LATimes | On paper, the deputies are scattered around the Los Angeles County
Sheriff’s Department in various assignments. One is supposed to be
working patrol in Lancaster, another in West Hollywood. A third is
assigned to a gang crime unit.
In reality, though, the group of
nine men and women make up a little-known team of investigators formed
by Sheriff Alex Villanueva and other top sheriff’s officials.
Much
of what they do, by design, is a mystery to the public and even to most
within the department. But as some of the investigations handled by the
team have come to light, a common thread has emerged: Their targets are
outspoken critics of Villanueva or the department.
The unit, named the Civil Rights and Public Integrity Detail, has pursued a long-running investigation
into one of Villanueva’s most vocal critics, L.A. County Inspector
General Max Huntsman, and others despite sheriff’s officials being told
by the FBI and state law enforcement officials that it appeared no
crimes had been committed, a senior sheriff’s official said.
The team also has an open criminal inquiry into a nonprofit that is
run by a member of a county board that oversees the sheriff and is
associated with county Supervisor Sheila Kuehl, both of whom have
clashed fiercely with Villanueva and called for his resignation.
Concern
over the team has caused consternation both inside and outside the
department. Even the union representing rank-and-file deputies put out a
warning that a member of the detail was using “unconventional tactics”
to question deputies.
George Gascón, the county’s district attorney, decided he wanted
nothing to do with the unit after sheriff’s officials proposed the two
agencies create a task force tocollaborate on public corruption investigations.
“He’s only targeting political enemies,” Gascón told The Times about
Villanueva. “It was obvious that was not the kind of work I wanted to
engage in, so we declined.”
Shortly after Gascón refused to
partner with the Sheriff’s Department, Villanueva came out as a strong
supporter of a recall campaign to kick the district attorney out of
office.
The unit has spurred a bitter confrontation between
Villanueva and the Civilian Oversight Commission, which oversees the
sheriff and his agency. Commission members say they fear the sheriff is
using it to intimidate people who challenge him and to score points in
personal vendettas, not conduct legitimate inquiries into possible
crimes.
americanconsequences | In fact, in his September 9 speech
outlining the new plan to get the virus under control, President Biden
made clear his intent to steamroll any states’ rights opposition…
If they will not help, if those governors
won’t help us beat the pandemic, I’ll use my power as president to get
them out of the way. The Department of Education has already begun to
take legal action against states undermining protection that local
school officials have ordered. Any teacher or school official whose pay
is withheld for doing the right thing will have that pay restored by the
federal government, 100 percent. I promise you, I will have your back.
Get them out of the way, Biden said, in a line that seemed
to tell the American people more than he intended about the lack of
limits on his power. During the early months of the pandemic in 2020,
the same voices who are backing Biden’s authoritarian maneuvers now were
claiming that – with stronger legal backing – state governors have
extensive plenary powers to deal with health emergencies, including some
mandatory quarantine practices.
Now that some states – most notably Florida, though Texas has begun
to mirror the pro-freedom approach of Governor Ron DeSantis – refuse to
do the Biden administration’s bidding on COVID policy, the federal
bureaucracy steps in as an unconstitutional super-legislature. On the
school masks mandate issue, in particular, the Democrat-Fauciite
position has become: We will find a way to have it our way.
Biden’s September 9 declaration of COVID total war had no shortage of
ire directed toward those who have thus far made the choice not to get
the vaccine, one they had been previously told they were legally and
ethically entitled to make. That has suddenly changed. Biden made it
clear that the unvaxxed are public health enemy No. 1…
We still have nearly 80 million Americans
who have failed to get the shot. And to make matters worse, there are
elected officials actively working to undermine the fight against
COVID-19. Instead of encouraging people to get vaccinated and mask up,
they are ordering mobile morgues for the unvaccinated dying from COVID
in our communities. This is totally unacceptable.
As many commentators have pointed out, Biden seemed to be much more
agitated with Americans who have chosen not to get a COVID vaccine than
he ever was toward the Taliban during his chaotic, incompetent
withdrawal plan. This parading of partisan animus is unsettling, to say
the least, as it is meant to convey a message to American people (or at
least the Biden voters among them) that anyone who is unvaccinated is a
reckless, selfish menace to public health.
But there’s cognitive dissonance at the heart of this thinking from
Biden and his supporters. First of all, when one breaks down the
demographic data, the highest proportion
of eligible but unvaccinated individuals in America is young Black and
Latino males, who have received at least one shot at 43% and 48%,
respectively. While there’s certainly a group within those categories of
Republicans and Trump voters, the data tells us that most young
minority males are not MAGA-hat-wearing, anti-vax Right-wingers… But the
Democrat narrative ignores this reality.
greenwald |A severe escalation of the war on a free internet
and free discourse has taken place over the last twelve months. Numerous
examples of brute and dangerous censorship have emerged: the destruction by Big Tech monopolies of Parler at the behest of Democratic politicians at the time that it was the most-downloaded app in the country; the banning of the sitting president from social media; and the increasingly explicit threats from elected officials
in the majority party of legal and regulatory reprisals in the event
that tech platforms do not censor more in accordance with their demands.
But the most severe episode of all was the joint campaign
— in the weeks before the 2020 election — by the CIA, Big Tech, the
liberal wing of the corporate media and the Democratic Party to censor and suppress a series of major reports about then-presidential frontrunner Joe Biden. On October 14 and then October 15, 2020, The New York Post,
the nation's oldest newspaper, published two news reports on Joe
Biden's activities in Ukraine and China that raised serious questions
about his integrity and ethics: specifically whether he and his family
were trading on his name and influence to generate profit for
themselves. The Post said that the documents were obtained from a laptop left by Joe Biden's son Hunter at a repair shop.
From the start, the evidence of authenticity was overwhelming. The Post published obviously genuine photos of Hunter that were taken from the laptop. Investigations from media outlets found people who had received the emails in real-time and they compared the emails in their possession to the ones in the Post's
archive, and they matched word-for-word. One of Hunter's own business
associates involved in many of these deals, Tony Bobulinski, confirmed publicly and in interviews
that the key emails were genuine and that they referenced Joe Biden's
profit participation in one deal being pursued in China. A forensics
analyst issued a report
concluding the archive had all the earmarks of authenticity. Not even
the Bidens denied that the emails were real: something they of course
would have done if they had been forged or altered. In sum, as someone
who has reported on numerous large archives similar to this one and was
faced with the heavy burden of ensuring the documents were genuine
before risking one's career and reputation by reporting them, it was
clear early on that all the key metrics demonstrated that these
documents were real.
