@06a436ca
Thanks for sharing. Excellent obit!
Here's a short 3min clip of him talking about some of what the FT article covers when he was honored by the then President of India, Pranab Mukherjee. Almost every sentence he utters in this video is important:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KBQVEfCsN4c
@ab7cf35b
I am always reminded me of the quip from the great Jonas Salk (after he synthesized the polio vaccine): “There is no patent. Could you patent the sun?”
mRNA derived vaccines are indeed great (I am a beneficiary), and the researchers who did the foundational work on mRNA richly deserve the honor.
A lot of people have already weighed in on the mistreatment/shutting of one of the winners, Katalin Kariko and the brokenness of academic research, bias against women, incentive structures, awards, grants etc.,
However, there is myopia/distortion/rank hypocrisy on other fronts that deserves ridicule as well.
This sentence in the citation, to put it mildly, is preposterous:
" ... contributed to the unprecedented rate of vaccine development during one of the greatest threats to human health in modern times."
In a world of roughly 8 billion people, roughly 13.5 billion doses of Covid19 vaccines have been administered so far. About 3 billion of those are mRNA vaccines (you can guess who got them). So, what do they mean when they say "human" health? Which humans are they talking about? Who do they think vaccinated the world?
This has to be either the greatest sleight of hand or complete ignorance/denial of how and what kind of Covid-19 vaccines were rolled out to save the world. It's as if the rest of the world doesn't exist or didn't as well develop vaccines quickly and save themselves.
What we witnessed the last three years was not "unprecedented ... development" using mRNA techniques to counter "one of the greatest threats to human health" as the citation points out, instead it was how the entire rich world failed so completely and spectacularly to see itself as part of a common humanity even after it had the means to do so.
#Vaccines #mRNA #NobelPrizeMedicine #Research #Covid19 #Inequality #Health
@3855455c
What paper is this?
I have heard similar assumptions that it now means human neuroimaging. I guess, then I don't count as someone doing cognitive neuroscience.
Just wow!
What an extremely moving story.
This is also an ideal for journalism, we need more such stories, and less stenography of the rich, vain, and powerful!
https://www.sixthtone.com/news/1009567
(via @a41df371 )
#Philosophy #PoliticalEconomy #Journalism #China #Education #MigrantWorkers #WorkingClass
@5ff7031a@ab7cf35b
I completely agree with this!
It was just an exercise to check my own sanity as well as see if others think in similar ways, vis-a-vis ML/NN systems will discover physical laws and all that nonsense.
@ab7cf35b
Sure... VC, Rademacher, whatever floats your boat.
I give you a physics model, you give me its complexity. So far, I don't see anything like that meaningfully possible.
@a41df371
Very much! So how do we say one is more complicated than the other... if all we are allowed to do are, here is x(input), here is y(output)... we got an excellent fit with the params we have defined (a) here in our model. We do a curve fit in ML. How do I map from the model complexity in ML to the model defined in those equations.
I know the question is silly, but if one even takes semi-seriously the claims that NN/ML will find new scientific laws, we should be able to understand known scientific laws in that language.
@de594dec
Also, the only cosmology and milk combination reference in India that I am aware of is the churning of Kshira Sagara (ocean of milk), which is paal kadal in tamil, that gave rise to our universe, life and immortality. That is, Indian version of the big bang.
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