Were the scientists and bureaucrats back then true believers, or did they sell the government a pig in a poke for the money?
Why did sickle cell anemia have such a brief moment in the sun so long ago and then fade away? Is it that rare? With recent white guilt, it looks like someone would see the fundraising opportunity and raise some consciousness again, but you're the only person I've heard bring it up in decades.
It was a big pie in the sky back then. Until you actually do the research in detail - and that means like completely sequencing 1k or more individuals, you don't know if it is going to be profitable in dollars and cents. Back then it was the next frontier - just like settling Mars now, lol.
The problem with sickle cell is that as a heterozygote trait it protects against Malaria. So reducing the rate of heterozygosity is not all that cost-effective.
Sickle cell anemia affects about 100,000 Americans who are living in a colder climate. But of course we are no closer to curing it now than before. Same with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Yes I suspect curing these conditions is as unrealistic as settling Mars (a new favourite completely unrealistic idea).
Well, with sickle cell we at least know the gene defect. With Alzheimer or Parkinson, with the exception of small percentage of monogenetic cases, the gene defects are mostly unknown and the diseases maybe a combination of nurture, infections and polygenetic nature. Same with diabetes.
At the moment, with Alzheimer we are starting to undergo humongous, large-scale phase 3/4 trials of antibody-assisted mobilization of amyloid precursor fragment deposits. If it will work it would finally confirm the amyloid precursor hypothesis. But we are not there yet. So far, the phase 2 results have been underwhelmingly moderate. Even though statistically significant (?)...
I don't understand how curing fatal cancers and other diseases gets anyone to 150 years old. Don't many of the very elderly die because of either falls that cause broken bones or their vital organs simply give out? How does genetic research change either of these factors?
It depends on answering the question 'what is the mechanism of aging?'. Is aging a program that is set up in our genes? If so it is tempting to think we could turn it off. If aging is wear and tear and accumulation of errors over a lifetime of repairs and patches, then all we can do is have more fixes and patches to let you limp on for a few more years like a 2012 Nissan Altima.
Are they going to find a way to keep joints from wearing out? It doesn't seem possible you could fix that genetically. The idea of spending 30+ years with knees that make it hard at first and eventually impossible to walk and other constant aches and pains is not what the average person buying into this is thinking about.
It may be telling this came in 2000, right as the Boomers were going into the back end of middle age. More than a few had abandoned the idea of an afterlife and would have been eager to grab onto the promise of a long extended life on earth without fully thinking it through. Bill Clinton in particular would represent this mindset well. Did he think the government run healthcare system he wanted was going to be doing knee and hip replacement surgeries on 110 year olds?
Do 2012 Altimas limp? My impression, driving 25k miles a year, is that Altimas, Accords and Camry's from those years are going strong, and so are Altimas from the '00-04 era.
Reading those speeches, you might think they never heard of "under promise and over deliver".
Funny how the nature-nurture dynamic is played. When it comes to physical issues like health it's all about nature, environmental factors don't matter. But social matters are all about relationships and power, nature has no impact.
Realize it's not just rampant stupidity (at least not all), there was a lot of VC money waiting to be invested into the next best thing.
OTOH, Bill does look today like he is pushing 150.
The human genome project was a good idea but if you had tried to sell it to the public based on an accurate description of its purpose, the average voter would fall asleep. When he awoke he would have called his congressman and demanded we not pay for this boring incomprehensible boondoggle. How far back would that have set biology and medicine? Hard to say.
Even though there are no cures for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc genetic markers for some have been discovered. For example APOE4 is a marker for Alzheimer’s. Debatable that this has helped: without a cure people don’t want to know.
In one case the BRCA gene (causes breast and ovarian cancer) carriers can have their breasts and ovaries removed. Drastic but it does help.
I keep hearing that we are Curing Cancer but while everyone agrees it's a switch that gets flipped at the sub-cellular level I don't think anyone knows where the switch is or how we flip it back off. So far as I've observed metastasis remains a 5-year death sentence. Happy to be proved wrong.
Tyler Cowen's and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution blog is a great source for the Latest Thing. They hump AI relentlessly, like they used to hump 3D printing presses and self-driving cars. I think once AI starts mowing through white collar jobs like the mechanical harvesters through agriculture MR won't talk about it much. It's no fun having to admit that we really don't need to stuff immigrants in every nook and cranny. One thing you don't hear a lot about on MR is genetics. I'm guessing the geneticists are learning there's not much you can do about your genetics. And since a lot of us aren't going to have grandkids it's just not as important. Which is probably just as well because another thing we're not doing is burning off mutational load.
