Part the First: Is This How to Do Science? San Diego, with the University of California-San Diego and the Scripps Research Institute leading the way, has been a Biotech/Little Pharma hotspot since the beginning, a strong third behind Boston and the Bay Area. Ups and downs are common, but in the current climate it is not clear that recovery is in the offing. From STAT, Uncertainty clouds the San Diego biotech hub, with jobs and capital scarce:
Ever since Vince Kato was laid off, he has felt like he was just two to three months away from landing a new position. But more than a year later, he’s running out of options, and out of time. Kato, who was a senior engineer at Illumina, was let go in March 2024 and since then, has applied without success for hundreds of positions at biotech startups and larger pharma firms, including roles he is overqualified for. With a monthly rent of $3,600 eating through his savings, he’s now facing hard choices.
“I’ve either got to leave San Diego, move back to Minnesota, or something. I don’t know,” Kato said. “At this point, I’m just reaching the end of my rope financially.”
Rather than discuss the outlook for biomedical science in general and Vince Kato in particular, the concerns expressed here are rather different. Not to mention shortsighted:
(Local analysts) remain convinced the local industry is spring-loaded for growth once investment dollars start flowing more freely and the industry’s IPO slump ends. Josh Schimmer, a market analyst for financial services firm Cantor Fitzgerald, finds reason for optimism in recent data. In a note to investors at the end of last year, Schimmer pulled data on how the stocks of dozens of San Diego’s publicly traded biotechs performed in 2024. He found that local companies’ shares increased by 29% at the median during a year in which the XBI, a closely tracked index of biotech stocks, was flat…“We continue to see very differentiated, very powerful companies, technologies, products, platforms, emerging out of San Diego.”
That’s what Hallie Kuhn sees, too. Kuhn, life sciences lead for Alexandria Real Estate, noted that, since 2023, for every dollar of venture capital poured into local biotech companies, there have been $5.85 in returns from mergers and acquisitions, according to data Alexandria has pulled from Pitchbook and market intelligence firm Evaluate. That exceeded the returns on investment for biotechs in Boston and San Francisco, where acquisition-to-investment ratios during this period were 3.33 and 0.76, respectively.
“From a venture perspective, our dollars here go really far,” she said.
And so it goes. In typical American fashion, very little about the science while the focus stays on money – which is what matters as Big Pharma buys up Little Pharma and provides a windfall for VC and PE while the “principals” of Little Pharma cash out with a unicorn and go sailing. To wit:
Three of the larger biotech deals in the past couple years were from Novartis, which bought gene therapy startup Kate Therapeutics, siRNA company DTx Pharma, and kidney-focused biotech Regulus Therapeutics. Those deals helped convince the Swiss pharma giant to expand its existing investment in the region. In April, Novartis announced plans to establish a $1.1 billion research hub in San Diego, its second such facility in the United States.
“We keep finding really good biotech companies there,” she said. “We really like the … dense packing together of pharma and biotech. It means people mix together, there are shared facilities. We generally find that’s the sort of environment that stimulates innovation.”
Behold, the Bayh-Dole Act of 1980 doing what it does best! Science in the United States has strayed so far from the post-war vision of Vannevar Bush that it may never recover. Especially if the Current Administration succeeds in its goal to Make American Science Great Again (MASGA) by returning it to a Gold Standard Science™ that admits of no uncertainty or leaves no room for the unexpected, and ignores the rest of the world. When Max Delbrück counseled his students and colleagues to always leave room for the unexpected result in their experiments, he was talking about all of science, not just what they were doing in their individual laboratories. As an aside, the first true discovery I made as a newly independent scientist happened because I left room for the unexpected in an experiment and found an accidental mutant that was the key to a function of my favorite protein.
Well, MASGA will require a return to what was a golden age of American science when scientists in independent research institutions, universities and colleges, medical schools, along with intramural researchers at the National Institutes of Health, are given the support to “interrogate” the living world in search of new and useful knowledge, with few preconditions. This is how to do science, if you want it to be productive. There is no other way.
