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.
quanta | Today, the most powerful artificial intelligence systems employ a
type of machine learning called deep learning. Their algorithms learn by
processing massive amounts of data through hidden layers of
interconnected nodes, referred to as deep neural networks. As their name
suggests, deep neural networks were inspired by the real neural
networks in the brain, with the nodes modeled after real neurons — or,
at least, after what neuroscientists knew about neurons back in the
1950s, when an influential neuron model called the perceptron was born.
Since then, our understanding of the computational complexity of single
neurons has dramatically expanded, so biological neurons are known to be
more complex than artificial ones. But by how much?
To find out, David Beniaguev, Idan Segev and Michael London,
all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, trained an artificial deep
neural network to mimic the computations of a simulated biological
neuron. They showed
that a deep neural network requires between five and eight layers of
interconnected “neurons” to represent the complexity of one single
biological neuron.
Even the authors did not anticipate such complexity. “I thought it
would be simpler and smaller,” said Beniaguev. He expected that three or
four layers would be enough to capture the computations performed
within the cell.
Timothy Lillicrap,
who designs decision-making algorithms at the Google-owned AI company
DeepMind, said the new result suggests that it might be necessary to
rethink the old tradition of loosely comparing a neuron in the brain to a
neuron in the context of machine learning. “This paper really helps
force the issue of thinking about that more carefully and grappling with
to what extent you can make those analogies,” he said.
The most basic analogy between artificial and real neurons involves
how they handle incoming information. Both kinds of neurons receive
incoming signals and, based on that information, decide whether to send
their own signal to other neurons. While artificial neurons rely on a
simple calculation to make this decision, decades of research have shown
that the process is far more complicated in biological neurons.
Computational neuroscientists use an input-output function to model the
relationship between the inputs received by a biological neuron’s long
treelike branches, called dendrites, and the neuron’s decision to send
out a signal.
This function is what the authors of the new work taught an
artificial deep neural network to imitate in order to determine its
complexity. They started by creating a massive simulation of the
input-output function of a type of neuron with distinct trees of
dendritic branches at its top and bottom, known as a pyramidal neuron,
from a rat’s cortex. Then they fed the simulation into a deep neural
network that had up to 256 artificial neurons in each layer. They
continued increasing the number of layers until they achieved 99%
accuracy at the millisecond level between the input and output of the
simulated neuron. The deep neural network successfully predicted the
behavior of the neuron’s input-output function with at least five — but
no more than eight — artificial layers. In most of the networks, that
equated to about 1,000 artificial neurons for just one biological
neuron.
newyorker | Last summer, an anonymous intermediary proposed to
Harris and Harden that they address their unresolved issues. Harden
appeared on Harris’s podcast, and patiently explained why Murray’s
speculation was dangerously out in front of the science. At the moment,
technical and methodological challenges, as well as the persistent
effects of an unequal environment, would make it impossible to conduct
an experiment to test Murray’s idly incendiary hypotheses. She refused
to grant that his provocations were innocent: “I don’t disagree with you
about insisting on intellectual honesty, but I think of it as
‘both/and’—I think that that value is very important, but I also find it
very important to listen to people when they say, ‘I’m worried about
how this idea might be used to harm me or my family or my neighborhood
or my group.’ ” (Harris declined to comment on the record for this
piece.) As she once put it in an essay, “There is a middle ground
between ‘let’s never talk about genes and pretend cognitive ability
doesn’t exist’ and ‘let’s just ask some questions that pander to a
virulent on-line community populated by racists with swastikas in their
Twitter bios.’ ”
Harden
is not alone in her drive to fulfill Turkheimer’s dream of a
“psychometric left.” Dalton Conley and Jason Fletcher’s book, “The
Genome Factor,” from 2017, outlines similar arguments, as does the
sociologist Jeremy Freese. Last year, Fredrik deBoer published “The Cult
of Smart,” which argues that the education-reform movement has been
trammelled by its willful ignorance of genetic variation. Views
associated with the “hereditarian left” have also been articulated by
the psychiatrist and essayist Scott Alexander and the philosopher Peter
Singer. Singer told me, of Harden, “Her ethical arguments are ones that I
have held for quite a long time. If you ignore these things that
contribute to inequality, or pretend they don’t exist, you make it more
difficult to achieve the kind of society that you value.” He added,
“There’s a politically correct left that’s still not open to these
things.” Stuart Ritchie, an intelligence researcher, told me he thinks
that Harden’s book might create its own audience: “There’s so much
toxicity in this debate that it’ll take a long time to change people’s
minds on it, if at all, but I think Paige’s book is just so clear in its
explanation of the science.”
