[HN Gopher] Professor who harnessed power of cactuses is a top i...
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Professor who harnessed power of cactuses is a top inventor
Author : tareqak
Score : 153 points
Date : 2021-05-09 09:53 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (apnews.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (apnews.com)
| helge9210 wrote:
| Cacti is a plural of cactus.
| TchoBeer wrote:
| Sure, in Latin. Cactus is (also) an English word and thus its
| plural is cactuses.
| dokem wrote:
| English intuition tells me I would use 'Cacti' when talking
| about cactus in general terms. 'Cactuses' would be
| appropriate when referring to a specific instance of multiple
| cactuses.
| twhb wrote:
| In English the plural is cacti, with cactuses and cactus also
| accepted. In general, trying to treat English as a rule-based
| language, not an amalgamation of special cases, will result
| in mistakes. Like "gooses", "passerbies", "milleniums",
| "datas", "childs", "criterions", "foots", "mans".
| https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cactus
| TchoBeer wrote:
| If OP said "cacti is also accepted" I would agree. Instead
| OP said "cactuses is wrong" which is what I take issue
| with.
| SamBam wrote:
| Ummm....
|
| OP (or rather GP) said "Cacti is _a_ plural of cactus. "
|
| You replied with "Cactus is (also) an English word and
| thus its plural _is_ cactuses. "
|
| Only one of you made an assertion that implied that there
| was only one correct answer.
| newman8r wrote:
| you could probably also get away with a phrase like "look at
| all this cactus" or "this hill is full of cactus"
|
| I'm not sure if it's correct, but it sounds correct.
| monkmartinez wrote:
| That is how most of my friends use the word "cactus" in
| Arizona.
| renewiltord wrote:
| That is correct, at least descriptively. For instance, I
| will routinely hear this like "There's a lot of sequoia up
| North" or "That forest is now full of eucalyptus".
| [deleted]
| cnasc wrote:
| I typically say "cactopodes"
| trompetenaccoun wrote:
| Always listen to your grandma.
|
| Most people understand their parents' generation fairly well, but
| there is a lot of knowledge in generations further removed from
| our own that generally gets dismissed. That's not to say we
| should easily believe things from the past without evidence, but
| there's merit looking into and formally testing old ideas.
| rand0mx1 wrote:
| Boomers recommend cow urine in my country for any disease. Very
| knowledgeable.
| BugsJustFindMe wrote:
| How very early 18th century.
| tartoran wrote:
| Listening to just anybody and acting on it is probably not
| going to end up well. But a lot of things relegated to the
| past are yet to be re-"discovered" by pharma and made large
| profits out of them because using them as natural remedies is
| not very profitable.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| Running large scale medical experiments on humans is
| costly. Vote for your tax dollars to do the research. But
| that doesn't mean grandma has sufficient credibility about
| medicinal claims to warrant "always listen to your
| grandma".
| vmception wrote:
| Gen-Z as Grandma's: say words of affirmation to the water to
| make it happy before you drink it. _breathwork moaning ensues_
| adkadskhj wrote:
| My grandmother tells me that fans left on will kill me while i
| sleep.
| jacobolus wrote:
| Is she Korean? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
| vkou wrote:
| My grandma tells me that a draft in my apartment will make me
| catch a cold.
|
| If only there was a method for differentiating old nonsense
| from advice that actually works... A scientific one, even?
| 55555 wrote:
| A steady stream of cold air coming into your apartment might
| introduce an airborne virus from outside while the cold
| weather may hinder your immune system from doing its job as
| effectively? haha that sounds impossible! stupid grandma!
| agumonkey wrote:
| Maybe use the toddler infinite "why" trick.
| foobarian wrote:
| That one is super popular in my family. I wonder if it's
| related to allergies; I sometimes get stuffed up with a fan
| blowing on me overnight.
| turtlebits wrote:
| If I sleep with a slight breeze on my face, I will sometimes
| wake up with a mild sore throat. There can be half truths in
| these types of beliefs.
| gowld wrote:
| That's probably related to low humidity.
| emiliobumachar wrote:
| See this Stack Exchange question. The answers do link some
| papers.
