Thursday Throughput: Michael Collins Edition

Michael Siegel

Michael Siegel is an astronomer living in Pennsylvania. He blogs at his own site, and has written a novel.

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10 Responses

  1. Oscar Gordon says:

    ThTh2: I was reading somewhere that the immune system plays a mutation game with the things it’s been primed to look for, so that minor changes still trigger the ‘heuristic’.

    ThTh7: There is a documentary on Netflix from 2018 that talks about how scientists were getting ready for the next pandemic. It’s scary prophetic, but it also explains how we were able to kick this out the door so fast.

    As for Collins, Ad Astra indeed.Report

    • JS in reply to Oscar Gordon says:

      The spike protein was also chosen because it’s a difficult target for COVID-19 to mutate successfully, and those mutations are likely to be much smaller.

      It’s a really important bit for infecting human cells. Mutations there are far more likely to break a critical part of the infection process, so even with the vast number of COVID-19 cases out there able to mutate, the spike protein will almost certainly remain the same — or very, very similar. It can’t get too different and still infect a cell.

      Which is the nice bit about mRNA vaccines, compared to — say — dead virus versions, the ability to specify exactly what your immune system should be looking for.

      (hence the possibility of cancer treatments. Telling your immune system “You want a cell that looks like THIS — specifically this weird thing here. Look for the weird thing. Anything with the weird thing you kill. You leave all the other cells alone. This weird thing RIGHT HERE is important”)Report

  2. Michael Cain says:

    ThTh9: The taller part is not surprising. When I was an undergraduate, I got to play intramural basketball in a league that required you be less than 5’10” tall only because they did the qualifying measurement in the evening. When I first got out of bed in the morning I was almost a half-inch taller and would have been too tall. A day of letting gravity compress my spine did the trick.Report

  3. Michael Cain says:

    ThTh7: Perhaps not “rushed” by the manufacturers — although I’d like to see the overtime numbers and unplanned hires for the people in the labs before I agree to even that — but certainly rushed by the FDA. They allowed the vaccines to be used even though the final clinical trials were not complete and absent much/all of the manufacturing inspection regime. Certainly the situation justified the risk, and things have worked out very well overall. Still, the FDA has issued modifications to the EUAs, particularly with respect to storage and handling, more conditions under which vaccine doses must be discarded, and the kinds of adverse effects that must be reported. Those are almost all things that would have been caught if the full licensing protocol had been followed.Report

  4. Oscar Gordon says:

    The Atlantic had a piece last year with some Transcripts from the Apollo 11 Mission.

    There is also a quote attributed to Collins that when Armstrong was contemplating what his first words on the moon would be, Collins told him, “If you had any balls, you’d say ‘Oh, my God, what is that thing?’ then scream and cut your mic.”. I can’t find an official cite for its perhaps it’s Urban Legend or some such, but damn if that wouldn’t have been funny…Report