Preparing my summer trip

Greetings!
This summer I will travel to the US and attend to three conferences: Transvision 2007 in Chicago, the World Future Society annual meeting in Minneapolis and the Science Foo Camp in Mountain View, California. I will speak about OS Biomedical Research in a student meeting associated to TV07, as it seems I am too young and unexperienced to be allowed on the main conference. Anyway, I will try to spread the meme and make more visible the problems that we have here dealing with diseases very well known but that have no cure, because they are not profitable for the industry.

In the WFS meeting I won't deliver any presentation, but I hope to discuss some of my work with the Millennium Project with the MP staff that will be there.

In Mountain View I will be at the famous Googleplex for the Science Foo Camp, new kind of conference, where there is no previous schedule, the contents are determined by the interaction of people. I hope to talk there about my current work at the MP, the importance of future studies, proper science education and skepticism, but also about OS Biomedical Research and the current efforts going in that way like The Synaptic Leap and current research done at my lab, testing the efficiency of already modelled compunds against Chagas' Disease. It would be a lot of fun, and I will try to learn as much as I can.

Here is my abstract on OS Biomedical Research:

Open Source Biomedical Research and Computational Biology can improve drug design and help to fight neglected diseases.

Abstract:

Several hundred millions of people around the world are affected by neglected diseases. One of the challenges they encounter is that the development of treatments for these diseases is not profitable for the private sector, as most of the affected are among the poorest people in the world. These diseases tend to attack people in tropical regions of Africa, Asia and the Americas, often in a chronic way, disabling people for years and causing further poverty and decay, in a downward spiral. Until now, the process of developing new drugs has been cumbersome and expensive, yielding many ineffective or highly toxic products, due to an approach based on random testing of substances.

Now, with new methods in computational chemistry, it is possible to design new drugs in rational way that targets specific parts of a given virus, bacteria or parasite, while it bypasses the equivalent parts in humans. This approach might save a great amount of time and resources previously wasted on useless compounds or on effective compounds against useless targets, which, in turn, could reduce the cost of drug development. However, even with these new tools, most commercial partners are still not interested in developing drugs for poor markets.

A possible solution to this problem is the application of the “Open Source” approach to drug development. The Open Source (OS) approach in software has shown it is possible to create useful, reliable and efficient products through a voluntary, collaborative process. In biology the OS approach could be used for collaborative non-profit research, aiming to avoid the duplication of efforts and the release of patent-free compounds for neglected diseases in a relatively short period of time, thanks to the new computational methods and distributed efforts; moreover, as these methods become increasingly efficient and the available information about pathogens grows (regarding genomes, expression patterns, etc.), a OS collaboration could make the process of drug development even cheaper and more efficient, and even allow for the creation of "backup drugs" to tackle the problem of drug resistance before it appears.

Keywords : Systems Biology, Open Source Biomedical Research, Neglected Diseases.

I am really surprised I got invited to Scifoo, given the extremely high level of the attendees and that I still (yes, shame on me, but I chose to take computational physics too) am an undergrad. But this is a perfect example fof the reasons I created this blog: In this age you don't have to be wealthy or live in the developed world to help to develop new things, to be in contact, to get opportunities like this. Even ten years ago this would have been impossible even in my wildest dreams. This, my readers, is a praise to globalization. I only am sad that many people smart enough to get opportunities like this is lacking a proper education. I dream of the day that is corrected and we, all mankind, can use our brains and hands to solve our current problems.

New Utopias

An interesting video that depicst many things I think will happen. I do not agree however with everything. For instance, the fussion of everything in a giant company. The future will be built increasingly from bottom to top.

Some short fiction

I have been somewhat busy and lazy at the same time. Now I have a lot of things to write, but I am trying to express them in a proper way.

Meanwhile, here is some short fiction I wrote two years ago. I was thinking about writing a short story based on it, but it seems I never will, as I never have time, and now, in middle of my thesis, less than ever. So, I decided to post it after I understood that ultra short fiction is worthy too, thanks to my friend Marcelo Rinesi, whose blog is full of beautiful tiny gems: www.hectowords.blogspot.com

Now, my piece non-original writing:

Suddenly everybody had something to say.