College professors who wants to keep their jobs cannot research, write, or talk about the impacts of genetics at a population level. But one should also remember how wrong those in the past were when it comes to genetics.
Who, and how wrong, were they? I'd say the average 19th century livestock farmer was better informed and more accurate about genetics than most people today.
It isn't a switch that get's flipped. Our understanding of cancer has advanced greatly since I was in school so I don't claim to be completely up to date. That said, our current understanding is a series of "switches" get flipped and the cancer cells evolve within the environment of your body in response to selective pressures. The abnormal cells in your colonic mucosa need to adapt to be able to invade the wall. They probably need to evolve further to metastasize successfully (though maybe not. We certainly don't know everything and I am not reading the journals).
When I was in school we were taught that once a cell goes cancer you are pretty much going to see cancer if you live long enough. Now we think your immune system is pretty good at sweeping away the abnormal cells before they can get a foot hold. Cancer represents a breakdown in this mechanism, much like pneumonia is a failure to control some bacteria in your lungs.
Thus a lot of research and many promising treatments are based on helping your immune system clear cancer.
Living to be 150 yo sounds great until you realize that will come with a retirement age of 125 years. Imagine toiling at a job for a century or more before you qualify for a decent pension, only to have pushed your statistical luck too far and die in a traffic accident before you can do so. The advantages of knowing my genome are outweighed by the sale of that information to unknown actors, and at 70 I ain't going back to Maggie's Farm.
There was a scifi book I picked up once which opened with a description of people who had lived to 150 or more thanks to medical science. The description of their falling-apart bodies sitting out at a cafe enjoying breakfast was quite disgusting. Likely the author got the idea from that Greek myth where a woman is granted eternal life but not eternal youth and must live as her body turns into dust and is blow away by the wind.
Yes, but that is offset by the refreshing conversations taking place . Many of those cafe-goers will be blacks saying things lije, "damn, I wish I hadn't spent most of my life making YT unconfortable."
I'm guessing the Boomers who bought into this thought they were going to get 70-80 years of retirement on the front end of the wave and it would be up to subsequent generations to figure out how retirement would work for everyone else.
Steve, where the genomics has worked out is if one is diagnosed with lymphoma in 2024, one is probably going to go through a set a genetic tests because many of those monoclonal antibodies only work when one has certain genes. That is why the advertising for MABs mentions that one has to be positive for certain genes and negative for others.
Another success in genomics is it realizing that being genetically disposed to certain cancers such as pancreatic cancer is due to a series of genetic markers instead of just having the "Pancreatic Cancer Gene."
Complete elimination of all cancer would add about 4 years of life expectancy - according to a calculation in the 1980s by Nathan Keyfitz. It would be a little bit more now, but not much.
As I remember it, the point of the human genome project was not so grand. Prior to it, researchers would look for genetic associations with, e.g. a disease, and use a variety of techniques to narrow it down to a chromosome, then a region of a chromosome, and finally a small enough region that they could have the grad students sequence it. After that they would need to do a bunch of other stuff. Did it code for a protein or was it a regulator sequence? If it was a protein what was the protein and what did it do? and that would lead to more questions and more papers and if it was a regulator then same deal. Was the regulator being turned on too much or too little? And on and on.
All the human genome project was intended to do, was eliminate the step where your grad students had to sequence the small region to which you had isolated the gene location. That could speed up the research but not do the research
Of course it opens the possibility of doing data research on the human genome and applying AI and all kinds of possibilities. But as a politician try getting constituents excited by that.
As for the idea that our genes didn't evolve to kill us, that was a hypothesis and I don't think we knew at the time what we were going to find. If you had asked doctors to make odds at the time about whether there would be a handful of heart attack genes that we could target, I think they would have said 'probably'
So we learned otherwise. But that doesn't mean that having complete gene sequences available doesn't massively help disease research. It just eliminates quick wins.
Sequencing our genome was a big step in science, and the timing (end of Cold War 1.0) helped pump up the optimism levels. The discovery of CRISPRs in 2005 and the subsequent thousand fold decrease in gene editing costs attracted more attention. This technology was used to cure the first sickle cell woman, for example and was also likely, (IMHO) used to produce the Wuhan virus we all remember with such affection. There are likely some other surprises in store with the gene editing efforts.