Despite all that, former intelligence
officials such as Obama's CIA Director John Brennan and his Director of
National Intelligence James Clapper led a group of dozens of former
spooks in issuing a public statement that disseminated an outright lie: namely, that the laptop was "Russian disinformation.”
Note that this phrase contains two separate assertions: 1) the
documents came from Russia and 2) they are fake ("disinformation"). The
intelligence officials admitted in this letter that — in their words — “we do not know if the emails are genuine or not,” and also admitted that “we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.” Yet it repeatedly insinuated that everyone should nonetheless believe this:
But
the complete lack of evidence for these claims — that even these career
CIA liars acknowledged plagued their assertions — did not stop the
corporate media or Big Tech from repeating this lie over and over, and,
far worse, using this lie to censor this reporting from the internet. One of the first to spread this lie was the co-queen of Russiagate frauds, Natasha Bertrand, then of Politico and now promoted, because of lies like this, to CNN. “Hunter Biden story is Russian disinfo, dozens of former intel officials say,” blared her headline in Politico on October 19, just five days after the Post began its reporting. From there, virtually every media outlet — CNN, NBC News, PBS, Huffington Post, The Intercept, and too many others to count
— began completely ignoring the substance of the reporting and instead
spread the lie over and over that these documents were the by-product of
Russian disinformation.
projectveritas | Project Veritas released the second video of its COVID vaccine
investigative series today exposing U.S. Food and Drug Administration
[FDA] economist, Taylor Lee, who was recorded calling for forced COVID
vaccinations and a registry for all unvaccinated Americans.
Lee said that U.S. Government policy could emulate Nazi Germany when it comes to the COVID vaccine.
“Census
goes door-to-door if you don’t respond. So, we have the infrastructure
to do it [forced COVID vaccinations]. I mean, it’ll cost a ton of money.
But I think, at that point, I think there needs to be a registry of
people who aren’t vaccinated. Although that’s sounding very [much like
Nazi] Germany,” Lee said.
“Nazi Germany…I mean, think about it like the Jewish Star [for unvaccinated Americans],” he said.
“So,
if you put every anti-vaxxer, like sheep, into like Texas and you
closed off Texas from the rest of the world, and you go, ‘Okay, you be
you in Texas until we deal with this [pandemic].’”
Lee said that
due to a large portion of the African American community being hesitant
to take the COVID vaccine, the solution would be to “blow dart” on them:
Taylor Lee, FDA Economist: “I
think that a lot of the time -- so there's also this issue of -- I
remember reading about how with COVID [vaccine] trials, they were having
an issue recruiting African American people. It was because of a
different medication the government tried to do that was specifically
designed to kill African Americans.”
Veritas Journalist: “Oh, so like a mistrust thing.”
Lee: “Yeah.”
Veritas Journalist: “But this thing [COVID vaccine] is safe, though.”
Lee: “We know that now, but like again, I think there is still this big mistrust and like it's deep-rooted.”
Veritas Journalist: “Yeah. Can’t blame them [African Americans].”
Lee: “I can’t. But at the same time, like, blow dart. That’s where we’re going.”
Lee
affirmed that “wealthy white people” are more likely to get the COVID
vaccine because they are “educated,” and added that he would be willing
to force COVID vaccines upon Americans himself if needed.
“I’m gonna go door-to-door and stab everyone [with the COVID vaccine], ‘Oh, it’s just your booster shot! There you go!’”
Lee also said that FDA officials can often be political appointees rather than actual scientific experts.
“There
are political appointees [at the FDA] that are generally scientific
advisors or are appointed by the president or the commission…They're
being paid based on if the other people are staying in power,” he said.
yahoo |President Biden’s net approval rating among unvaccinated black
voters has dropped a stunning 17 points since he announced plans to
implement a federal vaccine mandate for companies with more than 100 people, according to a new Morning Consult poll.
Biden’s
favor among black voters dropped substantially between an initial poll
conducted between September 6 and 8 — just before Biden’s mandate
announcement on September 9 — and a second poll taken between September
18 to 20 of more than 1,000 black voters.
The second
poll revealed that 71 percent of black voters approve of Biden’s
performance, down 5 points since the mandate. The share who disapprove
rose 7 points to 24 percent. Thirty-seven percent said they strongly
approve of his performance, while 14 percent said they strongly
disapprove.
The
president’s net approval rating — a measure of the share who approve
his job performance minus the share who disapprove — has dropped 12
percent among black voters.
Biden announced earlier this month
that his administration would develop rules to compel large companies to
mandate coronavirus vaccines for employees and to require weekly
negative test results for any unvaccinated workers. He said the rules
would be developed by the Department of Labor’s Occupational Safety and
Health Administration, and apply to companies with 100 or more workers.
The plan was part of a larger initiative
by the Biden administration that includes requiring vaccinations for
all federal employees and workers for federal contractors, as well as
for health care workers in most institutions that receive Medicare or
Medicaid. The administration also called on all states to mandate
vaccinations for teachers and other school employees.
Thirty-eight
percent of black voters who say they have not received a COVID-19
vaccine disapprove of the president’s job performance — an 11 point
increase since he announced the mandate.
Black Americans are the
least likely of all racial and ethnic demographics to have received a
COVID-19 vaccine. According to Morning Consult, 53 percent of black
adults have received the shots — a lower share than that of any other
race or ethnicity.
dailymail | Police have fired rubber bullets, stinger grenades and pepper balls at anti-vaxx protesters stationed at Melbourne's war memorial on a third day of violent demonstrations.
Around 400 people, who have been rallying to demand an end to mandatory vaccinations for construction workers, swarmed Victoria's Shrine of Remembrance which was built to honour the state's men and women who served in the First World War.
Throughout Wednesday the mob chanted 'lest we forget' as they stood in front of the monument, some decked out in body armour and helmets in anticipation of a police attack while others urged officers not to arrest them out of 'respect for the Anzacs'.
After an hours-long standoff where police offered to let protesters leave, officers opened fire to clear demonstrators who had started pelting them with bottles.
Victoria Police arrested 215 protesters throughout the day while two officers suffered head injuries, and one was taken to hospital with chest pains. Tap handles, golf balls, batteries and bottles were thrown at them from the shrine.
Deputy Commissioner Ross Guenther said: 'It was completely disrespectful that the crowd ended up at the shrine, which is such hallowed ground in this great city.'
The ugly scenes came after police ordered news channels to stop broadcasting aerial images of the protests, claiming organisers were using the live feed to evade police.
CTH | An inflection point has been reached in Australia with the government
COVID-19 lockdowns, forced vaccinations and now, vaccine passports.
