On Thursday, the Russian Ministry of Defense (MoD) released new files procured by Russian forces in eastern Ukraine, which include communications between American financier Hunter Biden – the son of US President Joe Biden – and figures engaged in biological research in Ukraine that his investment company aided in financing.
The emails disclosed the identities of numerous key American leaders
from Metabiota and Black & Veatch, and also officials from the US
Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA), who were involved in biological
research initiatives. Those named include:
The Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007is a bill sponsored by Rep. Jane Harman (D-CA) in the 110th United States Congress. Its stated purpose is to deal with "homegrown terrorism and violent radicalization" by establishing a national commission, establishing a center for study, and cooperating with other nations.
The bill was introduced to the House on April 19 2007, and passed on Oct 23, 2007. It was introduced to the Senate on August 2, 2007 as S-1959. The bill defines some terms including "violent radicalization," "homegrown terrorism," and "ideologically based violence," which have provoked controversy from some quarters. Although Section 899F of HR 1955 specifically prohibits "the violation of Civil Rights and Liberties in the enforcement of the bill," critics claim its enactment would pave the way for violations of Civil Rights and Liberties.
Former presidential candidate Dennis Kucinich has said he believes the bill is "unconstitutional" and has referred to the bill as a "thought crime bill".
Representative Ron Paul (R-TX), addressed the bill in he House on Dec. 5, 2007 saying: "This seems to be an unwise and dangerous solution in search of a real problem. Previous acts of ideologically motivated violence, though rare, have been resolved successfully using law enforcement techniques, existing laws against violence, and our court system," despite the fact that this bill does not "solve" anything and enacts no new laws of or pertaining to speech in the United States.
Over the weekend, I chatted with an AI specialist and got to thinking A LOT about possible applications of Large Language Models and their potential specialized uses for governance. The CIA studied Language very extensively under MKUltra as part of its larger Human Ecology project. Charles E. Osgood was a long term recipient of considerable CIA largesse. This topic was a priority for the Agency. It boggles the mind to consider what kind of clandestine leaps have taken place in this speciality through the use of contemporary computational methods.
Look at all these programs funded by the CIA's Human Ecology fund under MKULTRA. None of these scholars knew they were working for the CIA. pic.twitter.com/vTXel920Du
wikipedia | In control theory, affect control theory proposes that individuals maintain affective
meanings through their actions and interpretations of events. The
activity of social institutions occurs through maintenance of culturally
based affective meanings.
Affective meaning
Besides a denotative meaning, every concept has an affective meaning, or connotation, that varies along three dimensions:[1]
evaluation – goodness versus badness, potency – powerfulness versus
powerlessness, and activity – liveliness versus torpidity. Affective
meanings can be measured with semantic differentials yielding a three-number profile indicating how the concept is positioned on evaluation, potency, and activity (EPA). Osgood[2]
demonstrated that an elementary concept conveyed by a word or idiom has
a normative affective meaning within a particular culture.
A stable affective meaning derived either from personal
experience or from cultural inculcation is called a sentiment, or
fundamental affective meaning, in affect control theory. Affect control
theory has inspired assembly of dictionaries of EPA sentiments for
thousands of concepts involved in social life – identities, behaviours,
settings, personal attributes, and emotions. Sentiment dictionaries have
been constructed with ratings of respondents from the US, Canada, Northern Ireland, Germany, Japan, China and Taiwan.[3]
Each concept that is in play in a situation has a transient affective
meaning in addition to an associated sentiment. The transient
corresponds to an impression created by recent events.[4]
Events modify impressions on all three EPA dimensions in complex ways that are described with non-linear equations obtained through empirical studies.[5]
Here are two examples of impression-formation processes.
An actor who behaves disagreeably seems less good, especially if
the object of the behavior is innocent and powerless, like a child.
A powerful person seems desperate when performing extremely forceful acts on another, and the object person may seem invincible.
A social action creates impressions of the actor, the object person, the behavior, and the setting.[6]
Deflections
Deflections
are the distances in the EPA space between transient and fundamental
affective meanings. For example, a mother complimented by a stranger
feels that the unknown individual is much nicer than a stranger is
supposed to be, and a bit too potent and active as well – thus there is a
moderate distance between the impression created and the mother's
sentiment about strangers. High deflections in a situation produce an
aura of unlikeliness or uncanniness.[7] It is theorized that high deflections maintained over time generate psychological stress.[8]
The basic cybernetic
idea of affect control theory can be stated in terms of deflections. An
individual selects a behavior that produces the minimum deflections for
concepts involved in the action. Minimization of deflections is
described by equations derived with calculus from empirical
impression-formation equations.[9]
Action
On
entering a scene an individual defines the situation by assigning
identities to each participant, frequently in accord with an
encompassing social institution.[10]
While defining the situation, the individual tries to maintain the
affective meaning of self through adoption of an identity whose
sentiment serves as a surrogate for the individual's self-sentiment.[11]
The identities assembled in the definition of the situation determine
the sentiments that the individual tries to maintain behaviorally.
Confirming sentiments associated with institutional identities –
like doctor–patient, lawyer–client, or professor–student – creates
institutionally relevant role behavior.[12]
Confirming sentiments associated with negatively evaluated
identities – like bully, glutton, loafer, or scatterbrain – generates deviant behavior.[13]
Affect control theory's sentiment databases and mathematical model are combined in a computer simulation program[14] for analyzing social interaction in various cultures.
Emotions
According to affect control theory, an event generates emotions
for the individuals involved in the event by changing impressions of
the individuals. The emotion is a function of the impression created of
the individual and of the difference between that impression and the
sentiment attached to the individual's identity[15]
Thus, for example, an event that creates a negative impression of an
individual generates unpleasant emotion for that person, and the
unpleasantness is worse if the individual believes she has a highly
valued identity. Similarly, an event creating a positive impression
generates a pleasant emotion, all the more pleasant if the individual
believes he has a disvalued identity in the situation.
Non-linear equations describing how transients and fundamentals
combine to produce emotions have been derived in empirical studies[16] Affect control theory's computer simulation program[17] uses these equations to predict emotions that arise in social interaction, and displays the predictions via facial expressions that are computer drawn,[18] as well as in terms of emotion words.
Based on cybernetic studies by Pavloski[19] and Goldstein,[20] that utilise perceptual control theory, Heise[21]
hypothesizes that emotion is distinct from stress. For example, a
parent enjoying intensely pleasant emotions while interacting with an
offspring suffers no stress. A homeowner attending to a sponging house
guest may feel no emotion and yet be experiencing substantial stress.