Part the Second: The Strange Case of the Current Director of the National Institutes of Health. Jay Bhattacharya, MD-PhD (Stanford) is often referred to as a physician in the popular press. Although he has an MD, he is not a physician (neither is Casey Means, MD, who is apparently still the Surgeon General designee despite not having a license to practice medicine after she left her ENT residency without finishing it). Bhattacharya went straight from his medical school graduation to the PhD program in Economics at Stanford. He never did a residency and thus has never practiced medicine. In most jurisdictions it would be illegal for him to imply he is a “doctor,” if that is taken to have the same meaning as “physician.” Nor has he ever done any biomedical research as far as I can tell in a quick search of PubMed (NB: I may well have missed it; PubMed is indispensable but not infallible).
He has, on the other hand, received NIH support for published research on the economics and delivery of healthcare in the United States. This is covered here: Jay Bhattacharya once studied health disparities. As NIH director, he’s allowed such research to wither:
The April announcement of National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya’s appointment and his public profile at Stanford University, where he was a professor of health policy, both state that his work has focused on vulnerable populations, and he’s published at least five papers on racial health disparities. In June, he specifically lauded sickle cell research as an NIH success, highlighting it as the kind of work “that advances the health and well-being of minority populations,” and that the NIH should continue supporting. “It absolutely must,” he told podcaster Andrew Huberman.
Yet that same month, Duke University hematologist Charity Oyedeji was notified that her $750,000 NIH grant was terminated. She’d been studying how to assess and stave off disability for Americans with sickle cell disease, who tend to age prematurely, and most of whom are Black. The June 16 notice said that “such diversity, equity, and inclusion (“DEI”) studies are often used to support unlawful discrimination on the basis of race … which harms the health of Americans.”
To Oyedeji, that made it sound like her patients weren’t worth spending research time or money on. “People in this project are Americans,” she told STAT. “So do you not think that diverse populations are considered in this blanket of ‘Americans?’ Is ‘Americans’ the white people?”
Why is it that most patients in the US with sickle cell disease are Black? It has absolutely nothing to do with their race, which aside from superficial inherited characters is a sociopolitical construct convenient for eugenicists and their political minions. The malaria parasite does not grow well in the red blood cells of carriers of the sickle cell trait [one gene for Hemoglobin S (HbS) instead of two]. Thus, carriers are resistant to malaria and have mild symptoms of sickle cell disease only under extreme conditions (e.g., sustained exertion, high altitude). People with ancestors from sub-Saharan Africa are not the only populations that are prone to sickle cell disease. Those from Southeast Asia and the Mediterranean basin are also at risk for sickle cell disease, where malaria remains endemic. By the way, as the climate warms, malaria is probably returning the North America, too, as it was for my father as a child in southern Louisiana ninety years ago.
Whatever the justification for termination of a grant to study the trajectory of sickle cell disease, it cannot be DEI. Nevertheless:
Despite his avowed support for vulnerable people, Bhattacharya’s tenure has seen such science swept up in the Trump administration’s attack on DEI. Grants for health disparities research have been terminated left and right, sometimes affecting the very topics he’s said are worth studying. When confronted, he claimed, incorrectly, that such cuts hadn’t happened. Whether he’s been unwilling or unable to prevent them — or simply unaware of what’s happening within his own agency — is hard to say.
Or maybe it is not really hard to say. Maya Angelou famously and correctly said, “When someone shows you who they are, believe them the first time.” Jay Bhattacharya is one of three authors of the Great Barrington Declaration, which was the “let ‘er rip” manifesto for dealing with COVID-19 by letting the virus run wild to elicit herd immunity that would protect the vast majority from the pandemic. Never mind that a virus that does not elicit durable immunity, either through infection or vaccination, will not be controlled by herd immunity (unlike measles). This document is still cited by those inclined to believe what is emitted from one of our primary Merchants of Doubt, the American Institute for Economic Research. One may fairly conclude that Jay Bhattacharya, MD-PhD, is a libertarian for whom health is a personal, not a public matter. In this he is no different from the general run of such people. Those of us who get sick, get what we deserve. So saith the current Secretary of Health and Human Services. Like other things, directives flow downhill with a will of their own. And unlike every other Director of NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, MD-PhD, has no research as a physician or biomedical scientist.
