Work Or Cell: Fill & Download for Free

This is a fairly recent scientific development that I believe most people haven’t heard about:In November last year, a Chinese researcher He Jiankui of Southern University of Science and Technology of China claimed he helped make the world’s first genetically edited babies using the CRISPR technology, sparking widespread backlash from medical and bioethics experts.(CRISPR/Cas9 — or CRISPR — is a tool that allows researchers to attempt to control which genes get expressed; to delete undesirable traits and, potentially, add desirable traits more quickly and precisely than ever before. )While the work has not been published and verified in a peer-reviewed journal, he claimed at a conference in Hong Kong that he had altered the DNA of twin girls born in December (at the embryo stage during IVF) to make them HIV-resistant. He deleted two genes whose deletions could have a health benefit: CCR5, without which people can’t get HIV and PCSK9, which leads to low levels of bad cholesterol and a much lower risk of heart disease.CRISPR is error prone and can introduce new and potentially harmful mutations. Kiran Musunuru, a gene-editing scientist at the Perelman School of Medicine in Pennsylvania, saw the genetic readouts on the embryos and recognized that the girls may be made up of a mosaic of differently edited cells. Others have commented that the work hasn’t been sufficiently investigated to confirm whether it worked or was safe. Other scientists have remarked that the work was sloppy and not done correctly.This bombshell announcement has sparked intense debate about whether there should be CRISPR babies at all. What if CRISPR could be used to replace broken genes? What if it could be used to create humans with superhuman qualities, ushering a new era of genetic inequality? What if CRISPR introduces new, unknown undesirable health issues?He’s clinical trial was halted but the government seems ambivalent about the way forward. Meanwhile, scientists at Harvard Universities are pressing ahead with sperm DNA-editing with the hope to create IVF babies with reduced risk for Alzheimer’s disease. It looks like scientists have opened a Pandora’s box and unsure what to do with it.

To quote Tim Minchin, by definition, alternative medicine has either not been proved to work, or has been proved not to work. You know what they call alternative medicine that has been proved to work? “Medicine.”Alternative medicine never eradicated polio or tetanus because the people who invented it didn’t have the slightest idea what causes polio or tetanus, much less how they work or how the immune system works.Contrary to the rather bizarre and relentlessly incorrect answer that says polio is caused by DDT, polio has existed for a long time. Polio was recorded in Egypt in the 1400s. Sir Walter Scott was partially crippled by polio in 1773. The first mass polio epidemic in the United States was in 1875; DDT was not recognized as an insecticide until 1939 and didn’t go into use as an insecticide until the 1940s.The simple answer is without germ theory, cell theory, and an understanding of immune response, it’s very hard to eliminate a disease. Sometimes you can get lucky—the observation that milkmaids who contracted cowpox later became resistant to smallpox sparked the first vaccine (the word “vaccine” comes from Latin vaccinus meaning “from the cows”). That observation did not lead to an understanding of immune response.With most problems, it’s very hard to solve a problem when you don’t know what causes it.

Because he makes studios money. That’s it. Every single “why does XYZ actor/singer/producer get work” always comes down to money. Hollywood is not in the movie business. It’s in the money business. Movies are industrial products like cars or cell phones. Certainly, they employ lots of artists to make that product, but the product is for-profit and JJ Abrams (much to my chagrin, mind you) makes studios money. (“But Dan, Star Trek!” He made one money-loser in a franchise where the history is dull returns.)