Interpretations
Others' behaviors are interpreted so as to minimize the deflections they cause.[22]
For example, a man turning away from another and exiting through a
doorway could be engaged in several different actions, like departing
from, deserting, or escaping from the other. Observers choose among the
alternatives so as to minimize deflections associated with their
definitions of the situation. Observers who assigned different
identities to the observed individuals could have different
interpretations of the behavior.
Re-definition of the situation may follow an event that causes
large deflections which cannot be resolved by reinterpreting the
behavior. In this case, observers assign new identities that are
confirmed by the behavior.[23]
For example, seeing a father slap a son, one might re-define the father
as an abusive parent, or perhaps as a strict disciplinarian; or one
might re-define the son as an arrogant brat. Affect control theory's
computer program predicts the plausible re-identifications, thereby
providing a formal model for labeling theory.
The sentiment associated with an identity can change to befit the
kinds of events in which that identity is involved, when situations
keep arising where the identity is deflected in the same way, especially
when identities are informal and non-institutionalized.[24]
Applications
Affect
control theory has been used in research on emotions, gender, social
structure, politics, deviance and law, the arts, and business. Affect
Control Theory was analyzed through the use of Quantitative Methods in
research, using mathematics to look at data and interpret their
findings. However, recent applications of this theory have explored the
concept of Affect Control Theory through Qualitative Research Methods.
This process involves obtaining data through the use of interviews,
observations, and questionnaires. Affect Control Theory has been
explored through Qualitative measures in interviewing the family,
friends, and loved ones of individuals who were murdered, looking at how
the idea of forgiveness changes based on their interpretation of the
situation.[25]
Computer programs have also been an important part of understanding
Affect Control Theory, beginning with the use of "Interact," a computer
program designed to create social situations with the user to understand
how an individual will react based on what is happening within the
moment. "Interact" has been an essential tool in research, using it to
understand social interaction and the maintenance of affect between
individuals.[26]
The use of interviews and observations have improved the understanding
of Affect Control Theory through Qualitative research methods. A
bibliography of research studies in these areas is provided by David R. Heise[27] and at the research program's website.
micro-magnet |Common
to all eukaryotic cells, these filaments are primarily structural in
function and are an important component of the cytoskeleton, along with
microtubules and often the intermediate filaments. Microfilaments range
from 5 to 9 nanometers in diameter and are designed to bear large
amounts of tension. In association with myosin, microfilaments
help to generate the forces used in cellular contraction and basic cell
movements. The filaments also enable a dividing cell to pinch off into
two cells and are involved in amoeboid movements of certain types of
cells.
Microfilaments are solid rods made of a protein known as actin. When it is first produced by the cell, actin appears in a globular form (G-actin;
see Figure 1). In microfilaments, however, which are also often
referred to as actin filaments, long polymerized chains of the molecules
are intertwined in a helix, creating a filamentous form of the protein (F-actin).
All of the subunits that compose a microfilament are connected in such
a way that they have the same orientation. Due to this fact, each
microfilament exhibits polarity, the two ends of the filament
being distinctly different. This polarity affects the growth rate of
microfilaments, one end (termed the plus end) typically assembling and
disassembling faster than the other (the minus end).
Unlike microtubules, which typically extend out from the centrosome
of a cell, microfilaments are typically nucleated at the plasma
membrane. Therefore, the periphery (edges) of a cell generally contains
the highest concentration of microfilaments. A number of external
factors and a group of special proteins influence microfilament
characteristics, however, and enable them to make rapid changes if
needed, even if the filaments must be completely disassembled in one
region of the cell and reassembled somewhere else. When found directly
beneath the plasma membrane, microfilaments are considered part of the
cell cortex, which regulates the shape and movement of the cell's
surface. Consequently, microfilaments play a key role in development
of various cell surface projections (as illustrated in Figure 2),
including filopodia, lamellipodia, and stereocilia.
Illustrated
in Figure 2 is a fluorescence digital image of an Indian Muntjac deer
skin fibroblast cell stained with fluorescent probes targeting the
nucleus (blue) and the actin cytoskeletal network (green).
Individually, microfilaments are relatively flexible. In the cells of
living organisms, however, the actin filaments are usually organized
into larger, much stronger structures by various accessory proteins.
The exact structural form that a group of microfilaments assumes depends
on their primary function and the particular proteins that bind them
together. For instance, in the core of surface protrusions called microspikes, microfilaments are organized into tight parallel bundles by the bundling protein fimbrin. Bundles of the filaments are less tightly packed together, however, when they are bound by alpha-actinin
or are associated with fibroblast stress fibers (the parallel green
fibers in Figure 2). Notably, the microfilament connections created by
some cross-linking proteins result in a web-like network or gel form
rather than filament bundles.
Over the course of evolutionary history of the cell, actin has
remained relatively unchanged. This, along with the fact that all
eukaryotic cells heavily depend upon the integrity of their actin
filaments in order to be able to survive the many stresses they are
faced with in their environment, makes actin an excellent target for
organisms seeking to injure cells. Accordingly, many plants, which are
unable to physically avoid predators that might want to eat them or harm
them in some other way, produce toxins that affect cellular actin and
microfilaments as a defensive mechanism. The death cap mushroom, for
example, produces a substance called phalloidin that binds to and stabilizes actin filaments, which can be fatal to cells.
This book has been written by an anesthesiologist because of a confluence of two fascinations. The first is the nature of consciousness, which anesthesiologists routinely erase and restore in their patients. The second is a fifteen year trail of notions that would not go away. While a third year medical student in 1972, I spent a summer research elective in a cancer laboratory. For some reason I became fascinated and fixated by one particular question. When cells divided, the chromosomes were separated and daughter cell architecture established by wispy strands called mitotic spindles (“microtubules”) and cylindrical organelles called centrioles. Somehow, the centrioles and spindles “knew” when to move, where to go, and what to do. The uncanny guidance and orientation mechanism of these tiny biomolecular structures seemed to require some kind of motorized intelligence.
At about the same time, electron microscopy techniques were revealing the interior of all living cells to be densely filled with wispy strands, some of which were identical to mitotic spindles. Interconnected in dynamic parallel networks, these structures were thought to serve a purely supportive, or mechanical structural role and were collectively termed the “cytoskeleton.”