Part the Third: More on Malaria. In the movement to Make America Great Again, the country with the largest biomedical research establishment is pulling back from its place in the world because foreign aid has become foreign to our polity. From Science on August 7th: Losing protection The United States helped beat back malaria in Guinea. Now, the disease is set to soar:
Guinea—One morning in mid-June, a 10-year-old boy named Mohamed Camara was lying on a bed in a health center in the small Guinean town of Tamita, wearing bright blue shorts and an army-style T-shirt with Chinese characters on it. He looked listless and feverish; little pearls of sweat flowed from his forehead. He had just been diagnosed with malaria.
That morning, Mohamed’s parents had taken him to the center, which sits about 20 kilometers from the Atlantic coast in Boffa prefecture. Now, they and his baby sister were sitting on the bed next to him, looking anxious. “We were very worried,” said his father, Alseny Camara. They would have brought their son to the hospital earlier, he noted, but his job as a driver had taken him away from home for a few days.
Just 6 months earlier, Mohamed’s parents would have been able to call a community health worker when he got sick. That person might have come to the Camaras’ home on a motorcycle, taken a drop of blood, and applied it to a rapid diagnostic test, which looks a lot like a home test for COVID-19. After the thin line indicating a malaria infection had appeared, the health worker would have given the boy a first dose of drugs and explained to his parents how to continue the treatment. (If his symptoms were severe, Mohamed would have been referred to the health center instead.) A few days later, the worker would have checked in to see how Mohamed was doing.
Community health workers—laypeople trained to provide a few primary health services—are an essential part of the medical system in many African countries, and they’re particularly important in the fight against malaria, when a few days’ delay in diagnosis and treatment can make the difference between life and death. In Guinea, where the country’s entire population of more than 14 million is at risk of malaria, thousands of these workers lost their jobs after the United States suddenly froze billions of dollars in foreign aid in January, just days after President Donald Trump took office.
It turns out that Mohamed did not have a severe case of malaria and has been discharged from the hospital. But the United States of America cannot afford to send the $15M to Guinea that would save countless lives from the scourge that is malaria?
This, is what we have come to under Project 2025?
Part the Fourth: De-Extinction? No, Not Really. As has been all over the news, a company in Texas claims to have de-extincted the dire wolf, a canid that disappeared from the Americas during the last Ice Age:
For months, researchers in a laboratory in Dallas, Texas, worked in secrecy, culturing grey-wolf blood cells and altering the DNA within. The scientists then plucked nuclei from these gene-edited cells and injected them into egg cells from a domestic dog to form clones.
They transferred dozens of the cloned embryos into the wombs of surrogate dogs, eventually bringing into the world three animals of a type that had never been seen before. Two males named Romulus and Remus (get it!) were born in October 2024, and a female, Khaleesi, was born in January.
A few months later, Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based company that produced the creatures, declared: “The first de-extinct animals are here.” Of 20 edits made to the animals’ genomes, the company says that 15 match sequences identified in dire wolves (Aenocyon dirus), a large-bodied wolf species that last roamed North America during the ice age that ended some 11,500 years ago.
A technical tour de force? Yes. The recovery of an extinct species? No. The Nature article This company claimed to ‘de-extinct’ dire wolves. Then the fighting started is available at the archived link. The meaning of de-extinction is bound up in science fiction, some of which endures in the cinema:
De-extinction is an emerging field that represents the meeting point of several groundbreaking biotechnologies: ancient genomics, cloning and genome editing, ostensibly in the service of conservation. The field has roots in science fiction, with the term seeming first to have appeared in a 1979 novel by Piers Anthony called The Source of Magic. And Michael Crichton’s 1990 novel Jurassic Park — itself inspired by ancient-DNA investigations — popularized the possibility that long-dead organisms could be cloned from preserved DNA.
I have never been much of a reader of science fiction, but I read Jurassic Park in one sitting, just as I did The Andromeda Strain as a teenager. Crichton had a way. I willingly suspended disbelief that DNA would survive intact in blood cells of a dinosaur amber for 65+ million years in a mosquito trapped in amber. And that this would allow the brilliant technicians working for Richard Attenborough to clone Velociraptor and T. rex, among others. It was a good story and the first movie was a good movie (I have not seen any of the sequels). Could DNA survive for 10,000 years in a frozen carcass? Perhaps. Probably, under perfect conditions. Could this DNA be used to clone an organism in a surrogate mother? Very unlikely.