What is happening today in the state of Victoria, specifically the
Melbourne metropolitan area, is an outcome of more than a year of
heavy-handed government rules and regulations deaf to the voices of the
average man, woman or family. There is a middle class & blue-collar
backlash taking place, and Americans would be wise to pay attention.
Things recently came to a head when the Premier of Victoria, Daniel
Andrews, began outlining the rules and regulations for opening society
back up after almost a year of total lockdown. The always futile attempt
to block the COVID-19 virus through a policy known as “COVID-ZERO” was
abandoned. The new approach is to open up society and the economy by
forcing everyone to take the vaccine, and then allowing only the vaccinated
to participate in the economy as varying percentages of the population
are double-vaxxed, and admittedly, later, booster-vaxxed.
Vaccination passports will be required to work, shop, attend events and essentially live in the New World Order
Premier Andrews has created for the citizens of Victoria. The day after
Andrews outlined the new rules – the working class, who have been
locked down and compliant to this point, finally had enough.
Do not be naive to the fact that U.S. and Canadian government
officials; those in direct ideological alignment with the leftist
perspectives of government in Australia; are not paying close attention
to what is happening there in preparation for when both the U.S. and
Canada move to block the unvaccinated from participating in society.
The vaccination passport methods, processes and procedures being
tested right now in Australia are soon to arrive in the United States.
Electronic check-ins and QR codes deployed to track the movements of
vaxxed and unvaxxed are being tested right now in almost all states in
Australia. We The People in America are only a few weeks or
months away from having to make the same decisions that middle-class
Victorian workers are faced with right now. This is why you should pay
attention to what is happening there.
The population of Australia (26 million) is small by comparison to the U.S. (350+ million), and as a result, the dynamic will be exponentially more explosive when it arrives here.
Socially, Americans are more geographically spread out than
Australia, as most of their major population centers circle the
coastline. Factually, the population of Florida or Texas is essentially
equivalent to the entire population of Australia. The economy of the
U.S. is also substantially larger and more diverse than down-under.
However, those points only emphasize how significantly more explosive
the same scenarios may become when the Biden regime attempts to follow
the oppressive process now being witnessed in the Melbourne region.
Do not anticipate any support from CONservative Republican
politicians. As we have witnessed in the past two decades, there is
only one overarching ideology in the Washington DC UniParty. They too
are more than comfortable with a class society where the elites are
disconnected from the laws, rules and regulations they force upon the
underclass.
The rust-belt of America was created by both Democrat and Republican
administrations. The globalist worldview favorable to the multinational
corporations and Wall Street run through both political parties in the
United States.
noqreport | I recently had a conversation with a reasonably well informed writer
who simply missed the real reasons why most practicing physicians go
along with the Fauci Fraud. As a public service, I will attempt to fill
in a few gaps. But first, I must define the Fraud.
There are two basic legs to the Fraud. First is the idea that the
Centers for Disease Control is in any way concerned with a mission
related to its name. The failure of the CDC to in any way endorse any treatment that did not emanate from its exalted halls should give us our first glint of clarity.
There are literally millions of physicians around the world, and the
great bulk of them truly wish to treat their patients well. Among those
are thousands of researchers, a number far in excess of those at the
CDC, NIAID, NIH and other alphabet soup government agencies. The very
idea that outside researchers are incapable of discovering anything
useful without the help of the bureaucrats in DC is hubris of the
highest order. And it prevents the CDC, FDA, or any other such agency
from considering the idea that maybe, just possibly, there might be
intelligent life down here. Mount Olympus cannot be threatened.
The Second Leg of the Fraud is less visible to the naked eye, but
much more powerful. If I wrote this before I retired, I would be called
before the Board of my group and told in no uncertain terms to “Shut T…
F…. Up!” I might even be assessed a financial penalty with several
zeroes after the “1.” That’s a serious impairment of my pursuit of
happiness.
The reason for my group’s dislike is more than the fact that I might
be an irritant. They may actually agree with what I have to say. But
they simply cannot afford for me to say it. That’s right, as a
practicing physician in a group, my freedom of speech can become very
expensive… to the group.
My group cared for patients of all descriptions, with roughly half of
them on Medicare and another batch on Medicaid. Both programs are
ultimately managed by the Feds, one of the most humorless groups on the
planet. They write a whole bunch of rules on how you have to document
everything you do. If you didn’t document it correctly, it didn’t
happen, and you won’t get paid. But that’s not the half of it.
Suppose you have one of those patients brought in by the ambulance
from under the bridge. Their only clothes are the ones they are wearing,
and they don’t have two nickels to rub together. It’s more than obvious
that this surgery for bowel obstruction will be a charity case. Before
Medicare, you’d simply write it off as your good neighbor duty. Now you
don’t get a choice.
CMMS (the actual administrative agency) requires you to send a bill.
Twice. Or maybe three times. Whatever it takes to turn the bill into bad
debt. Then you have to send it to a collection agency. Your only
alternative is for your group to bring it up in its Board meeting and
declare it a write-off that gets noted in the minutes.
All this rigmarole serves no purpose, and you knew that before you
got to this sentence. But CMMS has a sinister side. If you do the case
for free (which you did before you spent that useless money on billing
and collection), CMMS will define that as your “usual and customary”
bill for an exploratory laparotomy. Since your U&C is now zero, you
can’t ever bill more than that for an ex lap in the future. But what
does that have to do with Ivermectin? I’m glad you asked.
U&C bills are just one of hundreds of rules that CMMS enforces.
Another is “Pay for Performance.” Basically, P-f-P requires you to check
a host of boxes when taking care of patients. If you didn’t get that IV
antibiotic in 20 minutes before the incision, you failed P-f-P and may
not get paid. The hospital won’t get paid to take care of the patient if
there’s a complication. So let us suppose that you use Ivermectin to
treat a COVID patient as they arrive in the hospital?
Ivermectin isn’t on the Medicare/Medicaid approved list of
medications for COVID. Your hospital pharmacy will call you up and give
you grief. After wasting a lot of time getting them to finally let you
have it, you’ve had to cancel half of your office day.
The next day, you’ll get a visit from a coder who will tell you that
you didn’t use the approved treatment protocol and put the hospital in
jeopardy because you flunked P-f-P. By the way, that “coder” is the
person who “helps” you use the proper ICD (billing) code for whatever
the patient has in order for the hospital to make the most money. But
that’s not the worst of it.
NYTimes | Who
should get vaccine booster shots and when? Can vaccinated people with a
breakthrough infection transmit the virus as easily as unvaccinated
people? How many people with breakthrough infections die or get
seriously ill, broken down by age and underlying health conditions?