But several factors suggested that the cytoskeleton was more than the structural “bones” of the cell: they manipulated dynamic activities, orchestrating complex and highly efficient processes such as cell growth, mitosis and transport. Another factor was a lack of any other candidate for “real time” dynamic organization within cells. Long term blueprints and genetic information clearly resided in DNA and RNA, and membranes performed dynamic functions at cell surfaces. However, a mechanism for the moment to moment execution, organization, and activities within cells remained unknown.
Where was the nervous system within the cell? Was there a biological controller?
This book is based on the premise that the cytoskeleton is the cell’s nervous system, the biological controller/computer. In the brain this implies that the basic levels of cognition are within nerve cells, that cytoskeletal filaments are the roots of consciousness.
The small size and rapid conformational activities of cytoskeletal proteins are just beyond the resolution of current technologies, so their potential dynamics remain unexplored and a cytoskeletal controlling capability untested. Near future technologies will be able to function in the nanoscale (nano = 10-9; nanometer = one billionth meter, nanosecond = one billionth second and will hopefully resolve these questions. If indeed cytoskeletal dynamics are the texture of intracellular information processing, these same “nanotechnologies” should enable direct monitoring, decoding and interfacing between biological and technological information devices. This in turn could result in important biomedical applications and perhaps a merger of mind and machine: Ultimate Computing.
A thorough consideration of these ideas involves a number of disciplines, all of which are at least tangentially related to anesthesiology. These include biochemistry, cognitive science, computer science, engineering, mathematics, microbiology, molecular biology, pharmacology, philosophy, physics, physiology, and psychology. As an expert in none, but a dabbler in all, I hope true experts in these fields will find my efforts never-the-less interesting.
Starting from a cytoskeletal perspective, this book flings metaphors at the truth. Perhaps one or more will land on target, or at least come close.
wikipedia | Since the 1940s, the DLVO theory has been used to explain phenomena
found in colloidal science, adsorption and many other fields. Due to the
more recent popularity of nanoparticle research, DLVO theory has become
even more popular because it can be used to explain behavior of both
material nanoparticles such as fullerene particles and microorganisms.
DLVO theory is a theory of colloidal dispersion stability in which zeta potential
is used to explain that as two particles approach one another their
ionic atmospheres begin to overlap and a repulsion force is developed.[1] In this theory, two forces are considered to impact on colloidal stability: Van der Waals forces and electrical double layer forces.
The total potential energy
is described as the sum of the attraction potential and the repulsion
potential. When two particles approach each other, electrostatic
repulsion increases and the interference between their electrical double layers increases. However, the Van der Waals
attraction also increases as they get closer. At each distance, the net
potential energy of the smaller value is subtracted from the larger
value.[2]
At very close distances, the combination of these forces results
in a deep attractive well, which is referred to as the primary minimum.
At larger distances, the energy profile goes through a maximum, or energy barrier, and subsequently passes through a shallow minimum, which is referred to as the secondary minimum.[3]
At the maximum of the energy barrier, repulsion is greater than
attraction. Particles rebound after interparticle contact, and remain
dispersed throughout the medium. The maximum energy needs to be greater
than the thermal energy. Otherwise, particles will aggregate due to the
attraction potential.[3]
The height of the barrier indicates how stable the system is. Since
particles have to overcome this barrier in order to aggregate, two
particles on a collision course must have sufficient kinetic energy due to their velocity and mass.[2]
If the barrier is cleared, then the net interaction is all attractive,
and as a result the particles aggregate. This inner region is often
referred to as an energy trap since the colloids can be considered to be trapped together by Van der Waals forces.[2]
For a colloidal system,
the thermodynamic equilibrium state may be reached when the particles
are in deep primary minimum. At primary minimum, attractive forces
overpower the repulsive forces at low molecular distances. Particles
coagulate and this process is not reversible.[4]
However, when the maximum energy barrier is too high to overcome, the
colloid particles may stay in the secondary minimum, where particles are
held together but more weakly than in the primary minimum.[5] Particles form weak attractions but are easily redispersed. Thus, the adhesion at secondary minimum can be reversible.[6]
Guardian | With Fukuyama's move into this territory, it may
be that bioethicists are going to be upstaged by political economists.
His question is clear: do we really want this post-human future, full of
bioengineered cyborgs? Should we just retreat behind the mantra -
originated by physicists who worked on the hydrogen bomb - that science
is progress, and cannot and will not be halted? Most US free marketeers
writing in this area take this view, in contrast to the European
tradition of regulating in the public interest. So the major surprise of
Fukuyama's book is that, in the field of human biotechnology at least,
he favours regulation.
He begins by
summarising what he sees as the current state of play in the science and
technology of genetic and brain sciences, in terms of their capacity to
extend healthy human life, to understand the roots of human behaviour
(intelligence, aggression, sexual orientation), and to control and
change that behaviour with drugs (Prozac, Ritalin and so on). Although
refreshingly sceptical about the claims made for the power and scope of
such drugs, he rightly argues that at the least they are harbingers of
increasingly effective new generations of psychochemicals.
He
is on less firm ground when dealing with genetic claims, where he
accepts at face value the rather suspect evidence for so-called "smart"
or "aggressive" mice engineered by adding or removing DNA from their
genomes. And sometimes he is way off course, as when he repeats the
once-fashionable 19th-century nostrum that "ontogeny recapitulates
phylogeny" - ie, that a human foetus relives its evolutionary history in
the nine months prior to birth. But for his purposes, such errors in
biological understanding aren't important, and his assessment of the
direction in which such work is heading seems about right.
That
some of us are sceptical about its feasibility should not prevent us
from looking hard at its potential consequences. We should be warned by
the example of Sir Ernest Rutherford, who knew more about the structure
of atoms in the early decades of the past century than anyone else, but
still insisted that the prospect of atomic power was "moonshine".
So
what should we do about it? The middle section of the book centres on
two classical philosophical problems viewed from within this new
context: human rights and human nature. The discourse of rights has
become very murky in recent years, in part, according to Fukuyama,
because of the rejection of naturalism. Naturalism would claim that
there is an intrinsic universal human nature, and that therefore ethics,
and as a consequence human "rights", can be derived from it.
These
assumptions together constitute what has been called the naturalistic
fallacy. Critics point out that human nature can be expressed only
within the diverse and historically contingent societies that humans
create, and therefore cannot be understood a priori. There is no
"nature" outside social context, and within the limits of evolved human
biology the societies that we have created are extraordinarily diverse.