The nomenclature has
given Harden pause, depending on the definition of “hereditarian,”
which can connote more biodeterminist views, and the definition of
“left”—deBoer is a communist, Alexander leans libertarian, and Harden
described herself to me as a “Matthew 25:40 empiricist” (“The King will
reply, ‘Truly I tell you, whatever you did for one of the least of these
brothers and sisters of mine, you did for me’ ”). The political
sensitivity of the subject has convinced many sympathetic economists,
psychologists, and geneticists to keep their heads below the parapets of
academia. As the population geneticist I spoke to put it to me,
“Geneticists know how to talk about this stuff to each other, in part
because we understand terms like ‘heritability,’ which we use in
technical ways that don’t always fully overlap with their colloquial
meanings, and in part because we’re charitable with each other, assume
each other’s good faith—we know that our colleagues aren’t eugenicists.
But we have no idea how to talk about it in public, and, while I don’t
agree with everything she said, sometimes it feels like we’ve all been
sitting around waiting for a book like Paige’s.”
Harden’s
outspokenness has generated significant blowback from the left. On
Twitter, she has been caricatured as a kind of ditzy bourgeois
dilettante who gives succor to the viciousness of the alt-right. This
March, after she expressed support for standardized testing—which she
argues predicts student success above and beyond G.P.A. and can help
increase low-income and minority representation—a parody account
appeared under the handle @EugenicInc, with the name “Dr. Harden, Social
Justice Through Eugenics!” and the bio “Not a determinist, but yes,
genes cause everything. I just want to breed more Hilary Clinton’s for
higher quality future people.” One tweet read, “In This House We
Believe, Science is Real, Womens Rights are Human Rights, Black Lives
Matter, News Isnt Fake, Some Kids Have Dumb-Dumb Genes!!!”
In 2018, she wrote an Op-Ed in the Times,
arguing that progressives should embrace the potential of genetics to
inform education policy. Dorothy Roberts, a professor of law, sociology,
and Africana studies at the University of Pennsylvania, strongly
disagreed: “There’s just no way that genetic testing is going to lead to
a restructuring of society in a just way in the future—we have a
hundred years of evidence for what happens when social outcomes are
attributed to genetic differences, and it is always to stigmatize,
control, and punish the people predicted to have socially devalued
traits.” Darity, the economist, told me that he doesn’t see how Harden
can insist that differences within groups are genetic but that
differences between them are not: “It’s a feint and a dodge for her to
say, ‘Well, I’m only looking at variations across individuals.’ ”
There
is a good precedent for this kind of concern. In “Blueprint,” Robert
Plomin wrote that polygenic scores should be understood as “fortune
tellers” that can “foretell our futures from birth.” Jared Taylor, a
white-supremacist leader, argued that Plomin’s book should “destroy the
basis for the entire egalitarian enterprise of the last 60 or so years.”
He seized on Plomin’s claim that, for many outcomes, “environmental
levers for change are not within our grasp.” Taylor wrote, “This is a
devastating finding for the armies of academics and uplift artists who
think every difference in outcome is society’s fault.” He continued,
“And, although Blueprint includes nothing about race, the implications
for ‘racial justice’ are just as colossal.” Harden has been merciless in
her response to behavior geneticists whose disciplinary
salesmanship—and perhaps worse—inadvertently indulges the extreme right.
In her own review of Plomin’s book, she wrote, “Insisting that DNA
matters is scientifically accurate; insisting that it is the only thing
that matters is scientifically outlandish.” (Plomin told me that Harden
misrepresented his intent. He added, “Good luck to Paige in convincing
people who are engaged in the culture wars about this middle path she’s
suggesting. . . . My view is it isn’t worth confronting people and
arguing with them.”)
