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1163 points jbredeche | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.264s | source
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chewbacha ◴[] No.43998395[source]
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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pacoWebConsult ◴[] No.43998457[source]
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways?

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.

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1. jonplackett ◴[] No.43998647[source]
I admit to having a similar thought to this - especially if it is then going to be commercialised and sold for millions of dollars per treatment.

BUT the long term view of creating a technology that can treat any genetic illness (or maybe even any illness?) must outweigh that _eventually_