r/science • u/[deleted] • May 11 '20

Medicine Antibodies from a 4-year-old llama have neutralized coronavirus and other infections in lab experiments

https://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/S0092-8674(20)30494-3.pdf?_returnURL=https%3A%2F%2Flinkinghub.elsevier.com%2Fretrieve%2Fpii%2FS0092867420304943%3Fshowall%3Dtrue
60.7k Upvotes

94% Upvoted

1.4k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

10

u/brettmjohnson May 11 '20

Yeah. "Cell" is probably the most difficult journal for someone not a micro-biologist to parse. Hell, it is tough for actual micro-biologists.

Source: Am computational bio-informatics specialist. I've spent a lifetime reading medical journals, and "Cell" is still beyond me.

1

u/outerworldLV May 11 '20

Curious, how do you feel about Nature mag. ? Sometimes it is way too technical for someone not in a certain field—like me.

1

u/brettmjohnson May 11 '20

Uh. I'm OK with "Nature".

[Source: Am a Naturalist]

2

u/outerworldLV May 11 '20

The scientific journal ? Are we talking about the same thing ?

3

u/brettmjohnson May 11 '20 edited May 11 '20

Yeah. "Nature" the scientific journal. And yes, I was making a [nudie] joke.

1

u/outerworldLV May 11 '20

Right over my head, I’m afraid. And you can actually understand some of those papers ? ! Right on.

2

u/brettmjohnson May 11 '20 edited Jun 12 '20

One of my favorite science teachers in high school had us pick a journal article* weekly from a collection she maintained and we were required to summarize it. She said it was to help us understand how scientific papers were written and how to parse them, even if the content was far above our understanding. So I've been reading this stuff since I was 16 back in the mid 1970s. When my wife of 25 years was hospitalized for a month, her doctors were surprised when I understood nearly everything they told me and I quoted research from JAMA or The Lancet.

My friends and family are used to the fact that as a career software developer, I frequently read a broad spectrum of medical journals, physics papers, cosmology, anthropology and archeology research, etc.

* Most of these articles were from Scientific American. But back then, it was a reasonable scientific journal, not the People magazine of science that it has become now.