Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Medical Roundup #1, published by Zvi on January 17, 2024 on LessWrong.

Saving up medical and health related stories from several months allowed for much better organizing of them, so I am happy I split these off. I will still post anything more urgent on a faster basis. There's lots of things here that are fascinating and potentially very important, but I've had to prioritize and focus elsewhere, so I hope others pick up various torches.

Vaccination Ho!

We have a new malaria vaccine. That's great. WHO thinks this is not an especially urgent opportunity, or any kind of 'emergency' and so wants to wait for months before actually putting shots into arms. So what if we also see reports like 'cuts infant deaths by 13%'? WHO doing WHO things, WHO Delenda Est and all that. What can we do about this?

Also, EA and everyone else who works in global health needs to do a complete post-mortem of how this was allowed to take so long, and why they couldn't or didn't do more to speed things along. There are in particular claims that the 2015-2019 delay was due to lack of funding, despite a malaria vaccine being an Open Phil priority. Saloni Dattani, Rachel Glennerster and Siddhartha Haria write about the long road for Works in Progress. They recommend future use of advance market commitments, which seems like a no brainer first step.

We also have an FDA approved vaccine for chikungunya.

Oh, and also we invented a vaccine for cancer, a huge boost to melanoma treatment.

Katalin Kariko and Drew Weissman win the Nobel Prize for mRNA vaccine technology. Rarely are such decisions this easy. Worth remembering that, in addition to denying me admission despite my status as a legacy, the University of Pennsylvania also refused to allow Kariko a tenure track position, calling her 'not of faculty quality,' and laughed at her leaving for BioNTech, especially when they refer to this as 'Penn's historic research team.'

Did you also know that Katalin's advisor threatened to have her deported if she switched labs, and attempted to follow through on that threat?

I also need to note the deep disappointment in Elon Musk, who even a few months ago was continuing to throw shade on the Covid vaccines.

And what do we do more generally about the fact that there are quite a lot of takes that one has reason to be nervous to say out loud, seem likely to be true, and also are endorsed by the majority of the population?

When we discovered all the vaccines. Progress continues. We need to go faster.

Reflections on what happened with medical start-up Alvea. They proved you could move much faster on vaccine development than anyone would admit, but then found that there was insufficient commercial or philanthropic demand for doing so to make it worth everyone's time, so they wound down. As an individual and as a civilization, you get what you pay for.

Potential Progress

Researchers discover what they call an on/off switch for breast cancer. Not clear yet how to use this to help patients.

London hospital uses competent execution on basic 1950s operations management, increases surgical efficiency by a factor of about five. Teams similar to a Formula 1 pit crew cut sterilization times from 40 minutes to 2. One room does anesthesia on the next patient while the other operates on the current one. There seems to be no reason this could not be implemented everywhere, other than lack of will?

Dementia rates down 13% over the past 25 years, for unclear reasons.

Sarah Constantin explores possibilities for cognitive enhancement. We have not yet tried many of the things one would try.

We found a way to suppress specific immune reactions, rather than having to suppress immune reactions in general, opening up the way to potentially fully curing a whole host of autoimmune disorders. Yes, in mice, of course it's in mice, so don't ge...