The Limits of Science

[Joe Hillshoist]

^^^ good book recommendation. Adding it to my queue.


The below image may be better suited in a thread focusing on the role of Pharma/overreliance on Prescription Drugs & Medicine and impact on society.

For now, I place it here. The color codes explain much of the current malaise.

Australians are among the highest per capita users of recreational drugs in the world. Especially for pingers and coke.

[stickdog99]

[conniption]

Reiner Fuellmich interviews Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Dr. Stefan Lanka.


Dr. Andrew Kaufman & Dr. Stefan Lanka | Session 90: The Virus Of Power

Watch >>> https://odysee.com/@Corona-Investigativ ... on-90-en:a <<<

Corona Investigative Committee
@Corona-Investigative-Committee
February 5th, 2022

Dr. Andrew Kaufman - Psychiatrist
Dr. Stefan Lanka - Biologist and author

The Corona Committee was formed by four lawyers. It is conducting an evidence review of the Corona crisis and actions.

Learn more about the committee: https://corona-ausschuss.de/en

Anonymous tips to the Corona Committee: https://securewhistleblower.com

Dr. Reiner Fuellmichs english Telegram channel: https://t.me/s/ReinerFuellmichEnglish

[Belligerent Savant]

Bill Gates and the Myth of Overpopulation

The following is adapted from my chapter in the forthcoming second edition of the Palgrave Encyclopedia of Imperialism and Anti-Imperialism, Immanuel Ness & Zak Cope, eds. I am publishing this excerpt now because the poisonous ideology of “population control” — a branch of eugenics — is rapidly being revived in Western public discourse, typically under cover of the corporate climate change movement. — Jacob Levich



Contraception and Population Control

The ideology of birth control embraces two very different traditions. Whereas feminists generally have supported contraception and abortion as a way of enhancing the health and freedom of women, capitalist elites have sought to leverage birth control in order to manage population trends, especially in the Global south. Marxist feminists warned that by the 1970s

the influx of professionals into the cause [had] changed the goals of the birth control movement, from a campaign to increase the area of self-determination for women and all working-class people to a campaign infused with elitist values and operated in an elitist manner. These professionals were mainly of two groups: doctors and eugenists (Gordon 1977:10).

This transformation was enthusiastically sponsored by Western foundations and governments. The Rockefeller Foundation invested in eugenics research beginning in the 1920s and helped found the German eugenics program that undergirded Nazi racial theories (Black 2003). After a brief period during which widespread horror at Nazi atrocities forced eugenic theory underground — as neoconservative jurist Richard Posner lamented, Hitler had given eugenics “a bad name” (Posner 1992: 430) — a number of powerful white men, notably John D. Rockefeller III, became obsessed with “differential fertility.” Taking note of the higher birth rate in poor countries, some imagined a future world overrun by hungry, unruly brown masses — people who would inevitably demand food and justice, enforcing their will through the sheer weight of numbers. Rockefeller organized the Population Council in 1953, predicting a “Malthusian crisis” in the developing world and financing extensive experiments in population control. These interventions were embraced by US government policymakers, who agreed that “the demographic problems of the developing countries, especially in areas of non-Western culture, make these nations more vulnerable to Communism” (Critchlow 1995: 85).
In India, traditionally the laboratory of choice for Western demographic experimentation, the Ford Foundation worked with USAID to tie development aid to “contraceptive acceptor targets,” i.e., numerical quotas. Ford Foundation money, coupled with pressure from the Population Council and USAID, culminated in an era of unbridled aggression in the area of government-sponsored “family planning” and incentivized a brutal sterilization campaign that forcibly vasectomized 6.2 million men and killed at least 1,774 during the 1970s (Biswas 2014). Thereafter India redirected its efforts toward women, using a “target-driven” approach that resulted in further thousands of deaths and countless coercive procedures, often conducted in camps designed for mass sterilizations.

