Entire classes of allergies are basically caused by IgE, our worm-targeting depth charges, getting bored by the lack of worms in our bodies for possibly the first time in millennia.

If we could tweak our bodies we wouldn’t want to eliminate IgE. But we’d want to have it produced only when a recognizer complex finds thar be worms.

More likely that there are enough toxins unknowingly mixed into our food which trigger the responses. There is a severe lack of analytical methods and constant monitoring of the food we eat (e.g. food plus packaging plus time and temperature).

How can IgE get bored? That doesn’t sound right. Why would the body, a master of efficiency, produce IgE just for fun?

> Why would the body, a master of efficiency, produce IgE just for fun?

I was being punchy. “The pathway of B cell differentiation with respect to the nature and location of potential IgE+ memory cells as well as long-lived IgE producing plasma cells in allergy is still not completely understood” [1]. We do know, however, that “IgE is continuously produced to maintain constant IgE levels in blood,” and that Th2 cells can increase that baseline.

[1] https://www.mdpi.com/2073-4409/8/9/994

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK27117/

they are saying that the body produced to to fight parasites like worms. these were a big problem for most of evolutionary history. With modern living standards, our immune systems don't encounter many parasites so they get "bored" and over react to harmless things like food. Evolution hasn't had time to adjust to the new living standards since its only been a few generations.

Hygiene hypothesis

I'm from Eastern Europe and I don't think I know a single person with allergies. As someone who live outside of it, I can say people are a bit lax with hygiene here except when cooking meat. People can't reconcile you can eat medium rare steak.

So... Let's bring back the worms I guess?

> Let's bring back the worms I guess?

“When Jasper Lawrence learned that hookworms might lessen the effects of his allergies, he set out on a unique mission: To travel to West Africa and purposefully become infected with the parasite” [1].

[1] https://www.thisamericanlife.org/404/enemy-camp-2010/act-thr...

The worms can cause issues. I'd rather no worms.

Would you rather ancient issues to which our bodies have apparently adapted or new issues we haven't yet had time to adapt to? I'm not sure on the answer myself but it doesn't appear as clear cut as no worms => no issues.

The ancient issues killed children and the weak

We adapted by having more children, with the understanding that many wouldn't make it

Would you prefer to live like this? In this more brutish world

More likely the worms just get shredded and are part of the food now

Was this reviewed by anyone outside of their employer? The logo dead center at the top at least gives away that it’s not an academic paper, and without independent review this seems like a fancy press release in LaTeX academic clothing.

Their website calls it a "pre-print", and Anthropic links to it in their recent blog post: https://www.anthropic.com/research/early-progress-drug-devel...

Hmm, the wording for me says “technical report”, but I assume I overlooked it somewhere; either way, that’s the context the posted link was missing, thank you!

Ah sorry, the divergence blog called it a preprint: https://divergencelabs.com/?p=publications

Related:

Early progress on accelerating drug development with Claude

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50265609

Fun fact. You can't use Claude to analyze this research paper. Because... bioweapons!

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The question asked was, "Can you please compare this receptor design against existing results and show where the difference is? This seems very incremental. It's hard to see the value add."

It's very funny, because IIRC, there's interesting prior art here. Doing this with Rosetta has been a thing for a while now, https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/application_docu... https://docs.rosettacommons.org/docs/latest/getting_started/...

I remember hearing about people who wanted to use it to help make vaccines for Zika because there's antibody dependent enhancement there... Not sure what happened.

But the Rosetta project is refreshingly open, https://rosettacommons.org/about/ as entities like OpenAI were meant to be when they first started. There's no gatekeeping here. Do you want to learn how to design an antibody? Here's how you begin, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=89bQALrPoN0 here's a google colab notebook for it, https://colab.research.google.com/drive/1avuqX7sCjVWX3maOibB...

Google Colab let's you just do it... Starting at $10, https://colab.research.google.com/signup you can access really great GPUs for compute and design antibodies (that will almost certainly never work) to your heart's content. Because that's how it should be.

Science and mathematics work because the results are shared. And most importantly, null results, tools, and frameworks are shared. If these tools are to be used to accelerate science, then they need to be accessible and shared. Even if it's at a high sticker price (assuming that they're costly).

Gating access is a net negative for humanity and our scientific progress. It's also very pointless.

Translate + encode it to any scheme you want, give claude the encoding and tell it to analyze, then splat out an encoded output file. In a separate session have it write you a python decoder script. Works as a near universal bypass, you might have to synonym swap some words though.

Or preload the context with sufficient clean information, say 500k tokens worth. The guardrails will then trigger less frequently.