With the first review of
Harden’s book, these dynamics played out on cue. Razib Khan, a
conservative science blogger identified with the “human biodiversity”
movement, wrote that he admired her presentation of the science but was
put off by the book’s politics; though he notes that a colleague of his
once heard Harden described as “Charles Murray in a skirt,” he clearly
thinks the honorific was misplaced. “Alas, if you do not come to this
work with Harden’s commitment to social justice, much of the
non-scientific content will strike you as misguided, gratuitous and at
times even unfair.” This did not prevent some on the Twitter left from
expressing immediate disgust. Kevin Bird, who describes himself in his
Twitter bio as a “radical scientist,” tweeted, “Personally, I wouldn’t
be very happy if a race science guy thought my book was good.” Harden
sighed when she recounted the exchange: “It’s always from both flanks.
It felt like another miniature version of Harris on one side and Darity
on the other.”
medium | One
of the clear indicators of non-equilibrium processes that scientists
have studied in single celled organisms is a loss of what is called
detailed balance. Detailed balance is simply the sense that time is
neither running forwards or backwards. In other words, a process is just
as likely to move from one state in phase space to another as back
again.
Thus,
the trajectories through phase space that exemplify non-equilibria are
those that are distinctly future oriented. They have a memory of past,
and they are irreversible or nearly so. And these are also what life
depends upon.
Life
is able to keep non-equilibrium processes in check however. When it
gets out of control, you get cancer, unconstrained growth and out of
control metabolic properties. It is as if life is trying to ride a bike
down a steep path and cancer is when the bike starts to careen out of
control down the slope. Because an out of control process will lead to
complete disorder eventually, a tangled mess at the bottom where
equilibrium, i.e., death, occurs, life must maintain itself at the brink
between chaos and order, between a fast decent to one equilibrium and a
stand still at another.
Despite
all its vast array, perhaps this definition of life as non-equilibrium
processes that maintain high probability trajectories in phase space
while maintaining order for a long time will provide, if not a
definition, at least a measure of how alive something is. Certainly
passing on genetic encoding might be included for it is another measure
of persistence.
Such
an achievement might also have applications. It could provide us
insight into how to build technology that is more “alive” and thus able
to repair itself and stop from degrading in hostile environments. This
could be useful for biotechnology including medical implants. It could
also have applications for space based technologies, especially those
that are designed to visit distant planets and act autonomously in
unknown environments. The future may not be one of steel and glass and
obviously artificial machines but one where biology meets technology and
technology borrows the best of what it means to be alive in order to
sustain itself. What a fascinating world that would be.
gov.uk | The ability to enhance one’s physical, psychological or social capability has been a source of power throughout history, and warfare is the epitome of this dynamic. The paradox of war is that humans are central to its conduct but are also the weakest link. We want ‘war fighters’ – whether they be cyber specialists, drone pilots or infantry soldiers – to be stronger, faster, more intelligent, more resilient and more mobile to overcome the environment and the adversary. We have designed increasingly complex technologies to enhance lethality, survivability and mobility. As technology has become more sophisticated our thinking has become more focused on the machine rather than the person, but this needs to change if we are going to be effective in the future.
Recent advances in the life sciences and related technologies have led to the emergence of the interdisciplinary field known as human augmentation which has the potential to disrupt every aspect of our lives. The interdependencies and potential implications of human augmentation are so vast and complex that it is difficult to make sense of what it means for the future of society and Defence. The aim of this strategic implications project is to take the first step in making sense of these potential changes to human capabilities. It offers a conceptual model for thinking about human augmentation, its future direction and identifies key implications for Defence and its stakeholders.
Human augmentation will become increasingly relevant, partly because it can directly enhance human capability and behaviour and partly because it is the binding agent between people and machines. Future wars will be won, not by those with the most advanced technology, but by those who can most effectively integrate the unique capabilities of both people and machines. The importance of human-machine teaming is widely acknowledged but it has been viewed from a techno-centric perspective. Human augmentation is the missing part of this puzzle.
Thinking of the person as a platform and understanding our people at an individual level is fundamental to successful human augmentation. Industrial Age warfare saw people as interchangeable components of military units or the material with which to operate the platforms – vehicles, aircraft and ships. These platforms are routinely monitored and analysed but it is remarkable that our ability to understand our most critical capability – the human – is so under-researched. Successful application of human augmentation demands a more sophisticated approach to understanding our people and their capabilities. Defining the key elements of the ‘human platform’ – physical, psychological and social – provides a conceptual baseline to enable a multidisciplinary conversation.
