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1168 points jbredeche | 2 comments | | HN request time: 0.422s | 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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dekhn ◴[] No.43999016[source]
Yes, but the cures here aren't general. They're highly specific, and the rare conditions have a long tail- large numbers of different conditions, each with a very small population of affected individuals, and likely, the treatments will be somewhat customized for each type of disease.
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1. pfisherman ◴[] No.43999116[source]
See my comment above. Getting approval for rare diseases and expanding the indication to the common form of the disease is a well established strategy in pharma.
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2. dekhn ◴[] No.43999166[source]
yes, but that's totally different from coming up with a generalized treatment for a wide range of "rare" diseases.