In
any event, as philosophers from Hume onwards have pointed out, one
cannot derive an "ought" from an "is". Evolutionary psychologists reject
the first criticism, and despite their protestations that they wouldn't
dream of doing so, happily spend their time deriving multiple oughts
from diverse ises. Fukuyama accepts their claims to universalism in
order to build his case that the naturalistic fallacy is itself
fallacious. Hence, he argues, there is a human nature on which human
rights can be based. And insofar as human biotechnology threatens to
interfere with that human nature, it is essential that it be regulated.
Sound conclusion, faulty premises.
So,
finally, to the tough question: how to bell this particular cat. Most
biotech is done in the US, and outside federal laboratories it is
largely unregulated. But the situation is paradoxical, as US
conservative religious views on, for instance, stem-cell research clash
with an otherwise deregulatory agenda. (Legislation to ban so-called
therapeutic cloning is currently before Congress, at the same time as
the US withdraws from the Kyoto and Start treaties and weakens
environmental protection.)
historynewsnetwork | The
journalist Annie Jacobsen recently published
Operation Paperclip: The Secret Intelligence Program that Brought
Nazi Scientists to America (Little Brown, 2014).Scouring
the archives and unearthing previously undisclosed records as well as
drawing on earlier work, Jacobsen recounts in chilling detail a very
peculiar effort on the part of the U.S. military to utlize the very
scientists who had been essential to Hitler’s war effort.
As
I read your book I started thinking about the various Nazi genre
films such as; The Boys from Brazil, The Odessa File, and Marathon
Man — they all hold to a similar premise, key Nazi’s escape
Germany after the war and plot in various ways to do bad things.
Apparently truth is stranger than fiction. What was Operation
Paperclip?
Operation
Paperclip was a classified program to bring Nazi scientists to
America right after World War II. It had, however, a benign public
face. The war department had issued a press release saying that good
German scientists would be coming to America to help out in our
scientific endeavors.
But
it was not benign at all, as seen in the character of Otto
Ambros, a man, as you explain, was keen on helping U.S. soldiers in
matters of hygiene by offering them soap, this soon after they had
conquered Germany. Who was Ambros?
Otto
Ambros I must say was one of the most dark-hearted characters that I
wrote about in this book. He was Hitler’s favorite chemist, and I
don’t say that lightly. I found a document in the National
Archives, I don’t believe it had ever been revealed before, that
showed that during the war Hitler gave Ambros a one million
Reichsmark bonus for his scientific acumen. The reason was two-fold.
Ambros worked on the Reich’s secret nerve agent program, but he
also invented synthetic rubber, that was called buna. The reason
rubber was so important — if you think about the Reich’s
war-machine and how tanks need treads, aircraft need wheels — the
Reich needed rubber. By inventing synthetic rubber, Ambros became
Hitler’s favorite chemist.
Not
only that when the Reich decided to develop a factory at Auschwitz, —
the death camp had a third territory, there was Auschwitz, there was
Birkenau — they did it in a third territory called Auschwitz
III also known as
Monowitvz-Buna. This was where synthetic
rubber was going to be manufactured using prisoners who would be
spared the gas chamber as they were put to work, and most often
worked to death by the Reich war machine. The person, the general
manager there at Auschwitz III, was Otto Ambros. Ambros was one of
the last individuals to leave Auschwitz, this is in the last days of
January 1945 as the Russians are about to liberate the death camp.
Ambros is there according to these documents I have located in
Germany, destroying evidence right up until the very end.
After
the war, Ambros was sought by the Allies and later found,
interrogated and put on trial at Nuremberg, where he was convicted of
mass-murder and slavery. He was sentenced to prison, but in the early
1950s as the Cold War became elevated he was given clemency by the
U.S. High Commissioner John McCloy and released from prison. When he
was sentenced, the Nuremberg judges took away all his finances,
including that one million Reichsmark bonus from Hitler. When McCloy
gave him clemency he also restored Otto Ambros’ finances, so he got
back what was left of that money. He was then given a contract with
the U.S. Department of Energy.
He
actually came to work in the United States?
Otto
Ambros remains one of the most difficult cases to crack in terms of
Paperclip. While I was able to unearth some new and horrifying
information about his postwar life, most of it remains, “lost or
missing,” which I take to mean classified. We do know for a fact
that Ambros came to the United States two, possibly three times. As a
convicted war criminal traveling to the United States he would have
needed special papers from the U.S. State Department. The State
Department, however, informed me through the Freedom of Information
Act that those documents are lost or missing.
The
plan isn't to re-create true woolly mammoths, but rather to bring their
cold-adapted genetic traits, which include small ears and more body
fat, to their elephant cousins, creating a hybrid that can wander the
tundra where mammoths haven't been seen for 10,000 years. Colossal's
co-founders are Chief Executive Ben Lamm, who started five companies before this, and George Church, a Harvard Medical School professor with deep CRISPR expertise.
"Our
true North Star is a successful restoration of the woolly mammoth, but
also its successful rewilding into interbreeding herds in the Arctic,"
Lamm said. "We're now focusing on having our first calves in the next
four to six years."
It's an interesting illustration of an imperative sweeping the tech
world: Don't just make money, help the planet, too. Tesla's mission is
to electrify transport to get rid of fossil fuels that hurt Earth. Bolt Threads
wants to replace leather with a fungal fiber-based equivalent that's
easier on the environment than animal agriculture. Colossal hopes its
work will draw attention to biodiversity problems and ultimately help
fix them.
Colossal has raised $15 million so far, led by investment firm Tulco.
The startup's 19 employees work at its Dallas headquarters and in
offices in Boston and Austin, Texas, and it's using its funds to hire
more.
Artificial wombs and other technology spinoffs
Church said he expects spinoffs from the company's biotechnology and genetics work.
"The
pipeline of large scale genome engineering techniques can be applied to
many other applications beyond de-extinction, and therefore [are] most
promising for commercialization," he said.
One technology ripe for commercialization is multiplex genome engineering, a technique Church helped develop that speeds genetic editing by making multiple changes to DNA at once.
Colossal
also hopes to develop artificial wombs to grow its mammoth embryos.
Just growing 10 woolly mammoths with surrogate elephant mothers isn't
enough to get to the large-scale herds the company envisions.
At
the foundation of Colossal's work is CRISPR. This technology, adapted
from a method bacteria evolved to identify attacking viruses and chop up
their DNA, is now a mainstay of genetic engineering, and Church has
been involved since CRISPR's earliest days.