Confused?
It’s not you. It’s the fog of pandemic, in which inadequate data
hinders a clear understanding of how to fight a stealthy enemy.
To
overcome the fog of war, the Prussian general and military theorist
Carl von Clausewitz called for “a sensitive and discriminating judgment”
as well as “skilled intelligence to scent out the truth.” He knew that
since decisions will have to be made with whatever information is
available in the face of an immediate threat, it’s crucial to acquire as
much systematic evidence as possible, as soon as possible.
In the current crisis, that has often been difficult.
Why
this stumbling in the fog? It may seem like we’re drowning in data:
Dashboards and charts are everywhere. However, not all data is equal in
its power to illuminate, and worse, sometimes it can even be misleading.
Few
things have been as lacking in clarity as the risks for children.
Testing in schools is haphazard, follow-up reporting is poor and data on
hospitalization of children appears to be unreliable, even if those
cases are rare. The Food and Drug Administration has asked that vaccine trials for children aged 5 to 11 be expanded, which is wise, but why weren’t they bigger to begin with?
While
the pandemic has produced many fine examples of research and meticulous
data collection, we are still lacking in detailed and systematic data
on cases, contact tracing, breakthrough infections and vaccine efficacy
over time, as well as randomized trials of interventions like boosters.
This has left us playing catch-up with emerging threats like the Delta
variant and has left policymakers struggling to make timely decisions in
a manner that inspires confidence.
To
see the dangers of insufficient data and the powers of appropriate
data, consider the case of dexamethasone, an inexpensive generic
corticosteroid drug.
In the early days of the pandemic, doctors were warnedagainst using it to treat Covid patients.
The limited literature from SARS and MERS — illnesses related to Covid —
suggested that steroids, which suppress the immune system, would harm rather than help Covid patients.
That assessment changed on June 16, 2020, when the results of a large-scale randomized clinical trial from Britain, one of all too few such efforts
during the pandemic, demonstrated that dexamethasone was able to reduce
deaths by one-fifth among patients needing supplemental oxygen and an
astonishing one-third among those on ventilators.
The
study also explained the earlier findings: Given too early, before
patients needed supplemental oxygen, steroids could harm patients. But
comprehensive data from the randomized trial showed that when given
later, as the disease progressed in severity, dexamethasone was
immensely helpful.
Dexamethasone has since become a workhorse of Covid treatment, saving perhaps millions of lives
at little cost or fanfare. Without that trial, though, it might never
have been noticed because of a problem called confounding: when causal
effects of different elements can’t be considered separately. If doctors
give multiple drugs to patients at the same time, who knows which drug
works and which one does not? Or, if they choose which drug to give to
whom, those more ill may be getting effective drugs, but the severity of
their illness could end up masking the positive effect of the drug.
Trials allow us to sort through all of this.
Randomized
trials are not the only source of useful data. For example, it would
have been difficult to quickly determine how transmissible the Delta
variant is — a crucial question — without the data collected from close
and systematic observation.
If a
variant is spreading quickly somewhere, it might be more transmissible,
or it could have simply arrived in that area early and gotten a head
start. Or it might have just hit a few superspreader events. We’ve had
variants appear, generating alarming headlines, that were later shown to
be no more threatening than previous ones.
nature | These jokers created some super-covid from the worst strains of
existing covid variants. (Gain of Function Research) It’s
virological and immunological <s>dual use bioweapons</s> research. Hope none gets out of the NYC lab where they created it over a year ago.
They then tested antibodies created from a natural Covid-19
infection - and - antibodies created by someone with an mRNA vaccine against
this “gain of function” super strain of Covid-19. The super Covid was
resistant to both types of antibodies. However, antibodies
from someone who both was infected and recovered from a Covid-19
infection AND received an mRNA vaccination defeated the super strain of
Covid-19.
The number and variability of the neutralizing epitopes targeted by
polyclonal antibodies in SARS-CoV-2 convalescent and vaccinated
individuals are key determinants of neutralization breadth and the
genetic barrier to viral escape1–4. Using HIV-1 pseudotypes and plasma-selection experiments with vesicular stomatitis virus/SARS-CoV-2 chimeras5,
we show that multiple neutralizing epitopes, within and outside the
receptor binding domain (RBD), are variably targeted by human polyclonal
antibodies. Antibody targets coincide with spike sequences that are
enriched for diversity in natural SARS-CoV-2 populations. By combining
plasma-selected spike substitutions, we generated synthetic ‘polymutant’
spike protein pseudotypes that resisted polyclonal antibody
neutralization to a similar degree as circulating variants of concern
(VOC). By aggregating VOC-associated and antibody-selected spike
substitutions into a single polymutant spike protein, we show that 20
naturally occurring mutations in SARS-CoV-2 spike are sufficient to
generate pseudotypes with near-complete resistance to the polyclonal
neutralizing antibodies generated by convalescents or mRNA vaccine
recipients. Strikingly, however, plasma from individuals who had been
infected and subsequently received mRNA vaccination, neutralized
pseudotypes bearing this highly resistant SARS-CoV-2 polymutant spike,
or diverse sarbecovirus spike proteins. Thus, optimally elicited human
polyclonal antibodies against SARS-CoV-2 should be resilient to
substantial future SARS-CoV-2 variation and may confer protection
against potential future sarbecovirus pandemics.
FT | Paul Dabrowa does not know if it is illegal to genetically modify beer at home in a way that makes it glow. The process involves taking DNA information from jellyfish and applying it to yeast cells, then using traditional fermenting methods to turn it into alcohol. But he is worried that it could be against the law given that it involves manipulating genetic material.
“This stuff can be dangerous in the wrong hands, so I did that in an accredited lab,” he says, adding that he himself has only got as far as making yeast cells glow in a Petri dish.
For the most part Dabrowa, a 41-year old Melbourne-based Australian who styles himself as a bit of an expert on most things, prefers to conduct his biohacking experiments in his kitchen. He does this mostly to find cures for his own health issues. Other times just for fun.
In recent years the community of hobbyists and amateurs Dabrowa considers his kin has been energised by the falling cost and growing accessibility to gene-editing tools such as Crispr. This has led to an explosion of unchecked experimentation in self-constructed labs or community facilities focused on biological self-improvement.
Despite a lack of formal microbiological training, Dabrowa has successfully used faecal transplants and machine learning to genetically modify his own gut bacteria to lose weight without having to change his daily regime. The positive results he’s seen on himself have encouraged him to try to commercialise the process with the help of an angel investor. He hopes one day to collect as many as 3,000 faecal samples from donors and share the findings publicly.