Physical performance is the capability to affect the physical environment and move within it. Strength, dexterity, speed and endurance are key components and there is often a trade-off between them.
Psychological performance comprises cognition, emotion and motivation. Cognition is the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience and the senses. It includes processes such as attention, the formation of knowledge, long-term and working memory, reasoning, problem solving and decision-making. Emotion describes the subjective human experience and is closely linked with motivation, which is the force that energises, activates and directs behaviour.
Social performance is the ability to perceive oneself as part of a group and the readiness to act as part of the team. It is founded on self-awareness and the ability to understand the behaviour of others. It is tightly linked to communication skills, collaboration and trust. The core tenet of social performance is group cohesion.
Human augmentation is not a shortcut – getting the basics of human physiology, biochemistry and psychology right is a prerequisite to human augmentation and will become more important in the future. Research into human augmentation has shone a stark light on how little we know about how to do the basics well. We need to do more to understand the precise effects of nutrition, sleep and hydration, and their relationship with other areas of the body to realise significant, yet untapped potential. Technology that improves monitoring will make it possible to individually optimise sleep, nutrition and other factors to deliver transformational gains across an organisation at relatively low cost and limited ethical risk.
Human augmentation is not just tomorrow’s business, there are short-term and long-term opportunities that require engagement today. The following matrix illustrates the technical maturity and the magnitude of policy considerations of human augmentation technologies. It shows that there are technologies that could be integrated today with manageable policy considerations. The most transformative technologies (for example, genetics and brain interfaces) currently sit at a low level of technological maturity but we must be prepared for this to change quickly. Bioinformatics and collection and analytics (encompassing sensors, artificial intelligence-enabled processing) are particularly important enablers for other human augmentation technologies and warrant focused research and development attention.
That initially disappointed many investors and onlookers, because a
vaccine platform seemed to be less transformative and lucrative. By the
beginning of 2020, Moderna had advanced nine mRNA vaccine candidates for
infectious diseases into people for testing. None was a slam-dunk
success. Just one had progressed to a larger-phase trial.
But when COVID-19 struck, Moderna was quick off the mark, creating a prototype vaccine within days of the virus’s genome sequence becoming available online.
The company then collaborated with the US National Institute of Allergy
and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) to conduct mouse studies and launch
human trials, all within less than ten weeks.
BioNTech, too, took
an all-hands-on-deck approach. In March 2020, it partnered with New
York-based drug company Pfizer, and clinical trials then moved at a
record pace, going from first-in-human testing to emergency approval in
less than eight months.
Both authorized vaccines use modified mRNA
formulated in LNPs. Both also contain sequences that encode a form of
the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein that adopts a shape more amenable to
inducing protective immunity. Many experts say that the protein tweak,
devised by NIAID vaccinologist Barney Graham and structural biologists
Jason McLellan at the University of Texas at Austin and Andrew Ward at
Scripps, is also a prize-worthy contribution, albeit one that is
specific to coronavirus vaccines, not mRNA vaccination as a general
platform.
Some of the furore in discussions of credit for mRNA discoveries
relates to who holds lucrative patents. But much of the foundational
intellectual property dates back to claims made in 1989 by Felgner,
Malone and their colleagues at Vical (and in 1990 by Liljeström). These
had only a 17-year term from the date of issue and so are now in the
public domain.
Even the Karikó–Weissman patents, licensed to
Cellscript and filed in 2006, will expire in the next five years.
Industry insiders say this means that it will soon become very hard to
patent broad claims about delivering mRNAs in lipid nanoparticles,
although companies can reasonably patent particular sequences of mRNA — a
form of the spike protein, say — or proprietary lipid formulations.
Firms
are trying. Moderna, the dominant player in the mRNA vaccine field,
which has experimental shots in clinical testing for influenza,
cytomegalovirus and a range of other infectious diseases, got two patents last year covering the broad use of mRNA to produce secreted proteins. But multiple industry insiders told Nature they think these could be challengeable.
“We don’t feel there’s a lot that is patentable, and certainly not
enforceable,” says Eric Marcusson, chief scientific officer of
Providence Therapeutics, an mRNA vaccines company in Calgary, Canada.
