthur" was a title rather than a given name. Bernard Mees is coming at the historical record as a linguist, noticing differences in endings and spelling that are usually overlooked, and using these to place Arthur in region and time.