What Colossal has done is, according to Tom Gilbert of the University of Copenhagen, produce a dog with twenty dire wolf genome edits in its genome. Again, this is a marvelous technical achievement that likely has relevance to conservation of endangered species. But this dog not a dire wolf. Still, what this overall approach could do is save the white rhinoceros, which has been hunted to near extinction. By any reasonable definition beyond a parlor trick, de-extinction must include reintroduction of the saved animal into its ecological niche. This is possible with the rhino. The Ice Age of the dire wolf and other large terrestrial mammals, unlikely.
And then there is this:
The company, now valued at around US$10 billion, has attracted celebrity investors, including the media personality Paris Hilton and film director Peter Jackson, alongside a handful of leading scientists as staff and advisers.
Clearly the company is by current definition a bountiful success. And this:
From Colossal’s perspective, the dire-wolf announcement was a success. Lamm says that the company tracked thousands of articles and social-media mentions about the achievement using artificial intelligence, and that they are overwhelmingly positive. “I wouldn’t change one thing,” he says. In July, Colossal announced controversial plans to de-extinct moas, a group of giant flightless birds that vanished not long after humans first arrived in New Zealand.
So, there you have it. Colossal is worth $10B (and we know how that often goes) and the responses to their breathtaking news has been “overwhelmingly positive” according to AI. John Hammond could not have said it better. But the fact remains that science by press release is not science. And extinction still is forever.
Part the Fifth, By Way of Diversion. Big Brother placed the final scene from the movie The Right Stuff in the sidebar of a video I was watching earlier this week. I was seven years old when Gordon Cooper made that final Mercury flight, so I am a sucker for such things. Throughout the remainder of elementary school, we watched virtually every Gemini Program launch on the snowy televisions on the mobile stands in my school (Grades 1-6). Yes, initially the US space program was a response to the Soviet Union. But it was also an unparalleled technical and scientific achievement with national purpose, perhaps similar to the final development and release of the polio vaccines contemporaneous with the Mercury Program.
This was also when the CEOs of General Electric and General Motors, both named Charlie Wilson, were proud their companies were best at what they did and the largest employers in the United States, while providing a living wage and setting that standard across the country. Not that they particularly cared for unions, but their shareholders were virtually inconsequential to them and certainly had little to do with their compensation. The America of 60+ years ago could do stuff and make things. Yes, prosperity was unevenly distributed, but that could have been remedied. After some discussion, a friend sent me this video clip from The Right Stuff, and commented, “This is where it started to go wrong.” He is correct. The NASA recruiter played by Harry Shearer may be the first member of the Professional Managerial Class (PMC). The older man in the cameo behind him is Chuck Yeager, who was played in the movie by Sam Shepard.
Those with experience, knowledge and knowhow, independence, and courage “don’t fit the profile.” Sums up America’s current state in four words.
Those with experience, knowledge and knowhow, independence, and courage “don’t fit the profile.” Sums up America’s current state in four words.
May I add “integrity” and “dignity” to make it six?
I’d add “in UK” to the America bit.
Same problem…. we just don’t get as much attention because we are “yesterday’s Empire” rather than “today’s Empire”.
Israel desperately wants as much U.S. aid as possible in order to kill as many Palestinians as possible. Therefore, saving $15 million would be significant.
It used to be a joke. Now it is true. Tell your grandchildren that there once was a “Golden Age.” Giants strode the Earth and did mighty deeds. Alas, today is but the decayed remnant of those halcyon times.
What is sadder is that many of those reading these words were alive to see the fall and understand what they saw and are still experiencing.
Yes, we are no longer the good guys, not saying we are the bad guys, but no longer the good guys and I mean most of us. Our grandfathers and their fathers were the good guys but we have allowed ourselves to be sucked into the good life with empty promises and temporary prosperity through stealing other people’s resources. Now the hammer comes down.
Even contemplating turning this around makes you want to weep. Probably our best hope is Mr Trump causing a second Great Depression, but could we organise like those of the first Great Depression ? Probably we would hunker down in our atomised silos and hold our delusional house prices to our chests.
I think we can say we’re the bad guys.