There are other ways
Colossal hopes to help. Its gene editing technology could artificially
add genetic diversity to species with only small surviving populations,
Lamm said.
americanthinker | What happens when a population of introverts, hypochondriacs, and
obsessive-compulsives is continuously bombarded with messages to seclude
and disinfect themselves, for fear that COVID-19 prickle-balls lurk
everywhere, waiting to attack?
What happens is that emotionally damaged people start driving bad politics and bad policy.
"Fifteen
days to flatten the curve." That phrase is surely now banned by
corporate media, for it reminds us how the supposedly acute health
threat of March 2020 was repeatedly re-packaged to keep populations
off-balance and out of business not for 15 days, but for 15 months.
“Outrageous.” @BillMaher railed against Facebook and Google for banning and suppressing content about lab leak. “You were wrong, Google and Facebook....The CDC’s been wrong about a lot shit, this is outrageous that I can’t look this information up.” #RealTimepic.twitter.com/28dwaQGz9W
Never
in modern times has a health issue been so flagrantly politicized, nor
wielded as a club, as the Wuhan virus has been. Outside a few rational
locales, almost every nation drank the COVID Kool-Aid, competing to see
who could enforce the stupidest rules.
Naturally, academia would lead the way:
Among
Americans aged 15–24, a total of 587 died of COVID in 2020, according
to the CDC, representing about 0.16%, or about 1 in 642, of COVID
deaths. If you are young, you have essentially no chance of dying of
COVID. The low youth mortality impact from COVID was known by April
2020.
Yet many universities now require these low-risk young
people to inject the experimental vaccine or be banished from
campus. Did you already catch the WuFlu and have antibodies? Too
bad. The great pulsating brains of academia cannot differentiate.
Young people who want to serve their
country are also targets: the passive-aggressive command at West Point
compels the unvaccinated to sacrifice a week's vacation to quarantine
and then to wear masks in the most ridiculous circumstances imaginable —
to harass them and make them look like fools. Military leaders do not
care whether the experimental vaccines might do more harm than good,
especially on a previously COVID-exposed youth. Take the jab and shut
up, cadet; Colonel Suckup needs to PowerPoint his 100% compliance
success.
interfluidity | I think it makes perfect sense that liberalism has become a kind of
upper-class creed. So long as it is, liberalism is in peril, and should
be. There are illiberal currents on both the left and right that would
exploit popular dissatisfaction to remake society in ways that I would
very much dislike, whether by restoring a “traditional” hierarchy of
implicit caste, or by granting diverse professionals even more
prescriptive authority than they already have at the expense of liberty
for the less enlightened.
My strong preference is that we do neither of
these things, and instead restore the broad appeal of liberalism by
“leveling up”. We should ensure that everyone has the means to rely upon
some mix of the market and the state to see to their material welfare,
reducing the economic role of networks of personal reciprocity and
history. This would render the good parts of liberalism more broadly and
ethically accessible.
Reducing economic stratification makes liberal
proceduralism more credible pretty automatically. When economic and
institutional power are dispersed and broadly shared, no one has a
built-in edge, and aspirations of neutrality and fairness become
plausible. Once we view society less through a lens of domination and
oppression — because in a more materially equal society that will be a
less credible lens — it will become possible to agree on a common,
stable set of commercial and professional mores rather than extend
deference to myriad communities’ evolving sensibilities. It will be
practical for the broad public to learn and understand those common
mores, and so not be excluded or set apart from professional communities
by what come to seem like inscrutable courtly conventions.
There are undoubtedly tensions between liberalism and egalitarianism.
But they are yin to one another’s yang. Opposites in a sense, they must
be reconciled if either is to survive.
unlimitedhangout | The SMART Health Cards framework was developed by a team led by the chief architect of Microsoft Healthcare, Josh Mandel, who was previously the Health IT Ecosystem lead for Verily, formerly Google Life Sciences. Verily is currently heavily involved in COVID-19 testing throughout the United States, particularly in California, and links test recipients’ results to their Google accounts. Their other COVID-19 initiatives have been criticized due to still-unresolved privacy concerns, something that has also plagued several of Verily’s other efforts pre-COVID-19, including those involving Mandel.
Of particular concern is that Verily, and by extension Google, created Project Baseline, which has been collecting
“actionable genetic information” with a focus on “population health”
from participants since 2017. Yet, during the COVID-19 process, Project
Baseline has become an important component
of Verily’s COVID-19 testing efforts, raising the unsettling
possibility that Verily has been obtaining Americans’ DNA data through
its COVID-19 testing activities. While Verily has not addressed this
possibility directly, it is worth noting that Google has been heavily
involved in amassing genomic data for several years. For instance, in
2013, Google Genomics was founded
with the goal of storing and analyzing DNA data on Google Cloud
servers. Now known as Cloud Life Sciences, the Google subsidiary has
since developed AI algorithms that can “build your genome sequence” and “identify all the mutations that an individual inherits from their parents.”
Google
also has close ties with the best-known DNA testing companies in the
United States, such as Ancestry.com. Ancestry, recently purchased by
private-equity behemoth Blackstone, shares data with a secretive Google subsidiary
that uses genomic data to develop lifespan-extending therapies. In
addition, the wife of Google cofounder Sergey Brin, Anne Wojcicki, is
the cofounder and CEO of DNA testing company 23andMe. Wojcicki is also
the sister of the CEO of Google-owned YouTube, Susan Wojcicki.
Google
and the majority of VCI’s backers—Microsoft, Salesforce, Cerner, Epic,
the Mayo Clinic, and MITRE Corporation, Change Healthcare—are also
prominent members of the MITRE-run COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition. Other members of that coalition include the CIA’s In-Q-Tel and the CIA-linked data-mining firm Palantir,
as well as a myriad of health-care and health-record companies. The
coalition fits well with the ambitions of Google and like-minded
companies that have sought to gain access to troves of American health
data under the guise of combatting COVID-19.
The COVID-19 Healthcare Coalition describes itself
as a public-private partnership that has enabled “the critical
infrastructure to enable collaboration and shared analytics” on COVID-19
through the sharing of health-care and COVID-19 data among members.
That this coalition and VCI are intimately involved with MITRE
Corporation is significant, given that MITRE is a well-known, yet
secretive, contractor for the US government, specifically the CIA and
other intelligence agencies, which has developed Orwellian surveillance and biometric technologies, including several now focused on COVID-19.
Just three days before the public announcement of VCI’s establishment, Microsoft Healthcare and Google’s Verily announced a partnership
along with MIT and Harvard’s Broad Institute to share the companies’
cloud data and AI technologies with a “global network of more than
168,000 health and life sciences partners” to accelerate the Terra platform.
