Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this.
Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science.
/s
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Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science.
/s
That's not to say the research itself is not impressive nor important, but think critically about the fact that this money doesn't exist in a vacuum.
How confident are you the answer isn't very close to zero? We've already curtailed smoking quite a bit in the past 30 years. At the level of an individual, it isn't any particular mystery how to stop obesity or to simply not drink, but population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily behave differently for their own health historically haven't worked well in these specific domains. Throwing more money at the problem doesn't seem like it would obviously change that.
Also keep in mind that overeating and alcohol addiction have significant genetic components. Research into gene editing has the eventual potential to cure damn near any disease, including whatever pet causes you personally think are worth defeating.
Maybe even the dirt cheap one, because even 100 dollars could go longer way somewhere in the Sahel.
It is good that the humanity does not have a one-track mind.
BUT the long term view of creating a technology that can treat any genetic illness (or maybe even any illness?) must outweigh that _eventually_
In reality, as this process becomes more mature it is going to become inexpensive.
The reduction in cost will almost certainly be similar to reduction in cost needed to sequence an individual's genome, which has fallen from tens of millions to hundreds of dollars.
The only catch is that we have to spend money to get there.
Another catch is that the nations who underwrite this research will turn millions in investments into trillions in dividends and the stingy or poor will be left in the cold.
Seeing that private enterprise is only good at taking publicly-funded work and patenting it, and that in the absence of public funding nothing ever gets invented, we should be all-in on this.
edit: it's apropos that you mentioned obesity because GLP-1 drugs are the direct, irrefutable, product of spending at government labs.
edit2: specifically, a single government scientist playing around with lizard saliva in the 1970s because he thought it was interesting.
This is something beyond that, and is very valuable as this baby has no actual means of fighting this issue at all.
And who's to say this won't lead to fixing the other things anyway.
Great use of dollars
He was jailed for illegal medical practices but it seemed like he established a proper lab after serving the sentence and hopefully he is focused on less objectionable practices. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1178695152/china-scientist-he...
There are known DNA changes that would probably help all people with chronic diseases, but it's ethically more accepted to go for the more fatal diseases and cleaner cases first, like a rare mutation with a high fix rate.
Instead if no resources is allocated on developing all the technical requirements to do such a thing, humanity ends up with less tools to heal itself, and that's it.
There's no evidence to support that gene therapy will ever be inexpensive. We can merely say that the process may become less shockingly expensive.
b) the whole point of NIH and other government research funds is to pay for this sort of "not clearly an effective use of dollars" type of research that Pfizer et al won't touch. but you can look at a ton of future applications from this - lipid packaging, CRISPR methods, drug delivery, etc that had to be devised, and could conceivably be commercially viable if the methodology is perfected and the cost comes down.
Sending robber barrons and their girlfriends into space?
Said like that it paints things like there are not far more resources spent on propagating the bad habits (as some ROI is expected from this by some actors), and any attempt to put a social health program in history always ended in major catastrophes.
I could say I believe the government should fund research into fixing people who think cilantro tastes like soap because for most of us it is delicious and promotes healthy diets. Should I be able to compel (tax) you to pay for that research?
Where that line is drawn will always be wrong to someone. How research is prioritized will always be wrong to someone. Is there an ethical way to determine the best use of collective resources and what portion of one’s property must be taken from them to fund that research.
My prediction is based on the number of efforts, too numerous to list here, being undertaken to develop lab equipment to automate the extremely labor-intensive workflow and the accumulation of vast libraries of CRISPR-Cas9 screens and dependency maps, the creation of which are also expensive and labor-intensive.
Getting a new drug or therapy approved for a rare form of a disease and then expanding the indication to the common disease patient population is a well established strategy.
When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved. A fall? They rebuild the site to make it safe. A criminal? They do not rest until he is rendered harmless. An illness? It is researched until cured, regardless of the time, the cost, over generations if need be. A car crash? They create their separate system, slower, less efficient, costing hours, but which has never cost a single life. Even for suicide they track the cause, and so, patiently, blade by blade, disarm Death. Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal. For now.
A similar thing has been said about so many cutting edge therapies and technologies in the past that I think you'll end up being quite surprised.
Eventually someone will invent a machine that spits these therapies out like espresso machines.
Of course they do. But untold amounts spent on very few kids could be spent elsewhere on many more. Federal budgets are a zero-sum game.
> Also, I think when they say they want more babies, they want a specific subset of babies to increase.
I've seen quite a few conservative commentators celebrate that the massively disproportionate levels of African-American abortion have been reduced, resulting in more African-American people being born, and zero bemoaning it. So maybe you're right.
The cilantro taste stuff does not sound absurd to me at all. In biology, there is no hard wall between banal stuff and critical stuff; they interact and fundamentally operate in the same environment under the same genetic and epigenetic rules. Sure, the research necessary for correcting cilantro-as-soap may be marginal, but there is a chance of discovering something significant along the way.
We should be more careful and also honest when communicating about science to taxpayers.