Silly Goofy Writer

And then, at some point, the people who left started coming back.

It was the children first. The March of Dimes and Saint Jude set up programs and my town would do spaghetti fundraisers and raffles and meal trains to support the family and send the child and one parent to a hospital in the city — and the children came home. Their hair grew back. They went back to school. We were all trained to think of them as the angelic lost and they were turning into asshole teens right in front of our eyes. What a miracle, what a gift, how lucky we are that the odds for several children are in our favor!

Adults started leaving for a specific program to treat their specific cancer at a specific hospital or a specific research group. They’d stay in that city for 6-12 months and then they’d come home. We fully expected that they were still dying — or they’d gotten one of the good cancers. What a gift this year is for them, we’d think. How lucky they are to be strong enough to ski and swim and run. And then they didn’t stop — two decades later they haven’t stopped. Not all of them, but most of them.

We bought those extra hours and months and years. We paid for time with our taxes. Scientists found ways for treatment to be less terrible, less poisonous, and a thousand times more effective.

And now, when a friend was diagnosed, the five year survival odds were 95%. My friend is alive, nearly five years later. Those kids who miraculously survived are alive. The adults who beat the odds are still alive. I grew up in a place small enough that you can see the losses. And now, the hospital in my tiny hometown can effectively treat many cancers. Most people don’t have to go away for treatment. They said we could never cure cancer, as it were, but we can cure a lot of cancers. We can diagnose a lot of cancers early enough to treat them with minor interventions. We can prevent a lot of cancers.

We could keep doing that. We could continue to fund research into other heartbreaks — into Long Covid and MCAS and psych meds with fewer side effects and dementia treatments. We could buy months and years, alleviate the suffering of our neighbors. That is what funding health research buys: time and ease.

Back in the 60s, a team got some funding to research the extremophile bacteria living in the hot springs in Yellowstone National Park. Among the organisms they described was Thermus aquaticus.

Okay, who cares? That bacteria lives in hot springs. You let it get below 122°F/50°C? It just dies. It just hangs out in scalding hot water and maybe trades molecules with some cyanobacteria or something. Kinda neat, but was it really worth our tax dollars to send these people on a field trip to a national park?

A few decades later, another researcher used one of the enzymes isolated from that bacteria to develop a process called Polymerase Chain Reaction (PCR).

Before PCR, if you wanted to make a bunch of copies of a given DNA sequence, you needed a team of experts and weeks of hard work. You needed to grow a whole bunch of cells and do a bunch of chemistry at them and there was still a high probability of failure.

With PCR, any jackass with a bachelor's degree can just pipette a barely-visible volume of colorless liquid into a lil tube with some other colorless liquid, throw it in the beige science box, and have the sequence of interest copied millions of times over in an hour or two. (Source: I'm a jackass with a bachelor's degree and I've done PCR on tens of thousands of specimens)

PCR is an absolutely critical tool in the molecular biology toolkit. Many assays for cancers and genetic diseases depend on it. It's a powerful tool for quickly detecting certain infectious diseases. It's how you find out if you really are the daddy. I'm not even going to start scratching the surface on how important it is in many areas of research. It's a magnificent technique that has dozens of variants to suit all kinds of niche applications.

So yeah, that goofy study about some shit that you think is a huge waste of time and money? You could be right, it might lead to a paper getting published that only matters to a handful of people in a super niche field.

Or it could completely revolutionize the world in ways that we never could have expected.

spider:

little did we know what this means is that she not only attacks toes but if she sees you with your ankles or bare arms out for example, there is a high chance she will slap you. she will literally just come up to you and slap you where your skin is showing unless its your face. she doesnt hiss or growl or anything she will just give you a disapproving slap or two i assume to voice her disagreement with how you present yourself