This past Tuesday a CT scan made this a highly relevant topic for me. I'm really hoping I get 6 decent months with my family. The biopsy results in a few days will perhaps let me know.
150 years? Absolutely not. I'm already jarred by the shift in value systems and cultural decay I've observed in 75 years.
It would be interesting to hear our presidential candidates debate a definition of human progress, if we had candidates capable of such a conversation.
"The turn of the century years just before 9/11 were an upbeat time."
Indeed. My first born (daughter) was about 1 year old and cute as button; life was good. Even though the dot.com bubble had burst, we hadn't yet entered the dot.com recession.
Then, in February 2001, Dale Earnhardt died on the last lap of the Daytona 500, and then, well, we all know the rest of the story. The last 24 years have not been the best ones in the history of the Republic.
Steve, you've often commented on the American Scots-Irish and their influence in American culture and politics from colonial settlement through the founding and on down through today. Their cultural influence and presence has waned, but they are thoroughly interwoven into the other American ethnic/racial subcultures, which is a fine American thing (I love your phrase "the Old Weird America"). Although Earnhardt is obviously Germanic, I would surmise his ancestors came as one of the 19th century waves of Germans (I could be wrong; have not done the research), refugees of the political and economic turmoil that erupted several times and sent large numbers to America. Most went north but many went south as well. My maternal grandmother (whose family was from middle Tennessee going back to the 1820's) had a clearly Germanic last name; I traced her line (through Census records and Ancestry.com) back to the original German clan that came a settled there in 1819. They inter-married frequently with the Scots-Irish and English Cavalier/Yeoman descendants.
I think Dale Earnhardt was somewhat of a folk hero to the Southern Scots-Irish, who loved (loved - NASCAR popularity has seriously waned since the mid-2000's) watching him race. Likely due to his intense competitiveness and I-don't-give-a-fig attitude when engaging with the sports media and NASCAR Corporate Leadership. He could be cranky and surly to them. When he died at the race, you could actually feel a huge sense of melancholy descend on a large chunk the Southern Scots-Irish.
A year before Earnhardt's death, another race car driver with a German surname, who, I think, lived in Tennessee, Tony Bettenhausen, was killed, February 14, 2000, when his plane encountered icing and he delayed climbing out of it. When he did finally try to climb, his plane, a Beech Baron, was already heavily burdened with rime ice and stalled. He was unable to recover and plunged to earth at 9,000fpm. The crash killed Bettenhousen, his wife, and two passengers.
From the NTSB accident report:
"The pilot filed an IFR flight plan, and received a standard weather briefing. The pilot was advised of occasional moderate rime or mixed icing below 10,000 feet for his route of flight. During the briefing the pilot stated, 'we got boots, and will be all right....' Approximately 5 minutes before the accident, the pilot reported the airplane was 'picking up' rime ice at 10,000 feet, and he requested 12,000 feet. He also reported that the windshield and wings were covered with ice, and that ice accumulation at 10,000 feet was moderate and steady. When the airplane started to climb to 12,000 feet, calibrated airspeed (CAS) began to decay. When the airplane reached 11,200 feet, and prior to the airplane starting a rapid descent, CAS had dropped to 85 knots. Minimum airspeed for icing conditions was published as 130 knots. In addition, the stall speed for the airplane was approximately 82 knots. The airplane was approved for flight into known icing conditions. Examination of the airframe, engines and propellers revealed no preimpact failures or malfunctions.
Probable Cause: The pilot's failure to maintain airspeed during a climb, which resulted in a loss of aircraft control."
"Boots" in this context means an inflatable rubber covering on the leading edge of the wings. When turned on, it inflates and deflates continuously, theoretically cracking any ice build-up and knocking it off the wing. But you need to keep an eye on the wings. The best procedure is to turn the boots on when ice begins to build up, then when it breaks off, turn off the boots until ice builds up again, then turn the boots on, break the ice off, shut down the boots, and so on.
If you don't, ice build-up can overwhelm the boots, forming on top of the boots so they inflate and deflate inside the build-up, accomplishing nothing. You have got to pay attention to the icing situation continuously. When you encounter icing, the wise thing to do is immediately change altitude to get out of it. Don't rely on your de-icing equipment to provide you with anything more than some time to escape the ice.
Bettenhausen had only been multi-engine-rated for less than a year and had bought his Beech only eight months earlier.
