Konrad Rudolph

7,043 reputation

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	location	Cambridge, United Kingdom
	age	28
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I’m a bioinformatics PhD student at EMBL-EBI and the University of Cambridge but I’m originally from Berlin.

My thesis project is about the regulation of tRNA expression in mammals.

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	7,043 reputation	bio	website		visits	member for	2 years, 2 months
12863 badges		location	Cambridge, United Kingdom		seen	13 hours ago

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May 16	comment	Are atheists strongly underrepresented in US prison communities? Data dumps are anonymized so you won’t find the author there. +1 for posting the answer. Unfortunately however, it is missing the comments which have some (in my opinion; full disclosure: they were my comments) interesting caveats about this statistic. In a nutshell: the statistic is highly implausible and I would attribute it to artifacts (technical details of the questionnaire) unless it can be corroborated.
May 15	comment	Is race a discredited scientific concept in biology? The question was specifically about biological meaning and none of the meanings in your first paragraph correspond to any of the typical biological meaning.
May 15	comment	Are human beings naturally predisposed to believe in God? Templeton = bad source on this topic. They have a very clear selection bias in the results they use.
May 15	comment	Do the majority of people go 80 mph on the motorway? I’m surprised that this answer is controversial – I thought the impreciseness of speedometers was common knowledge. Either way, the reference should clear this up.
May 15	awarded	Enlightened
May 14	comment	Do prions qualify as living and, if so, do they argue for a second origin of life? By the way, viruses aren’t alive either, by any common definition of the term.
May 14	comment	Do prions qualify as living and, if so, do they argue for a second origin of life? Prions don’t even reproduce properly. They are able, by shoehorning the service of other proteins, to impart certain aspects of their information onto other proteins. The important difference here is that prions in themselves are not a complete reproductive machinery (much like viruses) and don’t replicate all their information (unlike viruses).
May 13	comment	Is drug development far cheaper than Big Pharma wants us to believe? @DVK Absolutely. I’d love for somebody to post such statistics. I’d upvote them to heaven. Alas, I don’t have them. ;-)
May 13	comment	Is drug development far cheaper than Big Pharma wants us to believe? @DVK Don’t get me wrong – developing modern drugs is not cheap. But small enterprises do pop up all the time and try (sometimes successfully, most of the time not) to undercut big pharma using venture capital. In fact, it’s very common that University research labs out-source products to be made ready for the market by start-ups.
May 13	comment	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin @Fumble Yes, it was bound to happen in a way, and personally I’m convinced that it happened (much!) more often than just once. But even if it happened more than once here on Earth it’s reasonable (even safe) to assume that one life form had such huge advantages over the other life forms that it supplanted them. I’m not contesting multiple origins, I’m contesting the possibility of a life form of switching, mid-run, its complete engine for a completely incompatible set, all the while preserving its hereditary information (but translated into the new incompatible “hardware”).
May 13	comment	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin @Brightblades Thanks for the clarification. FWIW I’ve modified my formulation to stress that even though he played with the thought he wasn’t certain.
May 13	revised	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin Highlight the lack of certainty.
May 13	comment	Have any “cures” been invented since the 1950's or so? @Brian Exploding drug design cost is a slightly different question though. Granted, it’s a very interesting topic. But the drugs whose development costs so much money nowadays are exclusively “blockbuster drugs” and they are either completely new cures (no alternative) or are vastly superior to existing treatments (either in tolerance or efficiency) and therefore worth the money. Nothing else would sell sufficiently to break even.
May 13	comment	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin @Fumble Your second question sounds quite different, and very interesting. Unfortunately, I think it’s way beyond the scope if this site. It would be much better suited on, say, Popular natural science but that site proposal is unfortunately still not live. FWIW I don’t think that such evidence would have been available at his time, except perhaps for striking similarities of the organisms on the cellular level.
May 13	comment	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin @Fumble Sorry, you are arguing intellectually dishonestly: you are presenting me with a flawed analogy and ask me not to take it too far. There is no way that the storage medium and mechanism of the genome could be exchanged in a living cell. No amount of mutation could cause such a change, and no theory outside of evolution exists which would explain such a change. Your analogy is presenting a fundamentally different situation in order to make this change possible.
May 13	comment	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin Please explain the downvotes, people! It’s such a simple rule, is it really too much to ask you to adhere to it? Downvoting without pointing out the errors is a really rude disregard of the time that has flown into the research and writing of the answer. Furthermore, I would like to correct errors in the answer, if there are any.
May 13	comment	Is drug development far cheaper than Big Pharma wants us to believe? @DVK No, otherwise this would have been an answer. The fact that there are more research labs in public funding than in private enterprises should be quite easy to verify. The cost should follow. I didn’t really intend my comment to be the ultimate true answer, I just wanted to show potential shortcomings of your argumentation.
May 13	comment	Do bras prevent you from getting saggy boobs? @Kyralessa Well, the studies’ results confirm the claim but their low sample size doesn’t make this conclusion unassailable. The phrase is used quite often to mean something like this (most often with preliminary results).
May 13	comment	How could Darwin be sure all life has a common origin @FumbleFingers This is a misunderstanding. There is today no other even remotely plausible theory to explain the universality of the genetic code, except to suppose that there is indeed just one common ancestor. We know this beyond any reasonable doubt. A word like “proof” has no meaning in the context of science, except to mean “corroborating evidence”, and we’ve got plenty of that. If we ever find an organism that doesn’t share a common ancestor with us (entirely possible, but hasn’t happened yet) it won’t have DNA, nor RNA, nor proteins, that’s a dead certainty.
May 13	comment	Have any “cures” been invented since the 1950's or so? @Brian Spinosyn D cures lice infection. “or at least anything that hadn't already been cured” – again, this is a pretty restrictive, and not very useful, definition. If a new cure works better, or works for different people, it’s a valid investment. Your cynicism is misplaced without evidence.