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.
dailymail | A huge crowd of protesters have gathered outside the 2021 Met Gala in Manhattan just as a host of A-listers arrive for the biggest night in the fashion calendar.
Multiple
arrest have been made as dozens of NYPD officers clashed with the BLM
protesters outside New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on Monday.
Police
can be heard yelling at demonstrators lining the streets to 'Move
back!' in cellphone footage of the event, while the protesters chant
'Black Lives Matter'.
'The NYPD has a total financial allocation
of $11 billion per year. This money goes towards racist policing that
destroys Black and brown communities while people who are struggling do
not get the resources they need. CARE, not COPS, is the answer,' the
flyer read.
It is still unclear how many protestors were arrested.
The
gala's theme this year is a celebration of the Costume Institute’s
newest exhibition, 'In America: A Lexicon of Fashion.' The exhibit will
open to the public in the Anna Wintour Costume Center on September
18th.
The gala usually takes place
on the first Monday in May, but was delayed due to Covid-19 fears until
tonight. The 2020 event was cancelled entirely due to the pandemic.
“We really started having a conversation about what it means to be a working class woman of color at the Met ... we can’t just play along, but we need to break the fourth wall.”
greenwald | As AOC herself put it with her trademarked class consciousness, the very
fact that she can attend the Met Gala while you cannot is proof of the
potency of the left-wing movement she leads. Standing next to Aurora
James, the designer of her dress, AOC revealed the underlying
clandestine strategy of her subversive attendance: “We really started
having a conversation about what it means to be a working class woman of
color at the Met ... we can’t just play along, but we need to break the
fourth wall.”
In a separate exposition, AOC explained
that her appearance at the Met Gala was such a watershed moment for
working-class politics because it is vital that she not be confined to
dreary poor and lower-middle class venues when spreading her
fist-raising rebellion. Instead, she must endure the burden of carrying
her cause to the world's richest and most privileged elite and the
exclusive salons they occupy. Imagine being so unimaginative and myopic
as to be unable to recognize and be grateful for AOC's inventive praxis.
The
jealousy-driven attacks on AOC by her cultural inferiors were almost
certainly driven by various forms of white supremacy, misogyny and
colonialism, as AOC said of those who criticized her in 2018 for wearing an expensive designer dress (“women like me aren’t supposed to run for office”) as well as when she denounced
the dismissive and condescending attitudes toward the Squad from Nancy
Pelosi (“Nancy Pelosi has been ‘singling out’ freshman congresswomen of
color”). Worse, Monday night's traumatic bullying of AOC obscured the
far more important fact that, yet again, we saw elites prancing around
in the middle of a pandemic maskless, while those paid hourly wages to
serve them or desperately try to snap a photo of them were required to
keep their pointless faces covered with cloth at all times.
COVID rules are now so convoluted that liberals are able to defend
their leaders’ actions while not even pretending to make sense from a
scientific or rational perspective. Many defended Newsom and Obama's
maskless partying on the ground that it was all “outdoors,” even though
both were actually inside tents and people had been shamed for months
for taking their kids to deserted beaches rather than keeping them
locked away at home. Liberals argue that it is fine for elites at
Obama's party and the Met Gala to remain maskless since they are
vaccinated, even as they defend the CDC's new mask directives for vaccinated people
based on the view that vaccinated people still dangerously transmit the
Delta variant to both vaccinated and unvaccinated people alike. They
will claim that it is fine for rich Democratic donors at Pelosi's party
to sit on top of one other maskless because they are eating even though
the video shows they have no food in front of them (they are waiting for
the masked servants of color to bring their food) and even though
shoveling food into one's open mouth does not actually create a wall of
immunity against transmission of the virus from one's open-mouthed table
neighbors. The Met Gala's red carpet is said to be “outdoors” even
though it is surrounded by tent walls and other structures, and still
leaving the question of why workers need to be masked in the same area.
But
all of this stopped being about The Science™ long ago — ever since
months of relentless messaging that it is our moral duty to Stay At Home
unless we want to sociopathically kill Grandma was replaced overnight
by dictates that we had a moral duty to leave our homes to attend
densely packed street protests since the racism being protested was a more severe threat to the public health than the global COVID pandemic.
