From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Sat Jan 15 2000 - 20:55:35 MST
The cure for the common cold! Here at last!
http://www.cnn.com/2000/HEALTH/01/14/virus.cure.ap/index.html
> Pleconaril is the latest, and one of the most impressive, examples
> of this new way of creating medicines. It is an exquisitely precise
> sort of monkey wrench. The drug fits neatly into a groove on the
> surface of the virus, gumming up the machinery it needs to infect the
> body's cells.
[...]
> The company wants to get the drug approved
> first for viral meningitis, but it is the
> common cold -- the most prosaic of
> infections -- that is likely to be the
> medicine's biggest market.
[...]
> Some might quibble over that word. "Cure," after all, implies that
> pleconaril will make the sniffles evaporate instantly, which it won't.
> Still, the medicine can shorten a bad cold by three or four days and help
> people feel considerably less miserable along the way.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/beyond.html
Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns Writing in Gender-neutral
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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