Oh! Understood.

This is not the first time somatic gene therapy has been successfully performed, and it does indeed get the consent of the FDA! In the link is a different treatment, similar principle.

I’m sorry, I should have realized this was what you were asking about!

The #1 from the beginning was way more biologically and legally important than it might have seemed at first - the child was already alive.

The key difference between the two cases is germline vs somatic.

Germline editting is what occurred with the twin embryos. The germline is your hereditary/genetic line - reproductive cells and embryonic stem cells. This involves permanently altering the evolutionary path of humanity, at least for your offspring and descendants. (Fun fact - on a long enough time scale, any given human eventually becomes either ancestor to all, or ancestor to none. So a germline edit could literally change all of humanity!)

Editting the germline is generally still illegal, and arguably for very good reason, at least at humanity’s current stage of science and social ethics.

Somatic gene editting is altering the DNA in somatic cells, which have already differentiated and specialized. This is almost all of the normal cells in your body. These cells can often reproduce more cells, but generally cannot ever produce different cells. Your bone marrow can never create a neuron, for example. An embryonic stem cell can create anything.

In this case, the gene therapy targets only the liver cells and makes the needed change. Unlike germline therapy, somatic therapy like this shouldn’t affect anything in the body other than the liver. Which was already busted to begin with, which obviously decides the risk/reward calculation.

The “personalization” is from editting the child’s cells and DNA directly. It looks like past treatments involved editting immune cells outside the body and transfusing them into the patient. I presume those were someone else’s immune cells. People trade them all the time with blood transfusions.

So this is a pretty exciting development! But yeah, very different cases biologically speaking, not just ethically.

And rereading your past comment, this is exactly what you were talking about. So sorry I missed that. This is, in fact, non hereditary, non contagious gene editting!

2. You’re missing risk/reward calculations. In healthcare it’s not about whether something’s “good” or “bad”, it’s about whether rewards outweigh risks for the individual.
3. Consent is consent, and the existence of a law against a practice - even an otherwise ethical practice - does not waive the ethical need for consent. Doctors have been known to practice against local laws - abortion, euthanasia, gender-affirmation, etc. There are scenarios where healthcare can be ethical and illegal, but only with consent.

Gyms really upgrading their guerilla marketing game.

I mean, just off the top of the dome, we know the following three things -

1. This child was already alive
2. This child had a 50/50 chance of death
3. Everyone involved consented to the procedure

These stories share almost no similarities, biologically or ethically.

Hah dang you should have told me to read the rest of the sample before I read the study! Now I’ll never know how far I’d get before I stopped imagining some nobleman drinking at a pub for no reason. I’m certain I would have figured it out eventually… but 35 English students never figuring that out? Almost half?

Given a dictionary and the words solicitor, injunction, affidavit, talk of tripping each other up with arguments and a literal reference to a “pile of money”?! They couldn’t make the leap to “court of law”? Couldn’t functionally use the dictionary as a tool for comprehending a sentence?

…That’s really scary, huh…

Thanks! Oof, I don’t know a particular favorite book, but favorite author is the late great Sir Terry Pratchett.

Oddly enough I overthought the first sentence, and imagined the Lord Chancellor was some type of local decorative feature like the Duke of Wellington. Then I realized it’s probably just a guy with a fancy title sitting at a table in a pub?

The rest is mostly straightforward to me. The text feels the way it literally reads - a bit muddy?

The streets are so full of fresh mud that they may as well be prehistoric mud flats after a Great Flood. I imagine it’s quite a large street leading up a big hill if he could imagine a giant dinosaur making the walk. So I picture basically a solid river of mud rising up in the distance.

If there are normally cobblestones or whatever, they’ve disappeared beneath the muck. I don’t know exactly what a chimney-pot is, but black smoke is pouring from the chimney somethings and mixing with the falling drizzle into dirty soot water. The rain is so blackened - and the weather so dreary - that the city itself could be in mourning.

It’s so muddy that the dogs are just dirty shapes in the muck, the horses have mud all the way up to their blinkers… which I read as blinders first, so I imagined it up to their heads and necks, like only the top 10% of the horse is actually visible and most of that is the headgear, and the rest of the horse is mud. I don’t know if that’s what a horse blinker is though.

The foot traffic feels cramped and irritable in the muck, people holding umbrellas against the dirty rain. It also sounds like a lot - tens of thousands of people walking the same paths. The edge of the sidewalk or whatever at the street corner is probably invisible under the mud, and because of that people keep slipping in the same spots. This pushes the mud more and more in the same directions, forming gross layered piles of muck in specific places against the sidewalk or something, causing more people to slip, adding more to the local mud (compound interest)

The day is so dark and dreary that it may as well be night. Overall, it’s muddy, raining, sooty, and depressing. There’s a big, wide, muddy street up a hill, filled with a constant flow of unhappy people.

I don’t know if I would actually read this for leisure, but I like it. I think I’m on the same page for most of it? But I still have no idea what’s up with Lord Chancellor. Is he a person staring out a window at the scene in the street? Does his title imply nobility and fancy clothing? What does the inside of the Lincoln’s Inn Hall look like?