Much of his knowledge — including the complex bits related to gene-editing — was gleaned straight from the internet or through sheer strength of will by directly lobbying those who have the answers he seeks. “Whenever I was bored, I went on YouTube and watched physics and biology lectures from MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology],” he explains. “I tried the experiments at home, then realised I needed help and reached out to professors at MIT and Harvard. They were more than happy to do so.”
At the more radical end of the community are experimentalists such as Josiah Zayner, a former Nasa bioscientist, who became infamous online after performing gene therapy on himself in front of a live audience. Zayner’s start-up, The Odin — to which Crispr pioneer and professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School George Church is an adviser — has stubbornly resisted attempts to regulate its capacity to sell gene-editing kits online in the idealistic belief that everyone should be able to manage their own DNA.
These garage scientists might seem like a quirky new subculture but their rogue mindset is starting to generate consternation among those who specialise in managing biological threats in governments and international bodies.
In 2018 the states that are signatories to the 1972 Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) identified gene editing, gene synthesis, gene drives and metabolic pathway engineering as research that qualifies as “dual use”, meaning it is as easy to deploy for harmful purposes as it is for good.
phys.org | Researchers at MIT's McGovern Institute for Brain Research have
discovered a bacterial enzyme that they say could expand scientists'
CRISPR toolkit, making it easy to cut and edit RNA with the kind of
precision that, until now, has only been available for DNA editing. The
enzyme, called Cas7-11, modifies RNA targets without harming cells,
suggesting that in addition to being a valuable research tool, it
provides a fertile platform for therapeutic applications.
"This new enzyme
is like the Cas9 of RNA," says McGovern Fellow Omar Abudayyeh,
referring to the DNA-cutting CRISPR enzyme that has revolutionized
modern biology by making DNA editing fast, inexpensive, and exact. "It
creates two precise cuts and doesn't destroy the cell in the process,
like other enzymes," he adds.
Up until now, only one other family of RNA-targeting enzymes, Cas13,
has extensively been developed for RNA targeting applications. However,
when Cas13 recognizes its target, it shreds any RNAs in the cell,
destroying the cell along the way. Like Cas9, Cas7-11 is part of a
programmable system; it can be directed at specific RNA targets using a
CRISPR guide. Abudayyeh, McGovern Fellow Jonathan Gootenberg, and their
colleagues discovered Cas7-11 through a deep exploration of the CRISPR
systems found in the microbial world. Their findings were recently
reported in the journal Nature.
Exploring natural diversity
Like other CRISPR proteins, Cas7-11 is used by bacteria as a defense
mechanism against viruses. After encountering a new virus, bacteria that
employ the CRISPR system keep a record of the infection in the form of a
small snippet of the pathogen's genetic material.
Should that virus reappear, the CRISPR system is activated, guided by a
small piece of RNA to destroy the viral genome and eliminate the
infection.
These ancient immune systems are widespread and diverse, with
different bacteria deploying different proteins to counter their viral
invaders.
"Some target DNA, some target RNA. Some are very efficient in
cleaving the target but have some toxicity, and others do not. They
introduce different types of cuts, they can differ in specificity—and so
on," says Eugene Koonin, an evolutionary biologist at the National
Center for Biotechnology Information.
Abudayyeh, Gootenberg, and Koonin have been scouring genome sequences
to learn about the natural diversity of CRISPR systems—and to mine them
for potential tools. The idea, Abudayyeh says, is to take advantage of
the work that evolution has already done in engineering protein machines.
"We don't know what we'll find," Abudayyeh says, "but let's just explore and see what's out there."
projectveritas | [PHOENIX – Sept. 20, 2021] Project Veritas released the first video of
its COVID vaccine investigative series today featuring an interview with
U.S. Health and Human Services [HHS] insider, Jodi O’Malley, who works
as a Registered Nurse at the local Indian Medical Center.
O’Malley told Project Veritas founder James O’Keefe about what has
been going on at her federal government facility. She recorded her HHS
colleagues discussing their concerns about the new COVID vaccine to
corroborate her assertions:
Dr. Maria Gonzales, ER Doctor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “The
problem in here is that they are not doing the studies. People that had
[COVID] and the people that have been vaccinated -- they’re not doing
any antibody testing.”
Jodi O’Malley, Insider and Registered Nurse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “Nope.”
Dr. Gonzales: “Everybody is quiet with that. Why?”
O’Malley: “Now,
you got this guy in Room Four who got his second dose of the [COVID]
vaccine on Tuesday and has been short of breath. Okay? Now his BNP is
elevated. D diver elevated, ALT, all his liver enzymes are elevated. His
PTPTINR is elevated.”
Dr. Gonzales: “He’s probably got myocarditis!”
O’Malley: “Yes!”
Dr. Gonzales: “All this is bullshit. Now probably myocarditis due to the vaccine.”
O’Malley: “Right.”
Dr. Gonzales: “But now, they [government] are not going to blame the vaccine.”
O’Malley: “Well
and you know what -- but he has an obligation to report that doesn’t
he? It happened right -- what is it -- sixty days after if you see
anything?”
Dr. Gonzales: “They have got to.”
O’Malley: “But how many are reporting?”
Dr. Gonzales: “They are not reporting.”
O’Malley: “Right!”
Dr. Gonzales: “Because they want to shove it under the mat.”
O’Malley explained this conversation in detail during her interview with O’Keefe:
James O’Keefe, Project Veritas founder:“In this instance with Dr. Gonzales, what patient was she referring to? Without saying the name.”
Jodi O’Malley, Insider and Registered Nurse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services:“She was referring to a thirty-something-year-old patient that had congestive heart failure.”
O’Keefe: “Congestive heart failure? In that particular patient’s case, it was not reported?”
O’Malley: “No.”
O’Keefe: “Were there other instances that they didn’t report? Or just this one?”
O’Malley: “Yeah, many.”
O’Keefe: “How many did you see?”
O’Malley: “Oh, I’ve seen dozens of people come in with adverse reactions [to the COVID vaccine].”
…
O’Malley: “So,
what the responsibility on everyone is -- is to gather that data and
report it. If we’re not gathering [COVID vaccine] data and reporting it,
then how are we going to say that this is safe and approved for use?”
The
whistleblower also recorded Dr. Gonzales’ disagreement with another HHS
doctor pertaining to the research and reporting behind the COVID
vaccine:
Jodi O’Malley, Insider and Registered Nurse, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “So how come after 18 months, we haven’t had any research? Isn’t that fishy to you?”
Dr. Maria Gonzales, ER Doctor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “It does -- it is fishy.”
O’Malley: “It’s super fishy.”