I believe most Germans in the South first settled in SE Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, not the 1800s. When that became crowded after mid-century, many moved to frontier central NC (VA had an established church), as did many Scots-Irish, and from there to points west in the 19th century, as the Piedmont doesn't have much good farmland (without fertilizer) for its size, and tobacco wears it out.
First, you would need to whole genome sequence the parents. That's doable because there is tons of DNA available - like from their white blood cells. If you have a single mutation for which to hunt - good. With preimplantation embryos you have like 2 extracted cells in total with which to work. Good for single mutations which can be amplified with nested PCR. DNA from the first cell to spot the mutation. DNA from the second to confirm it. But atm not for sequencing the whole genome.
> We haven’t cured cancer yet and nobody is living to 150.
To pee into the soup, I would argue these are both good things. We need ways to cull the population. If we live to 150 that means that people will be retired for more than half their lives. As a society we are not set up for this. If you think we're going off of a financial cliff now, just wait until we extend lifespans for another 50+ years!
I much prefer when science works on improving lives for people who were dealt a bad hand. The advances in technology for those who are missing limbs have been remarkable, but there is more to be done. After all, if you are born (or struck) blind, all society can do for you at this point is to give you a cane and a dog. Just imagine if we could cure blindness. To me that would be much more of a net positive than making sure grandma and grandpa can live another 60 years. I can tell you directly that those last couple of years for my grandparents weren't pleasant for anyone.
Another irony besides the race-doesn't-exist denialists becoming more shrill at that time was that the Gay "Born This Way/Can't Be Changed" movement kicked into another gear. So the latter was implying DNA/genomic evidence of homosexuality that never materialized.
Will & Grace debuted in 1998 and was one of the major propaganda vehicles for normalizing homosexual behavior to the public (as Joe Biden, in his dementia-addled stupidity, accidentally admitted). One early theme of the show was pushing the idea that homosexuality could not be cured -- a second season episode with Neil Patrick Harris guest starring had that as a main plot. And it had Will as just being closeted when younger with no sexual trauma to cause him to be gay.
Meanwhile, on Sex and the City (contemporary to Will & Grace), an episode had two homosexual men that Charlotte tried to set up have an odd conversation where one talked about his time as a younger man and the other kept repeating "But you were gay then" as a mantra, to hammer home to the audience the homosexuality-is-inborn political slogan the gay normalization movement was pushing at the time.
In reality, of course, homsexuals are made, not born. It is fundamentally nurture, not nature: the child is either sexually molested (the most common way) or else mother is so overbearing and dad ejected from the situation (and often mommy sexually molests the child for good measure) that the child develops a warped sense of the sexes such that they become sexually stunted to the early-pubescent "the other sex is icky" stuff. And many homosexuals have come around and developed opposite-sex attraction with therapy and help.
So sad this degeneracy has such political force that it shuts down help for those afflicted!
People believed in genetics in the same manner as astrology some 2k years ago. They inappropriately ascribed some causal agency to genes. They're doing the same thing right now with AI, which will similarly fail to live up to its promises.
in the early 2000's, I took a bunch of extension courses in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics. One of the courses was on drug development, with a lot of guest speakers from Roche.
The message I got back then was: the DNA knowledge was helpful, no question about it. But that's all. It didn't solve many problems all by itself.
Hard science is hard. Nothing will make it trivial.
Were the scientists and bureaucrats back then true believers, or did they sell the government a pig in a poke for the money?
Why did sickle cell anemia have such a brief moment in the sun so long ago and then fade away? Is it that rare? With recent white guilt, it looks like someone would see the fundraising opportunity and raise some consciousness again, but you're the only person I've heard bring it up in decades.
It was a big pie in the sky back then. Until you actually do the research in detail - and that means like completely sequencing 1k or more individuals, you don't know if it is going to be profitable in dollars and cents. Back then it was the next frontier - just like settling Mars now, lol.
The problem with sickle cell is that as a heterozygote trait it protects against Malaria. So reducing the rate of heterozygosity is not all that cost-effective.
Sickle cell anemia affects about 100,000 Americans who are living in a colder climate. But of course we are no closer to curing it now than before. Same with Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s and diabetes.
Yes I suspect curing these conditions is as unrealistic as settling Mars (a new favourite completely unrealistic idea).
Well, with sickle cell we at least know the gene defect. With Alzheimer or Parkinson, with the exception of small percentage of monogenetic cases, the gene defects are mostly unknown and the diseases maybe a combination of nurture, infections and polygenetic nature. Same with diabetes.