Terra, originally developed by the Broad Institute and Verily, is an
“open data ecosystem” focused on biomedical research, specifically the
fields of cancer genomics, population genetics, and viral genomics. The biomedical data
Terra amasses includes not only genetic data but also medical-imaging,
biometric signals, and electronic health records. Google, through its
partnership with the Pentagon, which was announced last September, has
moved to utilize the analysis of such data in order to “predictively diagnose” diseases such as cancer and COVID-19. US military contractors, such as Advanced Technology International, have been developing wearables that would apply that AI-driven predictive diagnosis technology to COVID-19 diagnoses.
newsweek |In this extract from When Google Met WikiLeaks Assange describes his encounter with Schmidt and how he came to conclude that it was far from an innocent exchange of views.
Eric Schmidt is an influential figure, even among the parade of
powerful characters with whom I have had to cross paths since I founded
WikiLeaks. In mid-May 2011 I was under house arrest in rural Norfolk,
England, about three hours' drive northeast of London. The crackdown
against our work was in full swing and every wasted moment seemed like
an eternity. It was hard to get my attention.
But when my
colleague Joseph Farrell told me the executive chairman of Google wanted
to make an appointment with me, I was listening.
In some ways the higher echelons of Google seemed more distant and
obscure to me than the halls of Washington. We had been locking horns
with senior U.S. officials for years by that point. The mystique had
worn off. But the power centers growing up in Silicon Valley were still
opaque and I was suddenly conscious of an opportunity to understand and
influence what was becoming the most influential company on earth.
Schmidt had taken over as CEO of Google in 2001 and built it into an
empire.
I was intrigued that the mountain would come to Muhammad. But it was
not until well after Schmidt and his companions had been and gone that I
came to understand who had really visited me.
The stated reason
for the visit was a book. Schmidt was penning a treatise with Jared
Cohen, the director of Google Ideas, an outfit that describes itself as
Google's in-house "think/do tank."
I knew little else about Cohen
at the time. In fact, Cohen had moved to Google from the U.S. State
Department in 2010. He had been a fast-talking "Generation Y" ideas man
at State under two U.S. administrations, a courtier from the world of
policy think tanks and institutes, poached in his early twenties.
He
became a senior advisor for Secretaries of State Rice and Clinton. At
State, on the Policy Planning Staff, Cohen was soon christened "Condi's
party-starter," channeling buzzwords from Silicon Valley into U.S.
policy circles and producing delightful rhetorical concoctions such as
"Public Diplomacy 2.0." On his Council on Foreign Relations adjunct staff page he listed his expertise as "terrorism; radicalization; impact of connection technologies on 21st century statecraft; Iran."
It
was Cohen who, while he was still at the Department of State, was said
to have emailed Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey to delay scheduled maintenance
in order to assist the aborted 2009 uprising in Iran. His documented
love affair with Google began the same year when he befriended Eric
Schmidt as they together surveyed the post-occupation wreckage of
Baghdad. Just months later, Schmidt re-created Cohen's natural habitat
within Google itself by engineering a "think/do tank" based in New York
and appointing Cohen as its head. Google Ideas was born.
Later that year two co-wrote a policy piece
for the Council on Foreign Relations' journal Foreign Affairs, praising
the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an
instrument of U.S. foreign policy. Describing what they called
"coalitions of the connected," Schmidt and Cohen claimed that:
Democratic states that have built
coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with
their connection technologies.…
They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world [emphasis added].
taibbi | The thesis of The Revolt of the Public is that traditional
centralized powers are losing — have lost — authority, in large part
because of the demystifying effect of the Internet. The information
explosion undermined the elite monopoly on truth, exposing
long-concealed flaws. Many analysts had noted the disruptive power of
the Internet, but what made Gurri unique is that he also predicted with
depressingly humorous accuracy how traditional hierarchies would respond
to this challenge: in a delusional, ham-fisted, authoritarian manner
that would only confirm the worst suspicions of the public, accelerating
the inevitable throw-the-bums-out campaigns. This assessment of the
motive for rising public intransigence was not exactly welcomed, but
either way, as Kling wrote, “Martin Gurri saw it coming.”
Gurri also noted that public revolts would likely arrive unattached
to coherent plans, pushing society into interminable cycles of zero-sum
clashes between myopic authorities and their increasingly furious
subjects. He called this a “paralysis of distrust,” where outsiders can
“neutralize but not replace the center” and “networks can protest and
overthrow, but never govern.” With a nod to Yeats, Gurri summed up: “The
center cannot hold, and the border has no clue what to do about it.”
The Revolt of the Public became
a cult classic in the Trump years for a variety of reasons, resonating
with audiences spanning the political spectrum, from left to right to in
between, everywhere except the traditional media consensus. It
describes a basic problem of authority in the digital age and for that
reason will continue to have relevance into the future. But its most
striking feature is how completely it nailed the coming Trump era.
Published in 2014, The Revolt of the Public may
be alone among the countless books about the Trump years to correctly
peg its core destabilizing problem. While conventional pundits blame
everyone from Russians to white nationalists to “fake news” for all that
currently ails us, Gurri focused on the inherent problem of authority
in the digital age. If you follow his thinking, the specific forms that
recent revolts have taken — Brexit, Trump, etc. — have been far less
important than what he describes as the “nihilist impulse” behind them,
“the wish to smash down whatever stands.” In America, this impulse found
Trump, not the other way around. It also could have (and has, in other
countries) come from the left instead of the right. The relentless focus
on Trump as the center of all evil on earth has mostly served to
deflect from a broader narrative about distrust of institutional
authority that far pre-dates Trump.
Through a series of case
studies ranging from Egypt to Tunisia to Italy to the campaign of Barack
Obama, Gurri lays out how snowballing disgust with the blundering
arrogance of ruling parties was everywhere leading to upheavals. In the
Italian general elections of February 2013,
a new party called the “Five Star” movement won 25% of the vote.
Inspired by a comedian-blogger named Beppe Grillo, named after the
Jiminy Cricket character in Pinocchio, the party, Gurri wrote,
“lacked a coherent program. The single unifying principle was a deep
loathing of the Italian political establishment.”