Dr. Dale McGee, ER Doctor, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: “It’s not that it hasn’t been done. It hasn’t been published, that’s why.”
Dr. Gonzales: “It hasn’t probably been done because the government doesn’t want to show that the darn [COVID] vaccine is full of sh*t.”
thexpose |A graduate of Yale University who also obtained a PHD at
Princeton University and an MD degree from the John Hopkins University
School of Medicine has published a paper in which she concludes that
mandating the public to take a vaccine is a harmful and damaging act
because of excellent scientific research papers which clearly
demonstrate the vaccines do not prevent infection or transmission of
Covid-19.
Nina Pierpont (MD, PhD) published a paper on September 9th
analysing various studies that were published in August 2021 which
prove the alleged Delta Covid-19 variant is evading the current Covid-19
injections on offer and therefore do not prevent infection or
transmission of Covid-19.
The Doctor of Medicine explained in her published paper that vaccines aim to achieve two ends –
Protect the vaccinated person against the illness
Keep vaccinated people from carrying the infection and transmitting it to others.
However, the Doctor of Medicine writes that herd immunity will not be
reached through vaccination because new research in multiple settings
shows that the alleged Delta variant produces very high viral loads
which are just as high in the vaccinated population compared to the
unvaccinated population.
Therefore, according to Nina Pierpont (MD,
PhD), vaccine mandates; such as the one now enforced in the UK for all
Care Home staff, have no justification because vaccinating individuals
does not stop or even slow the spread of the alleged dominant Delta
Covid-19 variant.
Which leads the Doctor of Medicine to conclude that natural immunity
is much more protective than vaccination because all severities of
Covid-19 illness produce healthy levels of natural immunity.
Nine Pierpont (MD, PhD) cites three studies whose findings and data support her conclusions and these include a study published August 6th 2021 in the Centre for Disease Control’s (CDC) ‘Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report’, another study published August 10th 2021 by Oxford University, and a final study published August 24th 2021 which was funded by the UK Department for Health and Social Care. Fist tap Dale.
theatlantic | Biden’s bet, while risky, grows
more solid by the day. Republicans are making a counterargument that
they believe their base wants to hear, which would be fine if their base
were sufficient to wrest control of Congress from the Democrats. Biden
is trying to appeal to a wider audience. Two of the most prized voting
blocs in an election—suburban and independent voters—favor Biden’s
vaccine-mandate plan by solid margins.
They don’t see the vaccine requirement as government overreach; for
them, it’s a step toward reentering a world they remember from two years
ago.
“Republicans could be
making a real mistake on the long-term play on this issue, especially
heading into the midterms,” Rob Stutzman, a longtime Republican
strategist based in California, told me. “Voters are looking at this
through a personal lens, not a political lens. If I’m vaccinated, I’m
really annoyed that we’ve had a second surge that was made worse because
of the unvaccinated. And I’m annoyed because that means I have to put a
mask back on and I have kids in school who are now at risk.”
Twenty years ago,
after hijacked planes brought down the World Trade Center and blew a
hole in the Pentagon, George W. Bush signed the PATRIOT Act, making it
easier for the federal government to surveil Americans in the name of
national security. Enough Americans
were traumatized by the events of 9/11 to make that sort of
encroachment on civil liberties palatable, so long as it meant the
government would safeguard them from another terrorist attack. Over the
years, the trade-off proved a devil’s bargain, as government watchdogs
have chronicled abuses of privacy that had nothing to do with foiling another attack on U.S. soil.
Biden’s vaccine mandates are more grounded in American tradition. George Washington ordered that his Continental Army be inoculated
against smallpox while fighting the British during the Revolutionary
War. Schools have long required vaccinations for diseases such as polio.
“Nobody wants the government to tell you what to do,” says Frank Luntz,
a longtime Republican pollster who has shared some of his research on
COVID-19 with the White House. “But—and this is a big but—they’re
even more afraid of the government allowing people who are standing
beside them, traveling with them, working with them, and partying with
them to give them COVID.’’
In
the Reagan era, much of Republican identity was bound up in support for
business and lower taxes. But the threshold question these days for
Republicans looking to rise within the party is their fealty to Donald
Trump. A strong argument can be made that Biden’s plan is helpful to
businesses and the larger economy, and something that, in less polarized
times, Republicans might have actually embraced. People are less likely
to go to a movie theater if they fear that the couple eating popcorn in
the seats next to them might be unvaccinated. They are less likely to
attend a conference—injecting money into both the local and national
economies through airfare, hotels, car services, and meals—if others in
the crowd are unvaccinated.
washingtontimes | If you’re among the Hollywood elite at the Emmys, you don’t need a
face mask. If you’re a simple school student in most of the rest of
America, you better have a face mask. Any questions?
This is the tale of two emerging societies in
America: those who have to obey coronavirus restrictions and those who
don’t. And guess which category you fit.
Cedric the Entertainer, the host for the
evening, tried to quiet criticisms before they had a chance to brew —
but was largely unsuccessful.
“No Masks at the #Emmys because rules are for the little people,” one social media poster wrote.
“The Only People Wearing Masks At the Emmys Were Servants,” another wrote.
“Is ‘science’ the reason celebrities don’t need masks at the Emmys but all the hourly employees do?” yet another wrote.
“Emmys = no masks. Our college and high school sons = masks. Where’s the outrage?” yet one more wrote.
It’s not that the Emmys’ attendees should have
been forced to wear masks. It’s that everybody else in the country
shouldn’t be forced to wear masks, either.
The fact some can skate on the
Anthony-Fauci-recommendations-slash-mandates while others cannot shows
clearly the growing two-class society in America: the thees — the
Democrat voters, the socialist types, the leftist leaners — but not for
me’s — the conservatives, the Donald Trump base, the tea party types,
the individualists.
It’s the coronavirus version of apartheid.
“Masks are for peasants,” another wrote on Twitter.
And that very succinctly describes the attitudes from the far-left.
oftwominds |Now that every financial game in America has been rigged
to benefit the few at the expense of the many, trust and credibility has evaporated like an
ice cube on a summer day in Death Valley.
Here is America in a nutshell: we no longer solve problems, we manipulate the narrative and
then declare the problem has been solved. Actually solving problems is difficult and
generally requires sacrifices that are proportionate to one's wealth and power. But since
America's elite are no longer willing to sacrifice any of their vast power for the common good,
sacrifice is out in America unless it can be dumped on wage earners. But unfortunately for
America's elite, four decades of hidden-by-manipulation sacrifices have stripmined average wage earners,
and so they no longer have anything left to sacrifice.
