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1165 points jbredeche | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0s | 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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SquirrelOnFire ◴[] No.43998690[source]
30 million people in the US are affected by "rare" genetic conditions.
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1. pfisherman ◴[] No.43999092{3}[source]
Also rare genetic diseases give insight into the underlying mechanisms and pathology of common sporadic diseases, which can be leveraged to develop new and better therapies.

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.