At the moment, with Alzheimer we are starting to undergo humongous, large-scale phase 3/4 trials of antibody-assisted mobilization of amyloid precursor fragment deposits. If it will work it would finally confirm the amyloid precursor hypothesis. But we are not there yet. So far, the phase 2 results have been underwhelmingly moderate. Even though statistically significant (?)...
I don't understand how curing fatal cancers and other diseases gets anyone to 150 years old. Don't many of the very elderly die because of either falls that cause broken bones or their vital organs simply give out? How does genetic research change either of these factors?
I think it's been established that 120 years is the absolute limit for homo sapiens based on telomere length.
It depends on answering the question 'what is the mechanism of aging?'. Is aging a program that is set up in our genes? If so it is tempting to think we could turn it off. If aging is wear and tear and accumulation of errors over a lifetime of repairs and patches, then all we can do is have more fixes and patches to let you limp on for a few more years like a 2012 Nissan Altima.
my bet is that it's a complex mixture of both.
Entropy is a biyotch...
Are they going to find a way to keep joints from wearing out? It doesn't seem possible you could fix that genetically. The idea of spending 30+ years with knees that make it hard at first and eventually impossible to walk and other constant aches and pains is not what the average person buying into this is thinking about.
It may be telling this came in 2000, right as the Boomers were going into the back end of middle age. More than a few had abandoned the idea of an afterlife and would have been eager to grab onto the promise of a long extended life on earth without fully thinking it through. Bill Clinton in particular would represent this mindset well. Did he think the government run healthcare system he wanted was going to be doing knee and hip replacement surgeries on 110 year olds?
Do 2012 Altimas limp? My impression, driving 25k miles a year, is that Altimas, Accords and Camry's from those years are going strong, and so are Altimas from the '00-04 era.
My daughter's Honda Civic was built in 2007; it has ~200K miles on it and still runs well, though some of the interior accoutrements are a bit worn.
Reading those speeches, you might think they never heard of "under promise and over deliver".
Funny how the nature-nurture dynamic is played. When it comes to physical issues like health it's all about nature, environmental factors don't matter. But social matters are all about relationships and power, nature has no impact.
Realize it's not just rampant stupidity (at least not all), there was a lot of VC money waiting to be invested into the next best thing.
OTOH, Bill does look today like he is pushing 150.
Best end point of almost all medical research is that the new drug treatment benefits some people some of the time.
The human genome project was a good idea but if you had tried to sell it to the public based on an accurate description of its purpose, the average voter would fall asleep. When he awoke he would have called his congressman and demanded we not pay for this boring incomprehensible boondoggle. How far back would that have set biology and medicine? Hard to say.
Even though there are no cures for Alzheimer’s, diabetes, etc genetic markers for some have been discovered. For example APOE4 is a marker for Alzheimer’s. Debatable that this has helped: without a cure people don’t want to know.
In one case the BRCA gene (causes breast and ovarian cancer) carriers can have their breasts and ovaries removed. Drastic but it does help.
I keep hearing that we are Curing Cancer but while everyone agrees it's a switch that gets flipped at the sub-cellular level I don't think anyone knows where the switch is or how we flip it back off. So far as I've observed metastasis remains a 5-year death sentence. Happy to be proved wrong.
Tyler Cowen's and Alex Tabarrok's Marginal Revolution blog is a great source for the Latest Thing. They hump AI relentlessly, like they used to hump 3D printing presses and self-driving cars. I think once AI starts mowing through white collar jobs like the mechanical harvesters through agriculture MR won't talk about it much. It's no fun having to admit that we really don't need to stuff immigrants in every nook and cranny. One thing you don't hear a lot about on MR is genetics. I'm guessing the geneticists are learning there's not much you can do about your genetics. And since a lot of us aren't going to have grandkids it's just not as important. Which is probably just as well because another thing we're not doing is burning off mutational load.
Anyway, good morning and happy Thursday.
College professors who wants to keep their jobs cannot research, write, or talk about the impacts of genetics at a population level. But one should also remember how wrong those in the past were when it comes to genetics.
Who, and how wrong, were they? I'd say the average 19th century livestock farmer was better informed and more accurate about genetics than most people today.
The focus was on the genetics of human, not farm animals.
Human genetics operate the same way as any other animal's.