Enter the Ministry of Manipulation, which adjusts the visible bits to align with the narrative
that the problem has been fixed and the status quo is godlike in its technocratic powers.
All this manipulation doesn't actually solve the problems, it simply hides the decay behind
gamed statistics, financial trickery and glossy PR. The problems fester until they
break through the manipulated gloss and the public witnesses the breakdown of all the systems
that were presented as rock-solid and forever.
Let's take three core fields of manipulation: cost of living, Social Security and the
stock market bubble. Each is a key signifier of the status quo functioning as advertised,
and so manipulating them to fit the narrative is the elite's prime directive. Goodness
knows what would happen if people were exposed to the unmanipulated reality, but it wouldn't
be good for America's self-serving power elite.
The cost of living--the Consumer Price Index (CPI), a.k.a. inflation--is the most threadbare
trash heap of manipulation currently on display. Fully 40% of the Index is based on
the opinion of random people rather than easily tabulated real-world data.
I refer to the government's comically wacky method of reckoning the cost of housing: ask a
random bunch of homeowners what they guess they could rent their house for.
But wait, why not simply tabulate the actual rents being paid? That data is easily available,
and could be made apples-to-apples by applying the methodology of the Case-Shiller housing
index, which is to track the cost data of the same homes / flats over time. This would provide
reliable data on the actual increase or decline in rents being paid.
Gathering actual real-world date is anathema because then the CPI would be much higher and
not so easily manipulated. The same can be said of all the other tricks of manipulating
the cost of living: seasonal adjustments (i.e., lop off price increases and attribute the
reduction to "seasonality") and hedonic adjustments (i.e., after adjusting for the better
stereo and the rear-view camera, today's $40,000 car is tabulated as "cheaper" than yesteryear's
$10,000 car of the same size).
If these same adjustments were applied to the weight and height of individuals, a 6-foot tall
individual weighing 200 pounds would be "adjusted" to 6 inches in height and a weight of 2 pounds.
This is a slight exaggeration but not by much, as today's calculation of expenses are laughably
understated in the CPI: today's cars haven't risen in cost at all according to the CPI, even as
the number of work hours needed to buy a new car have skyrocketed--that is, when measured in
purchasing power of wages, vehicles are much more expensive now.
Then there's healthcare, which is a weighted as light as a feather in the CPI. Healthcare--
you know, that sector which routinely bankrupts American families with bills in the tens of
thousands?--is weighted as roughly equal to clothing. This is beyond absurd, but par for the
CPI course of endless manipulations, all aimed at reducing the CPI so the public can be
lulled into a fairyland belief that inflation has been trifling for decades, even as their paychecks
buy a third less than they did a decade ago.
mises | The official line on vaccines is that they are extremely effective at
protecting against serious illness. And yet these same people are also
claiming that the unvaccinated are a major threat to the vaccinated.
More specifically, President Biden claimed on September 10 that vaccine mandates were to “protect the vaccinated workers from unvaccinated workers.”
In other words, it is claimed that vaccines are remarkably effective,
and that the vaccinated must also be protected from the unvaccinated.
How can both claims be true at the same time? They can’t. The idea that
vaccinated people are being frequently harmed by the unvaccinated is a
complete fabrication, based on the promandate crowd’s own mainstream
data.
As Robert Fellner points out, according to the official data,
The odds of a vaccinated person dying from COVID are 1 in 137,000.
The fatality rate for seasonal flu, meanwhile, is at least 100 times greater than that. The chance of dying in an automobile accident is over 1,000 times greater.
Dog attacks, bee stings, sunstroke, cataclysmic storms, and a variety
of other background risks we accept as a normal part of life are all
more deadly than the risk COVID poses to the vaccinated.
Moreover, the risk of death to vaccinated people is similar to the risk of having an adverse side effect
to the vaccine. And as the spokesmen for Big Pharma and the regime
never tire of telling us, you shouldn’t care about having an adverse
reaction, because it is so very rare and inconsequential.
So by that reasoning, vaccinated people shouldn’t worry about getting very ill from covid. Those cases are just as rare as the so, so rare cases of adverse reaction.
And yet, even after all of this, the backers of vaccine mandates are
trying to whip up hysteria about how we must “protect the vaccinated,”
who are in grave danger, thanks to the unvaccinated.
The level of mental and logical incoherence necessary to come to this conclusion is quite a feat.
But as [the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's] Dr. Walensky explained last month,
while the COVID vaccines remain incredibly effective at preventing
serious illness and death, “what they cannot do anymore is prevent
transmission.” This reflects the official position of the agency as
well, which is why the CDC now requires vaccinated people to mask
indoors and follow the same type of social distancing practices as
unvaccinated people.
The official confirmation that COVID is endemic, and vaccination
cannot stop transmission and thereby eliminate it in the way it could
for things like polio and smallpox, makes mandates intolerable to a free
society. The entire argument for mandatory vaccination originally
rested on the claim that the vaccines could reliably stop transmission.
Moreover, those who are vaccinated often experience a mild form of
covid when they are reinfected, which means they often spread the
disease without even knowing they have it. The vaccinated also carry the
same viral load as the unvaccinated, as noted last month by the UK’s Evening Standard:
While evidence demonstrates that vaccines significantly
reduce hospitalisations and deaths, scientists now believe those
infected by the Delta variant can still harbour similar levels of virus
to those who are unvaccinated.
Previous thinking was that vaccinations would stop the spread, but now
this has been thrown into doubt and raises questions
about vaccine passports … which work on the assumption that
double-jabbed people are less likely to spread the virus.
Yet again, we see the notion that the vaccinated are being endangered by the unvaccinated is a fantasy of the mandate activists.
At least the CDC is being logical when it says the vaccinated should
keep wearing masks. Indeed, every time we hear this from the CDC we
should remind ourselves: vaccination does not stop the spread.
aeon | In late summer of 1976, two colleagues at Oxford University Press,
Michael Rodgers and Richard Charkin, were discussing a book on evolution
soon to be published. It was by a first-time author, a junior zoology
don in town, and had been given an initial print run of 5,000 copies. As
the two publishers debated the book’s fate, Charkin confided that he
doubted it would sell more than 2,000 copies. In response, Rodgers, who
was the editor who had acquired the manuscript, suggested a bet whereby
he would pay Charkin £1 for every 1,000 copies under 5,000, and Charkin
was to buy Rodgers a pint of beer for every 1,000 copies over 5,000. By
now, the book is one of OUP’s most successful titles, and it has sold
more than a million copies in dozens of languages, spread across four
editions. That book was Richard Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene, and Charkin is ‘holding back payment in the interests of [Rodgers’s] health and wellbeing’.