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/88/does-
| being-c...
| v8dev123 wrote:
| My eyes getting so bad. I read the title as top investor instead
| top inventor.
| smusamashah wrote:
| It means there has to be so many other undiscovered use of things
| that only the old and experienced know about.
|
| How about herbal medicine? Other household remedies? How about
| these things from a very different living environment and
| culture?
|
| I believe we shouldn't just dismiss the old remedies and other
| tricks.
| guram11 wrote:
| like snake oil ?
| Ovah wrote:
| "A full 40 percent of the drugs behind the pharmacist's
| counter in the Western world are derived from plants that
| people have used for centuries, including the top 20 best
| selling prescription drugs in the United States today. For
| example, quinine extracted from the bark of the South
| American cinchona tree (Cinchona calisaya) relieves malaria,
| and licorice root (Glycyrrhiza glabra) has been an ingredient
| in cough drops for more than 3,500 years." https://www.fs.fed
| .us/wildflowers/ethnobotany/medicinal/inde...
| rmah wrote:
| A full 100% of the drugs sold today are manufactured using
| only ingredients found in nature! <sarcasm>
| Ovah wrote:
| (I'm aware of the sarcasm tag). Technically that 100%
| should be 99.999%. Not all drugs are found in nature.
| Technetium, a man-made compound, is used in some
| radiology. https://go.drugbank.com/categories/DBCAT001978
| LeifCarrotson wrote:
| No, technetium is still a natural product, it just takes
| a little processing. An organic miner dug up some raw
| uranium ore, then someone refined it, irradiated it, and
| isolated the resulting molybdenum-99, and finally a
| radiologist extracts the all-natural technetium from the
| decay process of that molybdenum.
| qwertywert_ wrote:
| Natural = found in nature.
| simplify wrote:
| You can argue that, and I might agree with it, but it's
| not regulated as such.
| Consultant32452 wrote:
| Medical errors are the third leading cause of death. We
| like to imagine we've come a long way from treating ghosts
| in your blood with cocaine, but we haven't.
|
| https://www.bmj.com/content/353/bmj.i2139
| gowld wrote:
| That's a very misleading summary. "Leading causes of
| death could be prevented by more perfect medical
| response" is a better summary.
| teh_infallible wrote:
| "Leading causes of death" being medical incompetence,
| which is the third largest cause of death in the US
| [deleted]
| burkaman wrote:
| "we shouldn't dismiss" means we should try them and see if
| they work, not just automatically assume they work or
| automatically dismiss them as snake oil.
| spoonjim wrote:
| Tu Youyou won the Nobel Prize for rediscovering artemisinin, a
| anti-malaria treatment, from a 1,600-year-old text and
| scientifically formalizing it.
|
| The medical handbook that first describes the formula
| (including the fact that you need to use low-temperature water)
| was written in the year 340. That's not a typo.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ge_Hong
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tu_Youyou
| s_dev wrote:
| >I believe we shouldn't just dismiss the old remedies and other
| tricks.
|
| We test many of those remedies and tricks with a formal method.
| The ones that work further science and our collective
| understanding. The ones that don't are relegated as old wives
| tales.
|
| Even the article narrows in on this correctly.
|
| >Alcantar told her postdoc about this, and because they didn't
| have a lab, directed him to try "a quick and dirty experiment."
|
| >"Two days later he came back and said 'Yeah, it worked,'" she
| said.
| swensel wrote:
| I would have more confidence in Big Pharma if it wasn't an
| industry driven by profits, but for public good.
|
| Look at ketamine vs esketamine, for example: "Why isn't
| ketamine an approved depression treatment, then? It comes
| down to profits. Ketamine's patent expired in 2002, meaning
| that further studies into the drug would not bring any
| financial returns to the companies funding them." [1]
|
| I think it would make sense that there are also natural
| remedies that may be available, and cheap for consumers, but
| simply aren't considered because they would not be
| profitable. It's not worth it for them to look into these
| natural remedies if they can't put a patent on them and make
| money. Big Pharma, being primarily for profit, would even
| have an incentive to discredit these natural remedies, as it
| could harm their business.
|
| [1] https://qz.com/1889308/why-isnt-ketamine-approved-as-an-
| anti...
| tartoran wrote:
| Yes I agree, the ones that work are packaged, labeled and
| sold at a high profit as Pharmaceuticals.
| dylan604 wrote:
| Typically, the ones that work are quickly synthesized and a
| method that can be patented is developed. Then the plant is
| scheduled and kept illegal so that you have to pay the
| pharma for something that grows naturally.