One can locate in all of this jumbled and always-shifting rationale
various forms of control, shaming, stigma and hierarchy, while The
Science™ is nowhere to be found.
vanityfair | Everyone is talking about what Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is wearing—again.
The New York Congresswoman donned a white gown for the Met gala on
Monday night that read, “Tax the Rich” in red type. And, as often
happens when AOC puts a finger on the cultural scale, everyone from
Trumpworld zealots to New York Times writers chimed in to comment on it.
“Cost per Ticket: $30,000,” tweeted Republican Senator Ted Cruz. “Virtue signaling to your base while partying—without a mask—with the people you claim to hate: Priceless.” Donald Trump Jr.struck
a similar note, writing, “What makes @AOC a bigger fraud: the “tax the
rich” dress while she’s hanging out with a bunch of wealthy leftwing
elites or the lack of masks?” Tabloids such as the Daily Mail and the New York Postchimed in. “America’s No.1 champagne socialist,” read the headline of a Daily Mailpiece claiming that Ocasio-Cortez “wanted to enjoy the limelight while trying to pass it off as a political protest.”
Times fashion director and chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedmanwrote
that “attending the $35,000-a-ticket” event in such a dress “is a
complicated proposition,” adding in a follow-up tweet, “Just seems she
might have wanted that money used for something other than an elite
party ticket.” (Manhattan Rep. Carolyn Maloney’s similarly statement-making dress prompted an entirely different reaction from Friedman.)
“There’s no way I’d be doing this if it wasn’t with a woman of color and
with the intent to grow the table and empower women that look like me,”
she said in a press release circulated by a communications firm
representing James. “Despite being held in New York City, the culture of
the Met Gala is everything but. NYC is often synonymous with
inclusivity, inviting millions of people from different walks of life to
call this city home. The Met Gala, on the other hand, is seen as elite
and inaccessible. I’m attending today because I want to change just that
and spotlight women of color who are often not included during events
like these.”
nakedcapitalism | I see two themes running through his speech. The first is he
is betting the house on vaccines. Forget masks, forget
social-distancing, etc., just everybody has to get a vaccine. And I
suspect that the reason why is the weakness of the Professional
Managerial Class – it is measurable. Having people wear masks and other
social measures is a bit fuzzy to get a handle on. But with vaccines, it
is easy. You can put that info into an Excel chart as in
‘unvaccinated’, ‘first shot’, ‘second shot’, and of course
a new row soon called ‘booster shot’. You can analyze those hard
figures, play with them, break them down by region, age group, etc. –
all the sorts of things that managers love to do. Mask-wearing? How do
you measure that? Dunno. This PMC viewpoint is also
why he did not thank all the doctors, nurses, first responders, etc in
his speech like he should have. Managers want it to be all about them
and not to share the credit.
The second theme is that he has decided to go full divisive. He has
set up those unvaccinated to be the fall-guy for all that goes wrong
with America dealing with the pandemic. If things blow up, it is not the
fault of Biden and his regime – it is all
the fault of the unvaccinated. The pandemic is still raging next year?
It is all their fault. A new variant turns up that blows past these
vaccines? It is still the fault of the unvaccinated. It is a signal and a
blank cheque to turn loose the attack dogs on
them by all right-thinking people. They are to be trolled and harassed
and are to be banned from restaurants, parks, gas stations until they
get vaccinated. You could never call Biden a Unity President. And when
he says his plan is ‘protecting our economic
recovery’ you wonder whose economy he is actually talking about. But
keeping the schools open will only ensure that the pandemic still
spreads as they will be the new vector for virus spread. Suffer the
little children indeed.
As for why all this was not done back in January or July, it is
simple. They never had a plan going into government. I have made the
point before that even though the US was in the middle of a world-wide
pandemic last year with bodies stacking up, there
was no task force set up to work out what to do before he went into
the Presidency as he had task forces set up for other matters. Think
about that. The pandemic undermined the Trump Presidency and without it,
Trump would probably still be President. But
yet it was not thought worthy enough a subject to form a distinct task
force by Biden and the Democrats.
I’m not sure about that; see STAT here.
