[ExI] call to arms against a terrible disease: was RE: Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

[spike]

>... On Behalf Of Adrian Tymes
Subject: Re: [ExI] Jaw-dropping CWRU Alzheimer's breakthrough?

On Fri, Feb 10, 2012 at 8:25 AM, spike <spike66 at att.net> wrote:
>> Anyone found any info on how to synthesize bexarotene?  The dopers
somehow make in their home labs meth-a-whatever-that-stuff-is ...

>...The equipment and skill needed to reliably produce good quality
medicinal drugs, are rarely to be found among those making cheap, black
market recreational drugs.

OK skip that idea.  Looks like there are several pharma-products available
that contain bexarotene, so the homebrew isn't necessary in any case.

However this all gives me one hell of an idea.

Suppose there is some odd chemical somewhere which does dissolve amyloids in
the brain.  Do we wait years or decades for some obscure lab to stumble onto
it?  Perhaps no one ever does.  However, all is not lost.

Imagine some standard memory test for mice, a maze of some sort perhaps,
where ordinary proles with no scientific training could use, by simply
putting the mice in one end and noting the time to find the cheese.  Imagine
cheap detectors at various points in the maze, which for these purposes can
be every bit as simple and cheap as a small magnet you glue onto or leg band
onto your mice, with copper loops in various hallways, then software which
takes the results and reduces the mouse's score to one or two numbers, such
as time and error rate.

Now imagine an enormous and grimly dedicated army of citizen scientist
volunteers, a million proles who raise Alzheimer mice in their homes, and
run the little bastards regularly, perhaps several times daily.

We have an internet central distribution point which collects the data from
everywhere, similar in principle to GIMPS and Folding at Home and such.  We
have some standard food we give the mice, plus some study ingredient.  Could
be bexarotene, or any oddball thing: some medication left over in the
cabinet, doesn't matter what it is, but let's get enough volunteers to try a
bunch of things, doesn't even need to be a medication.

We could design a standardized maze which has living quarters, a maze which
lets the mice through to get a reward, then circles back to the living
quarters, all of it isolated well enough that anyone can set it up in the
garage and need not have the experimenters directly contact the mice in any
way.  I can envision a setup which could contain about ten mice, cost about
a few hundred bucks and perhaps 10 a month in recurring costs.  It could
communicate with the internet, send the data to a volunteer group who grok
how to extract a signal from the noise.  The home volunteer citizen
scientist would be responsible only for supplying food and the one test
ingredient.

Have we anyone here who knows how to organize something like that?  Or knows
someone who knows?  I think I can design a standard mouse maze that can be
produced in quantity.  I think I can do the instrumentation to detect a
mouse magnet running by, and the software to collect the results.

It could be there is some medication sitting quietly in the cabinet, waiting
waiting waiting for someone to discover that it works against Alzheimers, as
millions suffer the agony of losing their life's memories, their savings,
their personhood, their everything.

spike