Gurri saw such
outbursts everywhere, even in the election of Barack Obama, since “the
U.S. presidential elections of 2008 [were] an early instance of the
public on the move against the established order.” The political
scientists and pundits who puzzle over the fact that a great many people
voted for both Obama and Trump, shouldn’t. Both men positioned
themselves as outsiders, both were aided by a lack of a track record and
a deliberately vague platform, making both effective vehicles for
expressing popular discontent.
corbettreport | On November 10, 2020, Joe Biden announced the members of a
coronavirus task force that would advise his transition team on setting
COVID-19-related policies for the Biden administration. That task force
included Dr. Ezekiel Emanuel, a bioethicist and senior fellow at the
Center for American Progress.
JOE BIDEN: So that’s why today I’ve
named the COVID-19 Transition Advisory Board comprised of distinguished
public health experts to help our transition team translate the
Biden-Harris COVID-19 plan into action. A blueprint that we can put in
place as soon as Kamala and I are sworn into office on January 20th,
2021.
ANCHOR: We’ve learned that a doctor from
our area is on the president-elect’s task force. Eyewitness News
reporter Howard Monroe picks up the story.
THOMAS FARLEY: I know he’s a very bright, capable
guy and i think that’s a great choice to represent doctors in general in
addressing this epidemic.
HOWARD MONROE: Philadelphia health commissioner Dr.
Thomas Farley this morning on Eyewitness News. He praised
president-elect Joe Biden’s transition team for picking Dr. Ezekiel
Emanuel to join his coronavirus task force. He is the chair of the
Department of Medical Ethics and Health Policy at the University of
Pennsylvania.
That announcement meant very little to the general public, who likely
only know Emanuel as a talking head on tv panel discussions or as the
brother of former Obama chief of staff and ex-mayor of Chicago, Rahm
Emanuel. But for those who have followed Ezekiel Emanuel’s career as a
bioethicist and his history of advocating controversial reforms of the
American health care system, his appointment was an ominous sign of
things to come.
He has argued
that the Hippocratic Oath is obsolete and that it leads to doctors
believing that they should do everything they can for their patients
rather than letting them die to focus on higher priorities. He has
argued that people should choose to die at age 75 to spare society the burden of looking after them in old age. As a health policy advisor to the Obama administration he helped craft the Affordable Care Act, which fellow Obamacare architect Jonathan Gruber admitted was only passed thanks to the stupidity of the American public.
JONATHAN GRUBER: OK? Just like the people—transparency—lack
of transparency is a huge political advantage. And basically, you know,
call it the stupidity of the American voter or whatever, but basically
that was really critical to getting the thing to pass.
During the course of the deliberations over Obamacare, the issue of
“death panels” arose. Although the term “death panel” was immediately
lampooned by government apologists in the media, the essence of the
argument was one that Emanuel has long advocated: appointing a body or
council to ration health care, effectively condemning those deemed
unworthy of medical attention to death.
ROB MASS: When I first heard about you
it was in the context of an article you wrote right around the time that
the Affordable Care Act was under consideration. And the article was
entitled “Principles for the Allocation of Scarce Medical Interventions.”
I don’t know how many of you remember there was a lot of talk at the
time about [how] this new Obamacare was going to create death panels.
And he wrote an article which I thought should have been required
reading for the entire country about how rationing medical care—you
think that that’s going to start with with the Affordable Care Act?
Medical care is rationed all the time and it must be rationed. Explain
that.
EZEKIEL EMANUEL: So there are two kinds of
“rationing,” you might say. One is absolute scarcity leading to
rationing and that’s when we don’t simply don’t have enough of something
and you have to choose between people. We do that with organs for
transplantation. We don’t have enough. Some people will get it, other
people won’t and, tragically, people will die. Similarly if we ever have
a flu pandemic—not if but when we have a flu pandemic—we’re not going
to have enough vaccine, we’re not going to have enough respirators,
we’re not going to have enough hospital beds. We’re just going to have
to choose between people.
off-guardian | The world has been fixated for months on novel-coronavirus PCR testing, contact tracing and vaccination.
Meanwhile, another major part of the Covid biomedical
complex has received far less attention: the use of antibodies for
detecting, diagnosing and treating infection with the novel coronavirus.
Hundreds of antibodies have been approved for these purposes since January 2020. And hundreds more are poised to start being marketed soon.
This is part of the biomedical gold rush: by last summer already, antibodies were on track to become the most lucrative medical product, with global revenue projected to reach nearly half a trillion dollars by 2024. Profit margins in the range of 67% aren’t uncommon.
Pharma giants
such as AstraZeneca, Novartis, GlaxoSmithKline and Eli Lilly are among
the companies grabbing the largest chunks of the
novel-coronavirus-antibody market. And some of the most muscular
government agencies, including Anthony Fauci’s US National Institute of
Allergy and Infectious Diseases and the US’s Defense Advanced Research
Projects Agency, are part of the action (see, for example, the
second-last section of this article, on antibodies used to treat Covid).
Virtually every study and piece of marketing material
related to Covid is premised on scientists having positively and
correctly identified the presence of the novel coronavirus (also known
as SARS-CoV-2) in the material they’re working with.
The job of that identification is usually given to
antibodies that are said to bind to the novel coronavirus. The
assumption is these antibodies are able to pick out the virus and only
the virus from among every other organism and substance surrounding it.
Unfortunately it turns out that the
antibodies rarely (if ever) do that. This is because of, among other
things, inadequate verification of the antibodies’ accuracy in targeting
the virus by the companies that manufacture and sell them. And there’s
even less verification by government regulators.
Let’s take a 30,000-foot tour of a couple of the main
features of the antibody-industry landscape, which is awash in
complexity and cash.
bloomberg | If messenger-RNA vaccines are the breakout medicine of the pandemic,
then the tiny lipid spheres that bring them into people’s cells are the
unsung heroes.
Lipids catapulted toward the top of the world’s health-care priority list because the potent vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna Inc., as well as others still being developed by CureVac NV and Sanofi,
can’t do their job without them. Messenger RNA, the genetic material at
the heart of these vaccines, needs a protective shell composed of four
different types of the fatty material -- collectively called a lipid
nanoparticle -- so that it can successfully journey from factory to a
person’s arm, and then get inside of human cells.
“This is an incredibly complex process,” said President Joe Biden,
touring a Michigan factory last month alongside Pfizer Chief Executive
Officer Albert Bourla, who vowed to produce more lipids -- along with mRNA -- at the facility as part of a push to double vaccine supplies. Biden marveled
at the close collaboration between machine technicians, chemists and
biologists who were “pioneering technologies that less than a year ago
were little more than theories and aspirations.”
For Bob Langer, those aspirations stretch back a lot
longer. As early as the 1970s, he was trying to prove you can capture
and transport big, complex molecules like DNA and RNA inside tiny
particles without destroying them.