At the animal level, genetics is viewed at the aggregate. For human, it is at the individual level. Very different.
Lol. That's the answer to a different question. And individual animals are judged for conformance with the breed all the time.
It isn't a switch that get's flipped. Our understanding of cancer has advanced greatly since I was in school so I don't claim to be completely up to date. That said, our current understanding is a series of "switches" get flipped and the cancer cells evolve within the environment of your body in response to selective pressures. The abnormal cells in your colonic mucosa need to adapt to be able to invade the wall. They probably need to evolve further to metastasize successfully (though maybe not. We certainly don't know everything and I am not reading the journals).
When I was in school we were taught that once a cell goes cancer you are pretty much going to see cancer if you live long enough. Now we think your immune system is pretty good at sweeping away the abnormal cells before they can get a foot hold. Cancer represents a breakdown in this mechanism, much like pneumonia is a failure to control some bacteria in your lungs.
Thus a lot of research and many promising treatments are based on helping your immune system clear cancer.
Living to be 150 yo sounds great until you realize that will come with a retirement age of 125 years. Imagine toiling at a job for a century or more before you qualify for a decent pension, only to have pushed your statistical luck too far and die in a traffic accident before you can do so. The advantages of knowing my genome are outweighed by the sale of that information to unknown actors, and at 70 I ain't going back to Maggie's Farm.
I'm wondering if it will be more like 75 years of increasing decrepitude once you hit age 75, as opposed to 10 years of increasing decrepitude.
Seeing centenarians really just makes me not want to be one.
Tom Segura has a bit about people asking him 'don't you want to live to a hundred?' and he responds 'no, have you seen 80?"
My 79 year old cousin doesn't think it's as funny as I do.
There was a scifi book I picked up once which opened with a description of people who had lived to 150 or more thanks to medical science. The description of their falling-apart bodies sitting out at a cafe enjoying breakfast was quite disgusting. Likely the author got the idea from that Greek myth where a woman is granted eternal life but not eternal youth and must live as her body turns into dust and is blow away by the wind.
Yes, but that is offset by the refreshing conversations taking place . Many of those cafe-goers will be blacks saying things lije, "damn, I wish I hadn't spent most of my life making YT unconfortable."
I'm guessing the Boomers who bought into this thought they were going to get 70-80 years of retirement on the front end of the wave and it would be up to subsequent generations to figure out how retirement would work for everyone else.
Steve, where the genomics has worked out is if one is diagnosed with lymphoma in 2024, one is probably going to go through a set a genetic tests because many of those monoclonal antibodies only work when one has certain genes. That is why the advertising for MABs mentions that one has to be positive for certain genes and negative for others.
Another success in genomics is it realizing that being genetically disposed to certain cancers such as pancreatic cancer is due to a series of genetic markers instead of just having the "Pancreatic Cancer Gene."
Complete elimination of all cancer would add about 4 years of life expectancy - according to a calculation in the 1980s by Nathan Keyfitz. It would be a little bit more now, but not much.
As I remember it, the point of the human genome project was not so grand. Prior to it, researchers would look for genetic associations with, e.g. a disease, and use a variety of techniques to narrow it down to a chromosome, then a region of a chromosome, and finally a small enough region that they could have the grad students sequence it. After that they would need to do a bunch of other stuff. Did it code for a protein or was it a regulator sequence? If it was a protein what was the protein and what did it do? and that would lead to more questions and more papers and if it was a regulator then same deal. Was the regulator being turned on too much or too little? And on and on.
All the human genome project was intended to do, was eliminate the step where your grad students had to sequence the small region to which you had isolated the gene location. That could speed up the research but not do the research
Of course it opens the possibility of doing data research on the human genome and applying AI and all kinds of possibilities. But as a politician try getting constituents excited by that.
As for the idea that our genes didn't evolve to kill us, that was a hypothesis and I don't think we knew at the time what we were going to find. If you had asked doctors to make odds at the time about whether there would be a handful of heart attack genes that we could target, I think they would have said 'probably'
So we learned otherwise. But that doesn't mean that having complete gene sequences available doesn't massively help disease research. It just eliminates quick wins.
Sequencing our genome was a big step in science, and the timing (end of Cold War 1.0) helped pump up the optimism levels. The discovery of CRISPRs in 2005 and the subsequent thousand fold decrease in gene editing costs attracted more attention. This technology was used to cure the first sickle cell woman, for example and was also likely, (IMHO) used to produce the Wuhan virus we all remember with such affection. There are likely some other surprises in store with the gene editing efforts.
