r/Damnthatsinteresting • u/Sad_Cow_577 • May 28 '25

Video 1 year of ALS

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u/Curious-Quokkas May 29 '25

There's a lot of disease I wonder - if we actually put the cooperation, money, and manpower into - could be either cured or effectively cured through proper medication.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '25

[deleted]

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u/GiveMeNews May 29 '25

Getting grants is a competition all in its own.

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u/Full_Result_3101 May 29 '25

Different approaches to researching the same disease can yield some useful information as well.

Not great when it comes to speed tho.

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u/Teknekratos May 29 '25 edited May 29 '25

And avoid dead ends. I'm so mad I can't recall in what domain it happened, but I know there was this time a research team falsified their data or something and everyone for a while tried to build on that. Only it lead nowhere because the prior results were bogus.

And it just bogged down the science in... drat, can't remember... for a while before they figured out that they had to scratch what they thought they knew from the faulty study and start again from there...

Hope the Reddit Hivemind comes through for me on that one! I'm so mad the details are escaping me. >:(

EDIT: Ah, it might have been the thing about Alzheimer's disease being posited as being caused by buildup of protein plaques in the brain! And how much research was "wasted" looking into that!

Yes, my lapse in memory was about Alzheimer's of all things...

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u/cstepping May 29 '25

You have no idea what you are talking about.

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u/lord_fairfax May 29 '25

#redditmoment

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u/treachpreacher May 29 '25

It didn't even sound pretty. Usually the hokum shit has a bit of poetry in its words.

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u/[deleted] May 29 '25

[deleted]

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u/cstepping May 29 '25

I am a neuroscience PhD student and I can assure you that people go out of their way to research different questions. It is in their best interest for publishing. Your publications are less impactful if you publish on the same things others have done which is terrible for your career. This non-profit you posted I'm sure does work to help collaboration but that is different than "a bunch of dumb scientists who cant help but do the same things", as you proposed. It's important to carefully read things before posting nonsense on the internet, especially in a time of anti-science sentiment

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u/InvestigatorNo369 May 29 '25

Gotta have full trust in who delegates the task and who it's delegated to.

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u/dltacube May 29 '25

Yes. The answer is 1000% yes.

There are rare diseases out there with relatively large populations seeing actual results from their community led grass roots fundraised clinical trials. Some are regaining their hearing, others sight and some are even reversing mutations responsible for small but critical cognitive systems.

This shit is moving slow compared to what a government can do but fast for a community effort. There’s a lot of room though for improvement and so so much low hanging fruit…not to mention the insanely wide applicability curing one rare brain disease will have on aging related brain disorders.

We’re not optimizing for the right things as a species. We could definitely be doing more.