Questions

A running list of questions that occur to me. I often ask questions on Quora as well.

Would use of additional dyes in routine histology improve its diagnostic capacity?
Can acne be treated with bacteriophage?
Can we infer pairs of bacteria and phage that kill each other from their covariation in metagenomic sequencing experiments?
Why do people have allergies to the same things?
Why is myopia on the rise, and what can we do about it?
Why are autoimmune diseases becoming more prevalent?
Why is obesity becoming more prevalent?
Do we really understand the cause of atherosclerosis, the leading killer of humans globally?
Are parasite-derived immunosuppressants useful as therapeutics?
Can T cell and B cell receptor repertoire sequencing serve as a “universal diagnostic” and enable the discovery of new drug targets?
How effective will NK cell therapies be in treating solid tumors?
Have we dismissed anything as quackery that will turn out to be a useful therapy?
Is rational drug design overrated?
How can we use experimental evolution to develop better drugs?
Should we care about unintended laboratory evolution in model organisms?
How does sugar cause pain sensation in teeth?
Which treatments work for chronic back pain?
How can we make pre-clinical assays of drug candidates more predictive?
How can we deal with evolved resistance to therapies?
How much can polygenic traits be modulated by single mutations or treatment with a single drug?
Which foods are the most thermogenic?
Which drugs enhance cognition?
What goes wrong when we try to freeze organs?

Why aren’t longevity mutations discovered in mutagenesis screens extant in wild-type populations?
Do diseases of aging share common causes?
- Should we continue to address them on a disease-by-disease basis?
Why can’t age-associated aggregates like drusen, lipofuscin, amyloid, Lewy bodies, and glycation be degraded?
Why don’t artificial hearts last forever?
Which interventions currently reduce all-cause mortality?
Does evolutionary theory contradict some of the most popular theories of the cause of aging? (Read Michael Rose for an aging Theory of Everything.)

Why are mammalian sex ratios roughly equal?
How do cells adjust to cold shocks?
How does karyotypic speciation happen in sexual organisms, given that their karyotype must be compatible with a mate’s?
Is x-chromosome inactivation reversible?
What determines the reversibility of mitotic exit?
How much information is in a cell?
Does Muller’s ratchet make sense?
How does biomineral morphogenesis (growth of bones, diatoms, etc.) work?

Is the pace of drug discovery stagnating (a.k.a. Eroom’s law)?
Is the pace of medical innovation stagnating?
How should we interpret the RAND Health Insurance Experiment?
Why isn’t it profitable to develop new antibiotics?
Are American insulin prices a scam?
How can we improve electronic medical records to improve patient care and accelerate drug discovery?
Should we donate our electronic medical records to the public upon dying?
How does cash payment for treatments influence affordability and innovation in medicine?
Are patent protections for biologic drugs useful to society?
What kinds of medical innovations can be successful when intellectual property and regulatory protections are weak?
Why are successful biotech venture capital firms adapting a “venture creation” model, where ventures are started in-house?
Are discovery-phase research programs at large pharmaceutical companies productive?
What are the biggest secular trends in healthcare / biotech / pharma?
Would it be useful to be able to bet directly on the outcome of clinical trials without trading a company’s shares?
What are the pros and cons of medical tourism?
Are insurance co-pays useful?
Are data-centric biotech companies ever going to make any money?
Are there any good opportunities for veterinary-human crossover drug discovery?

What is the minimum number of dimensions necessary to implement a universal classical computer?
Are computational kinetics provable? (i.e. can we determine analytically which processes cannot be computed faster on an alternative architectures without having to simulate them?)
Will homeomorphic encryption become practical anytime soon?
How probabilistic is software debugging? How much of it can be automated?
What are the potential uses of evolutionary algorithms?
Can more computation be memoized than we think?

Do microwaves have any non-thermal effects on reaction kinetics?
How useful is light in imparting enantioselectivity?
How well can organisms discriminate isotopes?
Would ice polymorphs with densities close to water allow us to freeze tissues without cryoprotectants?

Can some formal expression describe the minimal energetic costs of molecular quality control?
How does Shannon entropy relate to Boltzmann entropy? (I read answers to this one once in a while, but I don’t really get it yet. It seems like the most important and fundamental bit of science that I never encountered in school.)
Can we measure the information content of matter through calorimetry?
- Thought experiment: I have one hard drive filled with random data and another that has 1s and 0s in strict alternation. I put them both in a perfect bomb calorimeter. Do they evolve different amounts of heat?

What curve describes the discount rate?
Why do many countries tax short term capital gains at a higher rate?
What seemingly worthless data today will become valuable in the future?
- What are we not recording that we should?
Would semi-sovereign industries solve any social or technological problems?
Why would someone buy a negative yield bond?
- What are the macro / cultural implications of negative yields?

Are nicotine beverages effective stimulants?
Is it possible to enhance the light harvesting capacity of plants by engineering synthetic FRET pairs that donate to the natural chromophores?
Can we make bacterial nitrogen fixation cheaper than the Haber process for fertilizer production?

How can we develop personal cooling devices and cooling clothing?
Is residential evaporative cooling cost effective?
Why don’t we evaporate the condensation from an air conditioner off of the condenser unit?

Are we using enough data in recreational sports?
Does weightlifting confound mainstream health recommendations?
How many kinds of athletic stimulus promote health?
How much does optimal work volume for strength training vary between individuals?
Does holding your breath while exercising (or while sedentary) enhance cardiovascular fitness?
What kind of training reduces back pain?
Which sports stimulate the most diverse movement patterns?
What are the best predictors of which sports you will be the best at?

How should we decide whether to perform a destructive assay on a historical artifact?