Widespread horror at these policies inspired the 1994 International Conference on Population and Development (ICPD), which issued a Programme of Action that became known as the “Cairo Consensus.” The ICPD condemned coercion and repudiated sterilization quotas; however, much of the ICPD Programme reflected the values and imperatives of market capitalism, emphasizing above all “individual rights” that would permit “individual choice and responsible decision-making.” At the same time, the ICPD’s criticism of state actors meshed conveniently with a key part of the imperialist agenda: increased intervention by Western non-governmental actors, not excluding private enterprise. The Population Reference Bureau declared with satisfaction that “NGOs, religious and community leaders, and the private sector (what the UN calls ‘civil society’) are now active partners with governments in deliberations on new policies and programs” (Population Reference Bureau 2004).

Thus Cairo set the stage for the 2012 London Family Planning Summit, at which representatives of more than 70 governments, NGOs, and private firms announced their financial commitments to a stunningly ambitious program of population control. Unlike the ICPD, which had made some gestures toward inclusion of Global South feminists, this was a top-down, ruling-class affair, organized and orchestrated by the Gates Foundation. Melinda Gates, who emerged as the world’s most visible spokesperson for access to contraception, revealed that BMGF intended to donate $1 billion toward supplying birth control to 120 million women and prevent 110 million unwanted pregnancies by 2020 (Goldberg 2012); an ­additional $3.6 billion was pledged by organizations ranging from Planned Parenthood to the foundations endowed by Michael Bloomberg and Hewlett-Packard. With one flamboyant stroke, commentators agreed, BMGF had moved contraception to the top of the global public health agenda.

The putative urgency of the project was puzzling to say the least. In fact the global rate of population growth had been in steep decline for more than four decades. From its peak of 2.1% in 1971, the rate had fallen to 1.17%, a postwar low, in the year of the London Summit (World Bank 2017). In order to marshal support for a crash contraceptive program targeting Third World women, BMGF and its allies had needed to manufacture a sense of crisis. This was done in part through a canny reframing of the issue of “differential fertility” that had so troubled an earlier generation of family planning advocates. The world’s poorest countries, mostly in Africa, still reported alarmingly high fertility rates (the highest of these include Niger, with an average of 6.76 children born per woman; Burundi, 6.09; and Mali, 6.06 (CIA 2015). These numbers were repeatedly deployed by BMGF and friendly journalists in what appeared to be a coordinated effort to rekindle overpopulation hysteria. In the post-Cairo world, however, it was advisable to avoid any taint of racism and eugenics. Thus publicity surrounding the Summit blithely revived long-discredited arguments that overpopulation is the cause, rather than the result, of poverty, climate change, and all manner of social ills. According to Melinda Gates: “When women and their partners have access to contraceptives, everyone benefits. Maternal mortality rates drop, children are healthier and better educated, and incomes rise” (Gates 2015).

In fact, human fertility rates reflect prevailing social conditions and vary greatly across class, time, and region (Rao 2004: ch.3). Following the Industrial Revolution, Western countries underwent a “demographic transition” from large to small family sizes; this transition was linked to an improved standard of living and had very little to do with the availability of contraception. This rise in living standards was attributable largely to massive transfers of wealth from the periphery to the core; but while the West prospered, the imposition of imperialist forms of production on the periphery had profound social and economic consequences for poor countries. Imperialism “brought down death rates through modern technology but … could not bring down birth rates because [it] increased social inequality and undermined the economic security and self-sufficiency of the masses” (Bandarage 1994: 43). Ironically, then, the West was able to complete demographic transition only through a system of exploitation that relied on the prevention of a similar transition in the South. Mahmood Mamdani’s research demonstrated that Third World agricultural laborers and middle peasants required large families because family labor was essential to their survival and prosperity: children were needed both to work the land and to provide support for their parents in old age (Mamdani 1972). At the risk of oversimplifying, it is not “overpopulation” that causes poverty but vice versa.

