I've been working in sort of a groupthink echo chamber with my professional colleagues - so it's great to finally start getting some input from the general public.
I see great minds think alike on glacial walls - I like your AI Scaling Laws post. I winced a little at casting myself in the role of the Night King, but hopefully most readers won't stretch the metaphor that far.
Good question about variable response - we thought about it a lot. In addition to different individuals responding differently, there could be big differences in terms of other variables like choice of yeast strain (e.g., one strain I used lives happily at body temperature the other prefers room temp), how the yeast strain is eaten (beer vs dried yeast chips), and which foods you eat alongside the yeast. We did various kitchen experiments that are documented in the Supplement of the formal manuscript:
Another thing that was encouraging in the mice is that if you break open the yeast and put them in the nose the mice mount a very strong response against the polyomavirus antigen. In other words, if some people are resistant to the oral route they could theoretically try nasal. Or cosmetic microneedle derma-roller on the skin - that works too.
One point of drinking beer was to see whether my antibodies went up, but the main point was the hope that it might protect me against polyomaviruses. We know 100% for sure they kill immunocompromised people - and it would be very foolish to bet they're perfectly harmless for the rest of us:
My favorite pop star alive today! This video has been like comedy-psychotherapy during the vaccine development effort:
https://youtu.be/BnyvDBGojoQ?si=k0k7ITveseR-DAzz&t=119
Thanks for this feedback - I'm glad to hear the approach makes sense. As you can see from this media coverage:
https://www.sciencenews.org/article/vaccine-beer-polyomavirus-chris-buck
I've been working in sort of a groupthink echo chamber with my professional colleagues - so it's great to finally start getting some input from the general public.
I see great minds think alike on glacial walls - I like your AI Scaling Laws post. I winced a little at casting myself in the role of the Night King, but hopefully most readers won't stretch the metaphor that far.
Good question about variable response - we thought about it a lot. In addition to different individuals responding differently, there could be big differences in terms of other variables like choice of yeast strain (e.g., one strain I used lives happily at body temperature the other prefers room temp), how the yeast strain is eaten (beer vs dried yeast chips), and which foods you eat alongside the yeast. We did various kitchen experiments that are documented in the Supplement of the formal manuscript:
https://zenodo.org/records/17968622
Another thing that was encouraging in the mice is that if you break open the yeast and put them in the nose the mice mount a very strong response against the polyomavirus antigen. In other words, if some people are resistant to the oral route they could theoretically try nasal. Or cosmetic microneedle derma-roller on the skin - that works too.
One point of drinking beer was to see whether my antibodies went up, but the main point was the hope that it might protect me against polyomaviruses. We know 100% for sure they kill immunocompromised people - and it would be very foolish to bet they're perfectly harmless for the rest of us:
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.aea6124
Viruses. Must. Die.