Thank you for both conducting this experiment as well as for writing it up in great detail.
How much study do you estimate someone would have to invest into biology (or biohacking) to at least understand what’s going on here? What are some “genres” of biology someone could start looking into to understand this work?
This looks like a really interesting area to probe, but my current level of knowledge in biology (“1 year of high school biology classes”) makes it difficult to even formulate questions or google queries about it.
In my case, I’d estimate that I’ve spent around two hundred hours over the last several months coming sufficiently up to speed on the topics that I can reason about them. I started with about your level of biology (or possibly less), but probably a slightly stronger chemistry background.
For the basics, I started with cell biochemistry, DNA/RNA, mRNA and protein construction. From the vaccine side of things, I just started looking up things I found in the whitepaper which I didn’t understand, and once I understood all the terms I started looking for and reading research papers. When I found something I wasn’t sure about, I researched it and learned about it.
As examples, in early January, I spent about ten days reading up on VED (vaccine enhanced disease). Shortly after, I spent a few days digging into chitosan, and trying to understand how sensitive nanoparticle creation is to changes in the mixing process (hint: not very.) Everything I searched for I was able to find, and pretty much everything reinforced the same internally consistent view of the world.
When you find something that doesn’t make sense and you’re stuck, write it down, file it away and come back to it later. Eventually you’ll be able to make sense of it.
When you’re able to read through most or all of the whitepaper and understand both what’s being discussed and why specific things were selected, you’ll be in pretty good shape.
It’s not particularly difficult, it just takes time and effort.
To a large extent this project involves specialized knowledge about the immune system, and that’s stuff which you just have to look up one way or the other. That part is pretty straightforward. Same with looking up random jargon; that’s a part of any biology research.
The harder part is the not-very-legible general intuitions about biological systems—e.g. things like “a <25 amino acid peptide isn’t likely to have any function as a protein in its own right” or “error bars are on a log scale, and probably wide”. If you want to acquire those sorts of intuitions, one relatively-fast path might be the bionumbers book.
On the other hand, even without those intuitions you could just brute-force your way through by checking everything. For instance, if you don’t have the intuition that error bars are wide and on a log scale, you could find a paper experimentally measuring the concentration tolerances for chitosan nanoparticle formation. In some ways that’s better—you’re less likely to miss things and you can end up a lot more confident in your assessment—but it’s a lot more work.
Thank you for both conducting this experiment as well as for writing it up in great detail.
How much study do you estimate someone would have to invest into biology (or biohacking) to at least understand what’s going on here? What are some “genres” of biology someone could start looking into to understand this work?
This looks like a really interesting area to probe, but my current level of knowledge in biology (“1 year of high school biology classes”) makes it difficult to even formulate questions or google queries about it.
In my case, I’d estimate that I’ve spent around two hundred hours over the last several months coming sufficiently up to speed on the topics that I can reason about them. I started with about your level of biology (or possibly less), but probably a slightly stronger chemistry background.
For the basics, I started with cell biochemistry, DNA/RNA, mRNA and protein construction. From the vaccine side of things, I just started looking up things I found in the whitepaper which I didn’t understand, and once I understood all the terms I started looking for and reading research papers. When I found something I wasn’t sure about, I researched it and learned about it.
As examples, in early January, I spent about ten days reading up on VED (vaccine enhanced disease). Shortly after, I spent a few days digging into chitosan, and trying to understand how sensitive nanoparticle creation is to changes in the mixing process (hint: not very.) Everything I searched for I was able to find, and pretty much everything reinforced the same internally consistent view of the world.
When you find something that doesn’t make sense and you’re stuck, write it down, file it away and come back to it later. Eventually you’ll be able to make sense of it.
When you’re able to read through most or all of the whitepaper and understand both what’s being discussed and why specific things were selected, you’ll be in pretty good shape.
It’s not particularly difficult, it just takes time and effort.
That’s a tough question.
To a large extent this project involves specialized knowledge about the immune system, and that’s stuff which you just have to look up one way or the other. That part is pretty straightforward. Same with looking up random jargon; that’s a part of any biology research.
The harder part is the not-very-legible general intuitions about biological systems—e.g. things like “a <25 amino acid peptide isn’t likely to have any function as a protein in its own right” or “error bars are on a log scale, and probably wide”. If you want to acquire those sorts of intuitions, one relatively-fast path might be the bionumbers book.
On the other hand, even without those intuitions you could just brute-force your way through by checking everything. For instance, if you don’t have the intuition that error bars are wide and on a log scale, you could find a paper experimentally measuring the concentration tolerances for chitosan nanoparticle formation. In some ways that’s better—you’re less likely to miss things and you can end up a lot more confident in your assessment—but it’s a lot more work.