| SomaticPirate wrote:
| I'm always surprised by the vitriol directed at Biotech
| on HN. Isolating and enhancing the effect of a natural
| substance along with ensuring dosage typically requires
| quite a large amount of engineering effort. Why shouldn't
| that be patented? I think we can all agree that
| swallowing a tablet of aspirin is better than extracting
| your own from a willow tree.
| dylan604 wrote:
| There's lots of things to not like about big pharma. How
| much money has big pharama spent on lobbying congress to
| keep certain plants scheduled so they can maintain their
| stockholders? The stories on big pharma and their role in
| the opioid crisis, stories on big pharma pricing
| structures that are not the same depending on who/where
| you are even though there's no difference in the pill.
| The agressive nature of pill pushing (even non-opiods) on
| doctors. The aggressive nature of advertising to
| desperate patients to pressure their doctors to prescribe
| medication that won't actually help but may worsen
| situations.
| grok22 wrote:
| I think the vitriol is because they profit scandalously
| from their efforts.
| phyzome wrote:
| The ones that don't work may have just been experiments that
| were set up wrong, such as using the wrong plant, harvesting
| the wrong _part_ of the plant, or otherwise ignoring parts of
| the herbalist lore that the experimenter thought weren 't
| important. These are all things that happen.
|
| And some herbalism is just bunk, sure. But a failure to
| reject the null hypothesis isn't "final". It just means that
| experiment didn't work.
|
| Not everything is easy to test. Not all herbalism, home
| remedies, etc. are described well; not all practitioners
| actually understand how it works even if it does work. (And
| sometimes experimenters test the purported mechanism, rather
| than the claimed _effect_ , which is just silly.) All of
| these things can interfere with the transition from folklore
| to formal methods.
| pvaldes wrote:
| Saponins are a well known type of substances. It was created as
| predators deterrent but we can use if as predator's detergent.
| There is even a tree that bears soap berries, so you don't need
| to kill any poor cactus or use animal fat for that. First
| course of plant physiology.
|
| https://www.sciencedirect.com/topics/pharmacology-toxicology...
| RandallBrown wrote:
| Q: Do you know what they call alternative medicine that works?
|
| A: Medecine.
|
| I think many old remedies have been tested and then get refined
| to work better. Willow bark was used for thousands of years as
| pain relief but now those chemicals found in the bark have been
| refined into aspirin.
| monkeybutton wrote:
| The example from folk medicine I like is Ergot. It comes from
| a fungus, was used by midwives for hundreds of years, and
| scientists investigating its derivatives in the late 30s /
| early 40s is what lead to LSD's discovery.
| M_bara wrote:
| I have an uncle in his 70s. The other day he gave me some
| shrubbery to chew on coz of a toothache. I was like yeah-yeah
| let me humour him. Shock on me! The thing worked! Numbs the
| pain. In fact, any part of the tongue had a numbed feeling
| similar to the feeling you get when the dentist injects you.. I
| believe there's probably a lot one can learn from the connected
| with nature older folks
| dr_orpheus wrote:
| And we likely have learned from this! The plant likely had
| something like Menthol (from various mint) or Eugenol (clove,
| nutmeg, basil, etc) [0]. Both of these are examples of items
| where we found and isolated the compounds responsible for the
| desirable effects. Both of these are used as mild local
| anesthetics.
|
| Or he gave you some coca leaves to chew on since cocaine was
| one of the first really strong local anesthetics. A lot
| modern anesthetics are synthesized but based on the structure
| of cocaine, but without that pesky drug addiction and nasty
| side effects. This includes lidocaine, which what they do
| typically use at the dentist.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_anesthetic#Naturally_
| der...
| 0xbadcafebee wrote:
| > Sometimes, if the water was dirty, she'd boil it with part of a
| cactus plant. Alcantar questioned how adding something gooey
| would help.
|
| Isn't this just clarifying? Like adding egg whites to clarify red
| wine or aspic. The same process (usually egg whites, but also
| some other gooey substances) is used to extract impurities from a
| lot of things.
| AlotOfReading wrote:
| The technical term is flocculation, but yes it's ultimately the
| same process. Cacti just happen to be a very cheap,
| commercially available source of large amounts of mucilage.
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