Research news from Bhupesh Prusty

Haven't checked back up-thread, but I've posted an earlier paper: HHV-6 encoded small non-coding RNAs define an intermediate and early stage in viral reactivation (2018), with some summary quotes that I think may be relevant to that tweet.

 

a follow-up tweet from Dr Prusty

https://twitter.com/user/status/1591354698300526592

 

I'm afraid that categorizing patients into 'mild, moderate and severe" groups is going to lead nowhere. We all suffer from PEM so where is he going with this search for so called biomarkers?
https://twitter.com/user/status/1606634072670982144

 

Yeah I find trying to do that increasingly problematic as it's clear that it varies with time, between people and even often for the same person. LC basically clarified many of those things but there's no learning process that builds on itself so that the whole thing is still stuck at the same stage as half a century ago. Some are learning, everyone else is stuck in place.

This change in time would probably tell us many things, but trying to divide patients between subsets as if those are set in stone is bound to fail. That time is important here completely conflicts with the model of medicine that requires disease to either be permanent or unimportant. That's why they're stuck waiting and doing nothing, they're waiting for the changes to stop so they can pin down the differences, when they aren't even significant. Plan A failure without even the ability to think of a plan B.

The fact that medicine cannot process basic concepts such as relapsing-remitting and fluctuating is just so damn frustrating. None of this would be a problem if the basic stuff could be agreed on. Very little can be accomplished with poorly validated single-serving cohorts where the entire process is basically 99% redundantly doing the same validation process independently but using it only to answer a single question, often one asked way too many times already, and more often than not not even a valid question.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1614277823409135616

 

Prusty thing is strange. Might be more to this situation than we are being made aware of?

 

Yeah, I don't really understand, read the thread and I'm none the wiser!

 

I think he said at one stage he doesn't have good German which I imagine could make things difficult in some ways.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1633114141069123585

 

Is Twitter really the best place to persuade vice chancellors and faculty chiefs to take a chance on a research team? It’s like pitching for shipbuilding contracts on TikTok.

 

I find his use of twitter kind of strange generally but I thought the intended audience was the patients so maybe the interactions had their uses. This? Doesn't inspire confidence.

Who is looking around on twitter for a team to take in, give money to, and stake their reputation on?

 

Fair enough. And presumably he is pursuing other avenues as well. I hope they succeed and something good happens.

 

I agree. His tweets are often quite strange. Also, you can't just up sticks and move a research group, unless you have won a transferrable grant or fellowship, which I don't think he has. He's probably fed up with chasing grant money, as most early-career researchers are.

 

https://twitter.com/user/status/1633465490734477312

 

"ME/CFS research in Würzburg even after acquiring millions of Euros is not going as per my expectations"

Nor ours after falsely raising it by tweeting the positive results from an experiment carried out the same day (and a question about how to get funding) and which turned out to be nothing.