In the decades following that bet, The Selfish Gene has come
to play a unique role in evolutionary biology, simultaneously
influential and contentious. At the heart of the disagreements lay the
book’s advocacy of what has become known as the gene’s-eye view of
evolution. To its supporters, the gene’s-eye view presents an unrivalled
introduction to the logic of natural selection. To its critics,
‘selfish genes’ is a dated metaphor that paints a simplistic picture of
evolution while failing to incorporate recent empirical findings. To me,
it is one of biology’s most powerful thinking tools. However, as with
all tools, in order to make the most of it, you must understand what it
was designed to do.
When Charles Darwin first introduced his theory of evolution by
natural selection in 1859, he had in mind a theory about individual
organisms. In Darwin’s telling, individuals differ in how long they live
and how good they are at attracting mates; if the traits that enhance
these strengths are heritable, they will become more abundant over time.
The gene’s-eye view discussed by Dawkins introduces a shift in
perspective that might seem subtle at first, but which comes with rather
radical implications.
The idea emerged from the tenets of population genetics in the 1920s
and ’30s. Here, scientists said that you could mathematically describe
evolution through changes in the frequency of certain genetic variants,
known as alleles, over time. Population genetics was an integral part of
the modern synthesis of evolution and married Darwin’s idea of gradual
evolutionary change with a functioning theory of inheritance, based on
Gregor Mendel’s discovery that genes were transmitted as discrete
entities. Under the framework of population genetics, evolution is
captured by mathematically describing the increase and decrease of
alleles in a population over time.
The gene’s-eye view took this a step further, to argue that
biologists are always better off thinking about evolution and natural
selection in terms of genes rather than organisms. This is because
organisms lack the evolutionary longevity required to be the central
unit in evolutionary explanations. They are too temporary on an
evolutionary timescale, a unique combination of genes and environment –
here in this generation but gone in the next. Genes, in contrast, pass
on their structure intact from one generation to the next, ignoring
mutation and recombination. Therefore, only they possess the required
evolutionary longevity. Traits that you can see, the argument goes, such
as the particular fur of a polar bear or the flower of an orchid (known
as a phenotype), are not for the good of the organism, but of the
genes. The genes, and not the organism, are the ultimate beneficiaries
of natural selection.
This approach has also been called selfish-gene thinking, because
natural selection is conceptualised as a struggle between genes,
typically through how they affect the fitness of the organism in which
they reside, for transmission to the next generation. At an after-dinner
speech at a conference banquet, Dawkins once summarised the key
argument in limerick form:
An itinerant selfish gene Said: ‘Bodies a-plenty I’ve seen. You think you’re so clever, But I’ll live for ever. You’re just a survival machine.’
In this telling, evolution is the process by which immortal selfish
genes housed in transient organisms struggle for representation in
future generations. Moving beyond the poetry and making the point more
formally, Dawkins argued that evolution involves two entities:
replicators and vehicles, playing complementary roles. Replicators are
those entities that copies are made of and that are transmitted
faithfully from one generation to the next; in practice, this usually
means genes. The second entity, vehicles, are where replicators are
bundled together: this is the entity that actually comes into contact
with the external environment and interacts with it. The most common
kind of vehicle is the organism, such as an animal or a plant, though it
can also be a cell, as in the case of cancer.
quanta | Back in 2000, when Michael Elowitz
of the California Institute of Technology was still a grad student at
Princeton University, he accomplished a remarkable feat in the young
field of synthetic biology: He became one of the first to design and
demonstrate a kind of functioning “circuit” in living cells. He and his
mentor, Stanislas Leibler, inserted a suite of genes into Escherichia coli
bacteria that induced controlled swings in the cells’ production of a
fluorescent protein, like an oscillator in electronic circuitry.
It was a brilliant illustration of what the biologist and Nobel
laureate François Jacob called the “logic of life”: a tightly controlled
flow of information from genes to the traits that cells and other
organisms exhibit.
But this lucid vision of circuit-like logic, which worked so
elegantly in bacteria, too often fails in more complex cells. “In
bacteria, single proteins regulate things,” said Angela DePace,
a systems biologist at Harvard Medical School. “But in more complex
organisms, you get many proteins involved in a more analog fashion.”
Recently, by looking closely at the protein interactions within one
key developmental pathway that shapes the embryos of humans and other
complex animals, Elowitz and his co-workers have caught a glimpse of what the logic of complex life
is really like. This pathway is a riot of molecular promiscuity that
would make a libertine blush, where the component molecules can unite in
many different combinations. It might seem futile to hope that this
chaotic dance could convey any coherent signal to direct the fate of a
cell. Yet this sort of helter-skelter coupling among biomolecules may be
the norm, not some weird exception. In fact, it may be why
multicellular life works at all.
“Biological cell-cell communication circuits, with their families of
promiscuously interacting ligands and receptors, look like a mess and
use an architecture that is the opposite of what we synthetic biologists
might have designed,” Elowitz said.
Yet this apparent chaos of interacting components is really a
sophisticated signal-processing system that can extract information
reliably and efficiently from complicated cocktails of signaling
molecules. “Understanding cells’ natural combinatorial language could
allow us to control [them] with much greater specificity than we have
now,” he said.
The emerging picture does more than reconfigure our view of what
biomolecules in our cells are up to as they build an organism — what
logic they follow to create complex life. It might also help us
understand why living things are able to survive at all in the face of
an unpredictable environment, and why that randomness permits evolution
rather than frustrating it. And it could explain why molecular medicine
is often so hard: why many candidate drugs don’t do what we hoped, and
how we might make ones that do.
Rejuvenation Pills
-
No one likes getting old. Everyone would like to be immorbid. Let's be
careful here. Immortal doesnt include youth or return to youth. Immorbid
means you s...
Death of the Author — at the Hands of Cthulhu
-
In 1967, French literary theorist and philosopher Roland Barthes wrote of
“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
-
"On this sacred day of Michaelmas, former President Donald Trump invoked
the heavenly power of St. Michael the Archangel, sharing a powerful prayer
for pro...
Return of the Magi
-
Lately, the Holy Spirit is in the air. Emotional energy is swirling out of
the earth.I can feel it bubbling up, effervescing and evaporating around
us, s...
New Travels
-
Haven’t published on the Blog in quite a while. I at least part have been
immersed in the area of writing books. My focus is on Science Fiction an
Historic...
Covid-19 Preys Upon The Elderly And The Obese
-
sciencemag | This spring, after days of flulike symptoms and fever, a man
arrived at the emergency room at the University of Vermont Medical Center.
He ...