For more on what is going on at present, see this link: https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/06/stanford-explainer-crispr-gene-editing-and-beyond
This past Tuesday a CT scan made this a highly relevant topic for me. I'm really hoping I get 6 decent months with my family. The biopsy results in a few days will perhaps let me know.
150 years? Absolutely not. I'm already jarred by the shift in value systems and cultural decay I've observed in 75 years.
It would be interesting to hear our presidential candidates debate a definition of human progress, if we had candidates capable of such a conversation.
Agree. I’m 73 and find modern social trends bizarre.
Good luck with your biopsy results.
Thanks for your kind thoughts.
"The turn of the century years just before 9/11 were an upbeat time."
Indeed. My first born (daughter) was about 1 year old and cute as button; life was good. Even though the dot.com bubble had burst, we hadn't yet entered the dot.com recession.
Then, in February 2001, Dale Earnhardt died on the last lap of the Daytona 500, and then, well, we all know the rest of the story. The last 24 years have not been the best ones in the history of the Republic.
Yup, Dale Earnhardt's spectacular death was The Omen.
It *was* a tragically poetic death.
Would have been like if Prince had died on stage during a guitar solo.
Steve, you've often commented on the American Scots-Irish and their influence in American culture and politics from colonial settlement through the founding and on down through today. Their cultural influence and presence has waned, but they are thoroughly interwoven into the other American ethnic/racial subcultures, which is a fine American thing (I love your phrase "the Old Weird America"). Although Earnhardt is obviously Germanic, I would surmise his ancestors came as one of the 19th century waves of Germans (I could be wrong; have not done the research), refugees of the political and economic turmoil that erupted several times and sent large numbers to America. Most went north but many went south as well. My maternal grandmother (whose family was from middle Tennessee going back to the 1820's) had a clearly Germanic last name; I traced her line (through Census records and Ancestry.com) back to the original German clan that came a settled there in 1819. They inter-married frequently with the Scots-Irish and English Cavalier/Yeoman descendants.
I think Dale Earnhardt was somewhat of a folk hero to the Southern Scots-Irish, who loved (loved - NASCAR popularity has seriously waned since the mid-2000's) watching him race. Likely due to his intense competitiveness and I-don't-give-a-fig attitude when engaging with the sports media and NASCAR Corporate Leadership. He could be cranky and surly to them. When he died at the race, you could actually feel a huge sense of melancholy descend on a large chunk the Southern Scots-Irish.
A year before Earnhardt's death, another race car driver with a German surname, who, I think, lived in Tennessee, Tony Bettenhausen, was killed, February 14, 2000, when his plane encountered icing and he delayed climbing out of it. When he did finally try to climb, his plane, a Beech Baron, was already heavily burdened with rime ice and stalled. He was unable to recover and plunged to earth at 9,000fpm. The crash killed Bettenhousen, his wife, and two passengers.
From the NTSB accident report:
"The pilot filed an IFR flight plan, and received a standard weather briefing. The pilot was advised of occasional moderate rime or mixed icing below 10,000 feet for his route of flight. During the briefing the pilot stated, 'we got boots, and will be all right....' Approximately 5 minutes before the accident, the pilot reported the airplane was 'picking up' rime ice at 10,000 feet, and he requested 12,000 feet. He also reported that the windshield and wings were covered with ice, and that ice accumulation at 10,000 feet was moderate and steady. When the airplane started to climb to 12,000 feet, calibrated airspeed (CAS) began to decay. When the airplane reached 11,200 feet, and prior to the airplane starting a rapid descent, CAS had dropped to 85 knots. Minimum airspeed for icing conditions was published as 130 knots. In addition, the stall speed for the airplane was approximately 82 knots. The airplane was approved for flight into known icing conditions. Examination of the airframe, engines and propellers revealed no preimpact failures or malfunctions.
Probable Cause: The pilot's failure to maintain airspeed during a climb, which resulted in a loss of aircraft control."
"Boots" in this context means an inflatable rubber covering on the leading edge of the wings. When turned on, it inflates and deflates continuously, theoretically cracking any ice build-up and knocking it off the wing. But you need to keep an eye on the wings. The best procedure is to turn the boots on when ice begins to build up, then when it breaks off, turn off the boots until ice builds up again, then turn the boots on, break the ice off, shut down the boots, and so on.
