Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

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

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.

I think you may be operating under the assumption that the extremely expensive price tag will need to be repeated for each patient.

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.

> In reality, as this process becomes more mature it is going to become inexpensive.

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.

What should we as humanity, as society, spend most of our wealth and resources doing?

Sending robber barrons and their girlfriends into space?

I'm of accord with the Utopians of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning:

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.

So we should not even try to help the sick because 'death' has too many other ways to kill them?

I mean the opposite. We should continue seeking cures to every fatal condition, from the common to the rare.