Hah, cute. Nice try. Nobody wants to waste time on your bad faith or deranged bullshit.

If Republicans pushed this through “during the light of day,” would it make any actual difference

Yes, actually. The propaganda machine usually needs a minute to spin up and align talking points. Pushing things through at midnight gives them the ability to carefully prepare the first round of headlines and social media posts for when Americans wake up.

First impressions are by far the most important in propaganda.

For everybody in the back:

Polite isn’t right. Polite isn’t smart. Polite. Isn’t. Nice.

You’re here wasting time painting AOC of all people as a goddamn zionist.

Nobody needs to be polite to obviously bad faith (or deranged) bullshit like that.

Love it, thank you for this.

Do they isolate the queen larva to prevent other larva from eating its food? Or is it like a baby bird scenario where they’re just fed directly from bee to bee? Are mistakes sometimes made, and if so do they “correct” the mistake?

Yeah, gotta watch those cortisol levels. If you feel your brain light up in response to some trash take inside of the fediverse, you can take all the time you need. You can let your inner palpatine feed a little of that existential rage, as a treat.

If you feel your brain light up in response to some trash take inside of a social algorithm machine, close the app and take a beat. The algorithm notices. If you even pause on it, then keep scrolling, you reinforce the algorithm. You let the algorithm win.

Isn’t it crazy how seemingly schizoaffective thoughts are just, like, normal concerns in the modern day?

Private jets use mostly the same runways and traffic patterns, and they have enough political power to do whatever they want without prior justification. Occam’s and Hanlon’s razors both tell us it’s probably just greedy idiots. They might try some AI bullshit, but only as part of their tried-and-true method of “break things first and panic later when you realize they were load-bearing”

It’s absolutely crazy how new a lot of American cultural norms are, given that they all sound so goddamn old.

The confederacy is our heritage! It’s our history! You can’t take down these statues and rename these buildings they’re a part of our nation!!!

Checks notes … Most of America following the civil war was horrified and broken and considered the confederacy a stain on their history. Those statues and names were mostly put up a century after the civil war, after everyone who could remember it was dead. They were specifically constructed as a middle finger / scare tactic by angry white people who were worried that their hegemony was threatened by the Civil Rights Movement.

America is a Christian nation!!! One nation, under God! In God we trust! The Bible belongs in our schools next to the Constitution!"

Checks notes… The authors of the constitution - including the practicing christians! - were adamant that an officially recognized state religion would be an existential threat to democracy. Any elevation of any religion in government is a death sentence to freedom and liberty. The addition of “God” to our Pledge and our currency was also only 70 years ago, and was also a scare tactic by angry white people who were worried that their hegemony was threatened by other ethnicities and cultures.

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It’s three failing historical empires in a trenchcoat. It’s wild how you can vaguely gesture to almost any terrible moment in history and find strong parallels to modern problems in the US and the world.

If a tower of economic and political power slowly - but somehow also suddenly - falls into a disorganized pile of xenophobic horseshit, did it make a sound?

Not to mention that even the companies are suffering from the system they themselves built. The gamified and enshittified hiring process doesn’t improve the quality of the workers they get, it just filters the candidates based on a bunch of unrelated skills.

The talent pool has always skewed towards people who know how to play the game, rather than actual talent… but now “the game” they’re playing isn’t even about useful skillls like human charisma or networking, it’s about handling or misleading poorly designed AI tools.

Ahh, my nostalgia. Thanks!

I should clarify, it’s the idiots currently holding the White House, and the playbook authors are the idiots at the Heritage Foundation et al. who funded and supported that acquisition in return for a well-known set of conditions.

There are also many conditions placed upon them by a bunch of other domestic and foreign influences that have been publically and privately bribing the administration and party in various ways.

I don’t mean to paint them as simple fall guys, though they are the current face of a much larger problem that will continue after they’re gone if not stopped. It doesn’t have to be this deep state secret cabal, puppet master / strings scenario. It’s blatantly just a bunch of corruption visible to the naked eye. Oligarchs funded and supported a known fascist criminal.

There are many “masterminds” with many shared and competing interests - and I’ll admit that some of them are highly effective political operatives - but they’re all idiots for thinking this has to work out in their favor.

Anyone with skin in the game had the wealth and power to live their lives however they wanted, in castles and penthouses forever free from want or fear… and they chose to use that power to set things up so that everyone loses. A less stable, less healthy, less prosperous future for the world. All for the sake of their own wallets or their own particular vision of what the future should be.

That fascist criminal took control of the country and put out giant signs saying his administration is up for sale to the lowest bidder. Now he sells out America three times over before breakfast, and turns on allies on a whim - or by mistake!

It is really hard to overstate how utterly stupid it was and is to get in bed with him, because now every last one of them has to hope that their chamber is empty and they survive this incredibly foolish game of Russian roulette.

Given that Trump is explicitly granting it to his Presidential library or whatever bullshit, and therefore restricting its use to his own purposes - no, it would effectively not belong to the US.