We plot and execute coups that cause immense damage to multiple countries and entire regions of the world. We abuse world health programs and vaccine programs so that poor people in other countries don’t trust them. We outsource terribly destructive manufacturing processes to other countries so that we can get cheap goods without paying the environmental price. We start wars that we profit from directly. We prevent peace from developing in war torn regions. We ignore the suffering we cause in captive populations like Gaza by supporting the efforts of Occupiers. We refuse to support healthcare as a human right. Our banks benefit from the trade of illegal substances and people. We support the use and development of crypto assets so that there are untraceable ways to profit from criminal activity. We use methods of killing people that permanently scar children’s minds and bodies using tools they can’t fight back against like drones. We ignore the rule of law in our country, in other countries, and when our citizens are in other countries. We torture people.
I am not so naive to say that if there were no USA, the world would be a utopia. But if we stopped doing all this stuff most of the really bad stuff in the world right now would have a step change downward in frequency and duration.
we could have led by example rather than force,
probably a mistake to have not done that.
when were we ever the good guys? Once, perhaps we were the competent guys, but good guys?
“There were giants in the earth in those days…”(great book about pioneers by that title.)
I’m gonna do a rant tangent on this…bear with me:
my cousin and i talk about this all the time…usually tangentially to being a two man support group for black sheep children of covert narcissist superbitches.
i aint gonna paint with a broad generational brush, per site policy…because most of the boomer generation i have known have not been PMC or in any way bougie.
but in our family, they definitely were.
we talk about our respective college experiences…and marvel at how good our folks had it.
((while insisting at their failsons that ” well, I worked my way through college…”)
or medical care…or careers, stability, home prices, cops walking beats and knowing everyone, and just on and on and on and on.
my dad was a terrible student from K all the way up to his BS in geography and his minor in meteorology…but he got on at the DIA, in the damned pentagon…as a C student,lol…then on to NASA, where he was witness to amazing things.
and all of this backed up, shored up and made whole when it broke by my grandparents…and the country they had built, beginning in the Great Depression, through The Big One, and especially thereafter.
it was our parents who let all that just wither away…and then blamed their children for not having the same largesse applied to them,lol.
As KLG says, it wasnt a paradise…all the racism and sexism and smallmindedness and conformity…but dern…they could afford to live and go to school and buy a car and a house, etc.
when my parents were still dating, it cost $5 for him to take her all the way into houston for dinner and a movie.
25 years later, when i was in college, he’d hand me $5 and say, “heres some mad money…”
and again…the vast majority of the boomer generation that i know, personally, and right now…are working at convenience stores or cleaning the B&B’s or whatever…in their late 70’s and 80’s…so theyve been screwed by the people/class im actually ranting on, too.
but yeah…we used to have something in this country, however imperfect…and nobody ever asked me if i wanted to just undo it all and revert to dog eat dog.
because i sure as hell didnt….and i internalised the shame at not making it in a world that was nothing like the one they had grown up in. took me and cousin a long time to figure out, both of us, that it really wasnt that world anymore…and hadnt been for most of our lives(all of his life, i was born in ’69, him in ’74, i think, after the rot had set in)…and that
one plays with the cards one is dealt…and if wishes were horses…well, we’d be eating steak right now.
the book i referred to at the top of my last:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giants_in_the_Earth_(novel)
i read it when i first moved out here, and the part where the wind drove the wife mad when the dad and their boys were off somewhere really hit me. still think about it when we have wind events.
It was required reading at the small upper-Midwest (heavily Norwegian-American) college I attended in the early 70s.
Um yah Yah?
The son of the author of Giants in the Earth, Ole Rolvaag, was governor of Minnesota in the mid-1960s.
That’s an excellent rant, Amfortas.
“being a two man support group for black sheep children of covert narcissist superbitches”
sounds like we were separated at birth
and this –
“the vast majority of the boomer generation that i know, personally, and right now…are working at convenience stores or cleaning the B&B’s or whatever…in their late 70’s and 80’s”
describing a population of which I am a fatigued member
I remember being a teen babysitter for friends/neighbors your age. I watched their lives unfold, and end all too soon, with such helpless heartbreak, and I miss them so much.
That Right Stuff clip is gold and definitely tracks with when things went south.
The reason every airline pilot in the US from the late 1950’s though the early ’90’s tried to sound like he came from West Virginia was that they were imitating Chuck Yeger.
