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What part of the article are you referring to?
Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
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Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#22Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this. Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science. /s
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways? That's not to say the research itself is not impres…
I’m glad we don’t only think from a utilitarian perspective then.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#23Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this. Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science. /s
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RFK runs HHS which oversees multiple grant, research, and review organizations in the federal government. This includes the NIH, which has been gutted of experts that don’t share the political ideology of the political arm of the executive and / or aren’t willing to say untruths in service of their political agenda. The news is replete with stories of experts being purged leaving entire areas of research unstaffed; from various cancers to HIV to genetic engineering. Of course the same is true in other areas, such as NOAA, EPA, FEMA, etc that will cause more acute harm. The research harms will play out over decades.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#24Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this. Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science. /s
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways? That's not to say the research itself is not impres…
All those wasted dollars and time put into the discovery of the germ theory of disease instead of growing and distributing food to the invalids.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#25Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#26Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this. Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science. /s
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways? That's not to say the research itself is not impres…
How do you know it's not effective? The cost per life saved is extremely high now, but this stuff gets better over time. How much did penicillin cost to produce originally?
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#27[flagged]
You complain about oversimplification, then in the same breath complain about "random political stuff" being included. How is that not hypocritical, at best? This medical breakthrough would literally have not been possible without "politics". Get your head out of the sand. No one should be able to escape learning how their politics affects them or the society they are a part of. And if you want to enjoy the benefits of that society, then you don't get to complain about being reminded of how those benefits were achieved.
Pandering to people's fragile political sensibilities is how the U.S. got to this point where millions of citizens voted against their own self-interest because they thought candidates running on anti-intellectual, anti-science platforms was worth the zero sum "win".
Enjoy your weekends, eight hour workdays, clean air, and clean water—whether you like that those were all political or not!
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#28Good thing RFK pushed out the official overseeing this financing and the current administration is actively defunding the organizations that produced this. Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science. /s
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways? That's not to say the research itself is not impres…
> How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking?
How confident are you the answer isn't very close to zero? We've already curtailed smoking quite a bit in the past 30 years. At the level of an individual, it isn't any particular mystery how to stop obesity or to simply not drink, but population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily behave differently for their own health historically haven't worked well in these specific domains. Throwing more money at the problem doesn't seem like it would obviously change that.
Also keep in mind that overeating and alcohol addiction have significant genetic components. Research into gene editing has the eventual potential to cure damn near any disease, including whatever pet causes you personally think are worth defeating.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#29Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#30[flagged]
My experience is quite the opposite - I'm actually thinking about subscribing to the NYT (again) or The Atlantic (despite their higher cost) purely for the quality of their writing.