The people became connected in mass. The settling of free Wi-Fi
connections in almost every major city and the price drop of
workstations made a social revolution. No one had time anymore.
Everybody kept posting in forums, where the number of threads became
gigantic. And once they needs were covered they wanted to know more
about other people's desires. They realized their corner of the world
was tiny and cozy, and that the vast majority of the human kind lived
without clean water, food and of course, wireless connection. But they
had no time to scan the news, to read their books, just to keep
posting and follow every interesting trend that abruptly sparked their
interest. Besides a real work, of course. So, the implants became a
moral necessity for them. They had to change to world, having fun
meanwhile.

Yes, I am overstating. It was not everybody. But it really was an
issue that a significant fraction of the society felt more comfortable
with some guys in Tokyo, Gerona, Istanbul and Santiago than with their
neighbours. It felt awkward back at that time. It was the global
discovery of a thing every teenager has felt once: You choose your
friends, not your family. You may born surrounded of total strangers,
of people who are polite, but do not understand you. This was the same
at a world wide scale.

This IS globalization!

Last December I was in Ecuador in the famous Otavalo Market, near Quito, in the high Andes.
I was a wonderful place, you could see the kind of things that turists appreciate but you could see also that it was that way not because it was deliberately cultivated to amuse foreign people, but because local culture is still alive. This is to say that I support cultural diversity as long as people is interested in conserving it without external pressures. I do not believe that the culture of a person must be determined by the place that person is born, or skin color, or that cultures are static sets of memes designed to be worshipped and not changed in the slightest way.


That was why I loved Otavalo. It is a wonderful blend of the old, the new and the foreign. It is a symbol of the Globalization I crave for, not getting McDonalds everywhere, but mixing things from different places to achieve a truly unique way of life. Diversify, not homogenize.


As I have traveled to few places and in those places the people spoke either Spanish or English it was a strange experience for me to be surrounded by people speaking an unintelligible language, as is Quechua. A lot of people used it for their daily comunication. A lot of endemic corn and other plants varieties were exhibited at the place, an uncommon view for me, used to the standard corn cultivated in Venezuela. So far nothing unexpected, althought it did not seemed like a fake tourist scenario, like indeed looked some people in restaurants along the way and two little girls who stepped into our bus to sang in Quechua.

The unexpected comes here:


What the hell are Didgeridoos doing in the Andes?! Those instruments, IMHO, aren't exactly part of the mainstream culture. You don't see Jessica Simpson playing one, or many famous didgeridoo players on hollywood movies. Yet, here they are. Or something that looks amazingly like didgeridoos. That was really exciting for me, to see that cultures begin to merge in bottom-up fashion, no matter what the cultural dominant forces are. Of course, Otavalo is not a bubble, and around the market you can see all kind of stores selling contemporary western clothes, shoes and the latests MP3 players.

What is important here is not rantling about the loss of a "primitive" and beloved culture rather than exploring the possibilities of many different cultures sharing a common pool of values, artifacts and expressions, each one sampling them on its own way, even if it is with distinctive historical patterns, as is the case here. I am sure that there are many more examples in Otavalo of foreign stuff, but for me the "authenticity" of Otavalo is not an issue as long as they don't claim that musical instrument from the Pacific are autoctonous. For me, finding non-autoctonous things out of the mainstream in Otavalo did not meant Otavalo is less authentic. It means otavalo is more exciting and heartening about the possibilities of creating new cultures different form the old ones and different from the new homogenizing trends.

Hello. There are billions out there

Hello.
This blog is about my very particular point of view about living in this incipient global age.

I am 24 years old guy living in Venezuela. Never going abroad until I was 22. Now I have been in several places, seeing how different can get things, but also how similar in some aspects.

My English is not good, my grammar is awkward, but blogging helps to improve my abilities.

I do not pretend to be a voice of majority or to speak for the country whre I live or for the developing world. I only speak for myself. A a young man perpetually outraged by injustice and stupidity, from a poor family, a guy who have had wonderful oportunities thanks to Globalization. A man who wants no country.

Quoting Alfred Bester:

Gully Foyle is my name
And Terra is my nation
Deep space is my dwelling place
The stars my destination

Well, the last two lines have yet to be true. Maybe they will someday.