Mr. Shearer is a brilliant guy and knew exactly what he was doing in that scene. Really caps off the film, in a way.
Was in the Boeing museum in Seattle about a decade ago, and one of the video monitors had JFK giving a speech after a Mercury flight and he stressed how the USA was up front in regards to their space launches from countdown to touchdown, whereas the Soviets only let the world know after a successful trip.
My earliest memory is being roused awake by my parents, who didn’t want me to miss the first American space walk in 1965.
There is going to have to be a concerted effort to hide America’s past from the present population so that people will not realize how much has been lost. The newer generation are inheriting a pretty crappy world and may not really understand how much has changed within actual living memory and make them ask just why things are the way that they are. That may make them ask why we cannot reverse some things. Reading John Michael Greer’s book “Retrotopia” is worth the effort as it shows a part of the smashed US rebuild their own republic and using the past as a resource to be mined to see what worked and what didn’t. One example – banks there are a public utility while investment banks are another animal altogether that have their own restrictions. Another minor example – the clothing tends to be made of cottons, wool and leather making the people look like extras from a 1940s Hollywood film but the clothes are warm, comfortable and actually last. It’s worth the read.
I think there already is a concerted effort to hide America’s past. I see young people remarking that America has always been corrupt, racist, junky, and evil and it makes me want to cry. No. It wasn’t. There has been some of that, but the country used to be mostly good, and roughly fair, and society wasn’t all about shoveling more money to people who don’t need any more. How are the next generations going to ever get to a better place if they don’t even know what’s been lost?
With a monthly rent of $3,600 eating through his savings, he’s now facing hard choices.
Maybe I’m the out of tune harp in a carnival orchestra, but this person needs to rake in roughly 43 grand…for rent.
But thats not all!
43 grand puts you in a very nice (not for you of course) tax bracket, as well as an obamacare vortex (whats that? oh you’re a pharma bro so you don’t have to pay for health insurance (not care) I mean if you own a house, you love he inflated value, and if you’re a pharma bro, you love expensive health something something…
So anyway, you must add the taxes you’re paying on that 43 grand to get a real number and voila` it’s basically 50 grand… for rent, A reasonable ratio of rent to income (imo) is 25% so this person better make 200 grand to scrape by.
I would like for people to remember that one billion is a thousand million.
A hundred million is 1/10th of a billion.
I work for pretty well off people and I seriously doubt any of them have even close to 100 million.
there is a problem here in the form of a misallocation of capital .
Genetics and Ethics. Interesting issue you bring up here KLG, and thank you. Please permit me to raise a little thought experiment that follows from your treatment of the subject.
Suppose I were able to ‘arrange’ a clone of me, prior to my ‘extinction’, to be birthed by a surrogate. This guy could not grow up to be me as he would unlikely have my life experiences to mould him into adulthood. However, as his DNA would be identical, he could at least be ‘framed’ for my past scurrilous misdemeanours, should DNA testing be proof positive. He would not know he is ME, unless he were told. I would not survive as ME in him and ‘I’ would not know HIM, but I might enjoy the dubious satisfaction that I had managed, sort of, to escape the Grim Reaper’s scythe against the ‘normal’ rules.
Right after the ‘John Hammond’ link that you offered referencing ‘Jurassic Park’, was another to a drama featuring The Kray Twins (once notorious gangsters here in the UK). According to some reports, they were indeed as funny, and ruthless, as depicted. “You don’t bring a rolling pin to a gun fight”, Reggie retorts before storming out. “Reggie’s ‘done a runner’ the assailant opines. “No, he’s just disappointed” Ronnie flatly states (an understatement – Reggie is, in fact, insulted). Hilarious!
My point? I presume identical twins have the same DNA. Can they be held to account, ethically, for the other’s behaviour? Of course not. Same as if I cloned myself into another go at life, I presume.
I’m nearly 70 years young. Do you know of where I might be able to effect such an arrangement, while I still can? Unlike the the dire wolf experiment, I think this is ethically sound, don’t you?
Thanks for the post, and all the others.