If you don't, ice build-up can overwhelm the boots, forming on top of the boots so they inflate and deflate inside the build-up, accomplishing nothing. You have got to pay attention to the icing situation continuously. When you encounter icing, the wise thing to do is immediately change altitude to get out of it. Don't rely on your de-icing equipment to provide you with anything more than some time to escape the ice.
Bettenhausen had only been multi-engine-rated for less than a year and had bought his Beech only eight months earlier.
I believe most Germans in the South first settled in SE Pennsylvania in the early 1700s, not the 1800s. When that became crowded after mid-century, many moved to frontier central NC (VA had an established church), as did many Scots-Irish, and from there to points west in the 19th century, as the Piedmont doesn't have much good farmland (without fertilizer) for its size, and tobacco wears it out.
Edit: Early Earnhardts below--they haven't moved much in 230 years. China Grove is 6 miles from Kannapolis. I wonder if they left Bavaria because they were Protestants. https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/197890999/johann_jurg_ehrenhardt
https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/197892476/johannes_ehrenhardt
But there is still the promise of IVF, selecting among multiple embryos using whole genome sequencing, no? Not so sure about crispr.
IVF is good for selecting embryos without a particular genetic marker.
First, you would need to whole genome sequence the parents. That's doable because there is tons of DNA available - like from their white blood cells. If you have a single mutation for which to hunt - good. With preimplantation embryos you have like 2 extracted cells in total with which to work. Good for single mutations which can be amplified with nested PCR. DNA from the first cell to spot the mutation. DNA from the second to confirm it. But atm not for sequencing the whole genome.
> We haven’t cured cancer yet and nobody is living to 150.
To pee into the soup, I would argue these are both good things. We need ways to cull the population. If we live to 150 that means that people will be retired for more than half their lives. As a society we are not set up for this. If you think we're going off of a financial cliff now, just wait until we extend lifespans for another 50+ years!
I much prefer when science works on improving lives for people who were dealt a bad hand. The advances in technology for those who are missing limbs have been remarkable, but there is more to be done. After all, if you are born (or struck) blind, all society can do for you at this point is to give you a cane and a dog. Just imagine if we could cure blindness. To me that would be much more of a net positive than making sure grandma and grandpa can live another 60 years. I can tell you directly that those last couple of years for my grandparents weren't pleasant for anyone.
Another irony besides the race-doesn't-exist denialists becoming more shrill at that time was that the Gay "Born This Way/Can't Be Changed" movement kicked into another gear. So the latter was implying DNA/genomic evidence of homosexuality that never materialized.
Will & Grace debuted in 1998 and was one of the major propaganda vehicles for normalizing homosexual behavior to the public (as Joe Biden, in his dementia-addled stupidity, accidentally admitted). One early theme of the show was pushing the idea that homosexuality could not be cured -- a second season episode with Neil Patrick Harris guest starring had that as a main plot. And it had Will as just being closeted when younger with no sexual trauma to cause him to be gay.
Meanwhile, on Sex and the City (contemporary to Will & Grace), an episode had two homosexual men that Charlotte tried to set up have an odd conversation where one talked about his time as a younger man and the other kept repeating "But you were gay then" as a mantra, to hammer home to the audience the homosexuality-is-inborn political slogan the gay normalization movement was pushing at the time.
In reality, of course, homsexuals are made, not born. It is fundamentally nurture, not nature: the child is either sexually molested (the most common way) or else mother is so overbearing and dad ejected from the situation (and often mommy sexually molests the child for good measure) that the child develops a warped sense of the sexes such that they become sexually stunted to the early-pubescent "the other sex is icky" stuff. And many homosexuals have come around and developed opposite-sex attraction with therapy and help.
So sad this degeneracy has such political force that it shuts down help for those afflicted!
This SubStack was fundamentally better when you weren't here. It would be nice if you could contain your moronic ramblings to the other place.
Shut up, pedo.
People believed in genetics in the same manner as astrology some 2k years ago. They inappropriately ascribed some causal agency to genes. They're doing the same thing right now with AI, which will similarly fail to live up to its promises.
in the early 2000's, I took a bunch of extension courses in Molecular Biology and Bioinformatics. One of the courses was on drug development, with a lot of guest speakers from Roche.
The message I got back then was: the DNA knowledge was helpful, no question about it. But that's all. It didn't solve many problems all by itself.
Hard science is hard. Nothing will make it trivial.