I believe the thinking was that Mr. Ebola, Ron Klain, was tapped
as Biden’s chief-of-staff exactly because of his presumed expertise in
managing pandemics. Either Klain was over-rated, or he couldn’t manage
Biden (meaning he was over-rated in a different way).
tabletmag | Honest,
continuous questioning and exploration of alternative paths are
indispensable for good science. In the authoritarian (as opposed to
participatory) version of public health, these activities were seen as
treason and desertion. The dominant narrative became that “we are at
war.” When at war, everyone has to follow orders. If a platoon is
ordered to go right and some soldiers explore maneuvering to the left,
they are shot as deserters. Scientific skepticism had to be shot, no
questions asked. The orders were clear.
Who
gave these orders? Who decided that his or her opinion, expertise, and
conflicts should be in charge? It was not a single person, not a crazy
general or a despicable politician or a dictator, even if political
interference in science did happen—massively so. It was all of us, a
conglomerate that has no name and no face: a mesh and mess of
half-cooked evidence; frenzied and partisan media promoting parachute
journalism and pack coverage; the proliferation of pseudonymous and
eponymous social media personas which led even serious scientists to
become unrestrained, wild-beast avatars of themselves, spitting massive
quantities of inanity and nonsense; poorly regulated industry and
technology companies flexing their brain and marketing power; and common
people afflicted by the protracted crisis. All swim in a mixture of
some good intentions, some excellent thinking, and some splendid
scientific successes, but also of conflicts, political polarization,
fear, panic, hatred, divisiveness, fake news, censorship, inequalities,
racism, and chronic and acute societal dysfunction.
Heated
but healthy scientific debates are welcome. Serious critics are our
greatest benefactors. John Tukey once said that the collective noun for a
group of statisticians is a quarrel. This applies to other scientists,
too. But “we are at war” led to a step beyond: This is a dirty war, one
without dignity. Opponents were threatened, abused, and bullied by
cancel culture campaigns in social media, hit stories in mainstream
media, and bestsellers written by zealots. Statements were distorted,
turned into straw men, and ridiculed. Wikipedia pages were vandalized.
Reputations were systematically devastated and destroyed. Many brilliant
scientists were abused and received threats during the pandemic,
intended to make them and their families miserable.
Anonymous
and pseudonymous abuse has a chilling effect; it is worse when the
people doing the abusing are eponymous and respectable. The only viable
responses to bigotry and hypocrisy are kindness, civility, empathy, and
dignity. However, barring in-person communication, virtual living and
social media in social isolation are poor conveyors of these virtues.
Politics
had a deleterious influence on pandemic science. Anything any
apolitical scientist said or wrote could be weaponized for political
agendas. Tying public health interventions like masks and vaccines to a
faction, political or otherwise, satisfies those devoted to that
faction, but infuriates the opposing faction. This process undermines
the wider adoption required for such interventions to be effective.
Politics dressed up as public health not only injured science. It also
shot down participatory public health where people are empowered, rather
than obligated and humiliated.
A
scientist cannot and should not try to change his or her data and
inferences based on the current doctrine of political parties or the
reading du jour of the social media thermometer. In an environment where
traditional political divisions between left and right no longer seem
to make much sense, data, sentences, and interpretations are taken out
of context and weaponized. The same apolitical scientist could be
attacked by left-wing commentators in one place and by alt-right
commentators in another. Many excellent scientists have had to silence
themselves in this chaos. Their self-censorship has been a major loss
for scientific investigation and the public health effort. My heroes are
the many well-intentioned scientists who were abused, smeared, and
threatened during the pandemic. I respect all of them and suffer for
what they went through, regardless of whether their scientific positions
agreed or disagreed with mine. I suffer for and cherish even more those
whose positions disagreed with mine.
There
was absolutely no conspiracy or preplanning behind this hypercharged
evolution. Simply, in times of crisis, the powerful thrive and the weak
become more disadvantaged. Amid pandemic confusion, the powerful and the
conflicted became more powerful and more conflicted, while millions of
disadvantaged people have died and billions suffered.
I
worry that science and its norms have shared the fate of the
disadvantaged. It is a pity, because science can still help everyone.
Science remains the best thing that can happen to humans, provided it
can be both tolerant and tolerated.
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“The Death of the Author,” arguing that the meaning of a text is divorced
from au...
9/29 again
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"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
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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
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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
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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 ...