“Everybody told me it was
impossible,” he recalled during a phone interview. “I got my first nine
grants rejected. Couldn’t get a faculty job.”
Turns out it was possible, and Langer wasn’t out of a job for long. Today, the professor has a chemical engineering lab
at Massachusetts Institute of Technology bearing his name, focused on
the intersection of biotechnology and materials science. Following
decades of development, Langer in 2010 co-founded Moderna, where he’s
still on the board. That company -- like BioNTech and CureVac -- is
developing mRNA vaccines for infectious diseases beyond just Covid,
along with therapies for cancer and rare illnesses.
“I don’t think
people realized just how important the delivery systems are to all
kinds of medicines,” Langer said. “If you get more and more complex
medicines, like RNA and DNA and things like that, you’ll see more and
more work on delivery systems and more and more problems will be solved.
Lipid nanoparticles are going to be a big piece of the arsenal.”
Reuters | BGI Group, the world’s largest genomics company, has worked with China’s
military on research that ranges from mass testing for respiratory
pathogens to brain science, a Reuters review of research, patent filings
and other documents has found.
The review,
of more than 40 publicly available documents and research papers in
Chinese and English, shows BGI’s links to the People’s Liberation Army
(PLA) include research with China’s top military supercomputing experts.
The extent of those links has not previously been reported.
BGI
has sold millions of COVID-19 test kits outside China since the
outbreak of the new coronavirus pandemic, including to Europe, Australia
and the United States. Shares of BGI Genomics Co, the company’s
subsidiary listed on the Shenzhen stock exchange, have doubled in price
over the past 12 months, giving it a market value of about $9 billion.
But
top U.S. security officials have warned American labs against using
Chinese tests because of concern China was seeking to gather foreign
genetic data for its own research. BGI has denied that.
The
documents reviewed by Reuters neither contradict nor support that U.S.
suspicion. Still, the material shows that the links between the Chinese
military and BGI run deeper than previously understood, illustrating how
China has moved to integrate private technology companies into
military-related research under President Xi Jinping.
The
U.S. government has recently been warned by an expert panel that
adversary countries and non-state actors might find and target genetic
weaknesses in the U.S. population and a competitor such as China could
use genetics to augment the strength of its own military personnel.
BGI
has worked on PLA projects seeking to make members of the ethnic Han
Chinese majority less susceptible to altitude sickness, Reuters found,
genetic research that would benefit soldiers in some border areas.
Elsa
Kania, an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American
Security think tank, who has provided testimony to U.S. Congressional
committees, told Reuters that China’s military has pushed research on
brain science, gene editing and the creation of artificial genomes that
could have an application in future bioweapons. She added that such
weapons are not currently technically feasible.
BGI’s pattern of collaboration with the Chinese military was a “reasonable concern to raise” for U.S. officials, said Kania.
Nature | mRNA vaccines represent a promising alternative to conventional vaccine
approaches because of their high potency, capacity for rapid development
and potential for low-cost manufacture and safe administration.
However, their application has until recently been restricted by the
instability and inefficient in vivo delivery of mRNA. Recent
technological advances have now largely overcome these issues, and
multiple mRNA vaccine platforms against infectious diseases and several
types of cancer have demonstrated encouraging results in both animal
models and humans. This Review provides a detailed overview of mRNA
vaccines and considers future directions and challenges in advancing
this promising vaccine platform to widespread therapeutic use.
Vaccines prevent many millions of illnesses and save numerous lives every year1.
As a result of widespread vaccine use, the smallpox virus has been
completely eradicated and the incidence of polio, measles and other
childhood diseases has been drastically reduced around the world2.
Conventional vaccine approaches, such as live attenuated and
inactivated pathogens and subunit vaccines, provide durable protection
against a variety of dangerous diseases3.
Despite this success, there remain major hurdles to vaccine development
against a variety of infectious pathogens, especially those better able
to evade the adaptive immune response4.
Moreover, for most emerging virus vaccines, the main obstacle is not
the effectiveness of conventional approaches but the need for more rapid
development and large-scale deployment. Finally, conventional vaccine
approaches may not be applicable to non-infectious diseases, such as
cancer. The development of more potent and versatile vaccine platforms
is therefore urgently needed.
Nucleic acid therapeutics have
emerged as promising alternatives to conventional vaccine approaches.
The first report of the successful use of in vitro transcribed
(IVT) mRNA in animals was published in 1990, when reporter gene mRNAs
were injected into mice and protein production was detected5.
A subsequent study in 1992 demonstrated that administration of
vasopressin-encoding mRNA in the hypothalamus could elicit a
physiological response in rats6.
However, these early promising results did not lead to substantial
investment in developing mRNA therapeutics, largely owing to concerns
associated with mRNA instability, high innate immunogenicity and
inefficient in vivo delivery. Instead, the field pursued DNA-based and protein-based therapeutic approaches7,8.
Over
the past decade, major technological innovation and research investment
have enabled mRNA to become a promising therapeutic tool in the fields
of vaccine development and protein replacement therapy. The use of mRNA
has several beneficial features over subunit, killed and live attenuated
virus, as well as DNA-based vaccines. First, safety: as mRNA is a
non-infectious, non-integrating platform, there is no potential risk of
infection or insertional mutagenesis. Additionally, mRNA is degraded by
normal cellular processes, and its in vivo half-life can be regulated through the use of various modifications and delivery methods9,10,11,12. The inherent immunogenicity of the mRNA can be down-modulated to further increase the safety profile9,12,13. Second, efficacy: various modifications make mRNA more stable and highly translatable9,12,13. Efficient in vivo
delivery can be achieved by formulating mRNA into carrier molecules,
allowing rapid uptake and expression in the cytoplasm (reviewed in Refs 10,11).
mRNA is the minimal genetic vector; therefore, anti-vector immunity is
avoided, and mRNA vaccines can be administered repeatedly. Third,
production: mRNA vaccines have the potential for rapid, inexpensive and
scalable manufacturing, mainly owing to the high yields of in vitro transcription reactions.
The
mRNA vaccine field is developing extremely rapidly; a large body of
preclinical data has accumulated over the past several years, and
multiple human clinical trials have been initiated. In this Review, we
discuss current mRNA vaccine approaches, summarize the latest findings,
highlight challenges and recent successes, and offer perspectives on the
future of mRNA vaccines. The data suggest that mRNA vaccines have the
potential to solve many of the challenges in vaccine development for
both infectious diseases and cancer.
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 ...