As a physician I was horrified that Guinea could not afford 15 million to help treat malaria and that the US cut the funds. The African leader married to a very attractive French bleached blonde from pictures has an adequate standard of living. From pictures at least it is obvious that the local kleptocrats live very well and could come up with the money. The country is majority Sunni Muslim which is the Saudi Arabian variant. I am sure the Saudis could spare 15 million to enable more of their flock to survive. No matter the waste in Israel or Ukraine I cannot see how the US taxpayer should be required to borrow Saudi or Chinese money or perhaps even Guinea money in US and French banks to support health care in Guinea.
Yesterday I made my annual visit to the local County Fair, here in southwestern New York/Pennsylvania. I hung out with cousins who own a small multigenerational dairy farm and we watched one of my favorite events (along with the Steer Dump and the Heavyweight Horse Pull), the Celebrity Milking Contest. The Fair’s Dairy Princess and her court, high school and junior high school age lasses, match milking skills with State Troopers and Sheriff’s deputies. Guess who wins!
The body types of the ‘princesses’ ranged from chubby to obese. (The troopers and deputies were not exactly buff, sporting neck rolls and prominent tummies.). One morbidly obese young woman was painful to watch and I could not help thinking that she was well on the path to debilitating health problems in her twenties.
Add to that at least half of the fair-goers, and we have a public health crisis. Or, profit-making opportunities in weight loss, kidney dialysis, and diabetes mitigation therapies. Are we witnessing the initial stages of a planned ‘genocide.’ Is there a name for the deliberate wiping-out of an entire economic class of a population, not by means of famine, but through the provision of an excess of ultra-processed foods loaded with fats, salts and high-fructose corn syrup?
” Classicide” perhaps?
Good one. Or, ‘culling the flock?’
Giants in the Earth was required reading at the small upper-Midwest (heavily Norwegian-American) college I attended in the early 70s.
It seems to me that the best argument for defending sickle cell research is to point out the abosolute depravity of applying anti-DEI sentiment to what is essentially an inarguably genetic condition arrived at through no fault of the patient. Arguing that sickle cell is not really a race-related condition implies, however weakly, that it would be somehow less objectionable to cut funding if it was.
I would argue the exact opposite, beginning with the assertion that sickle cell disease has a lot to do with race. Although sickle cell occurs in non-Black populations, it occurs at a higher rate in black populations because malarial exposure over generations had created selection pressures that favored survival of those with the gene. This naturally shaped and altered the collective Black genome to the point that that these differences are statistically significant. As well, even among sickle cell patients of different races, there are studies showing race-dependent differences (odds ratio) in mortality, morbidity, hospital stays, etc.
(https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36710488/
Many studies show that some gene-related disease differences are significantly more prevalent in some races or ethnicities versus others. One can google “racial disparity” to find such studies. It should be emphasized that racial disparity can be entirely due to environmental and/or income factors and not directly related to race. For example, some wealthy whites develop Parkinson’s due to living in proximity to golf courses. Obversely, poor minority children develop asthma due to living close to highways. 75% of the asthma risk in minority children is genetic and 25% is environmental.
http://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMms2029562
Likewise, there are genomic components associated with the higher risk of prostate cancer in Black men. Many race-related or ethnicity-related diseases are inherited or familial. Some other examples are Tay-Sachs, Sjogren’s, etc. Race-related diseases are a natural phenomenon due to modern populations having arisen from geographically distinct ancestral pools that were subjected to differing genetic selection pressures, genetic drift, and limited intermixing between populations. And research to cure should be funded on precisely that basis.
The argument that “race is a sociopolitical construct” absolutely should be extended to areas of education, disease, and other outcomes that are mainly affected by cultural influence, environmental risk factors, and longstanding discrimination. Such reasoning, however, does not extend to genomic diseases with characteristic racial predelictions that are unrelated to confounding cultural inputs. This is a tricky argument to make as it can easily be distorted (as the author notes) by eugenicists. However, the best counterargument is not to ignore the association of race and disease. The best counterargument is and always will be to point out, when relevant, the role of confounding variables other than race with regards to medical and societal outcomes. And when such variables are not present, funding should be directed to the underlying cause precisely because some things are actually racial, scientifically speaking. These diseases are not social constructs subject to anti-DEI rhetoric. They are racially distributed and should be recognized as such. It would be eugenics to withhold funding under such circumstances, and criticism should ensue post haste on that basis before such discriminatory policies become entrenched.