Yet the contraception industry and its supporters persist in touting population control initiatives as the key to alleviating poverty, a myth is further cloaked in quasi-feminist rhetoric about “reproductive health” and “women’s empowerment.” According to Melinda Gates, such empowerment is to be achieved via the widespread distribution of long-acting, reversible contraceptives (LARCs) — primarily injectables like the notoriously dangerous Depo-Provera (Goodman 1985, Sarojini 2005) and subcutaneous implants such as Norplant. In a 2012 Newsweek profile, Melinda Gates described visiting remote clinics in sub-Saharan Africa where, she claims, women literally begged her for Depo-Provera injections — supposedly their only means of hiding contraceptive use from “unsupportive husbands” (Goldberg 2012). Injectables are ideally suited to Third World countries, she opined elsewhere, because they enable women to “receive a shot behind [their] husband’s back” (quoted in Posel 2015). In the high style of imperial feminism, her putative support for poor women was yoked to disdain for poor men.

Publicly BMGF promotes LARCs in the name of freeing women to make responsible choices; however, there is reason to believe that Western family planners prefer these methods precisely because they afford Global South women the least choice possible short of actual sterilization. LARCs leave far more control in the hands of providers, and less in the hands of women, than condoms, oral contraceptives, or traditional methods. Some methods, like Norplant, can render women infertile for as long as five years (Morrow 1999).

Recent events in India suggest that LARCs are being promoted as a soft form of sterilization. The country’s mass sterilization programs, which persisted even after Cairo, became politically inconvenient after 15 women died as a result of botched “cattle camp” tubal ligations in 2014. After a highly publicized meeting between Modi and Mr. and Mrs. Gates, the prime minister felt empowered to introduce injectable contraceptives in the national family planning program as a next-best substitute for sterilization (Barry & Dugger 2016). 70 prominent Indian feminists, scholars, and health workers signed a statement in vehement protest of the decision, to no avail (Nigam 2015).

Additional support for this view can be found in BMGF’s close relationship with EngenderHealth, Inc., which is listed on the Foundation’s website as a family planning “partner.” Founded in 1937 as the Sterilization League for Human Betterment, the organization was frankly devoted to the eugenic project of “fostering all reliable and scientific means for improving the biological stock of the human race.” Later, with funding from Hugh Moore, it was rechristened Birthright and during the 1970s played a lead role in USAID’s sweeping sterilization campaigns in India and elsewhere in the Third World (Dowbiggin 2016). In the wake of Cairo, the organization rebranded yet again, downplayed promotion of sterilization as such, and shifted its focus to “long-acting and permanent methods” of contraception (LAPMs): intrauterine devices (IUDs), injections, and implants, as well as tubal ligations and vasectomies. To this end EngenderHealth has received more than $36 million in BMGF funding. This close partnership between BMGF and an organization primarily devoted to the sterilization of Global South women makes little sense if “reproductive choice” is indeed the goal. Rather, in a post-Cairo ideological climate that makes open advocacy of sterilization indecorous, BMGF and its partners apparently see long-lasting, provider-authorized contraception — effectively a form of temporary sterilization — as a politically acceptable means of top-down fertility control.

Pushing LARCs in India and other imperialized countries appears to be a means of quietly advancing the traditional population control agenda under the bright new banner of reproductive choice, while not incidentally creating vast new markets for the pharmaceutical industry. The reasons underlying imperialism’s ongoing commitment to population control are multifold and can be summarized as follows:

Ideology: The myth of overpopulation supplies reliable cover for the ruling class as it expropriates ever greater shares of the people’s labor and the planet’s wealth. Recently, for example, imperial ideologists have discovered the advantages of blaming climate change on population growth on the Global South. As stated in Aspects of India’s Economy, “Malthus’s heirs continue to wish us to believe that people are responsible for their own misery; that there is simply not enough to go around; and to ameliorate that state of wretchedness we must not attempt to alter the ownership of social wealth and redistribute the social product, but instead focus on reducing the number of people” (Chakrabarti 2014).

Global “security”: The Western ruling class appear to share Dean Acheson’s view — famously ridiculed by Mao Zedong — that population growth engenders revolutions by “creating unbearable pressure on the land” (Mao 1949). During the Cold War, and especially in the wake of the Chinese Revolution, it was commonly thought by US planners that too many Third World “mouths to feed” would inevitably create conditions hospitable to Communism. The fall of the USSR failed to alleviate such fears but instead transferred them to a new set of adversaries: popular resistance groups primarily located in the Middle East and typically designated with the catch-all term “terrorists.” Thus the 1986 report of the US Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism warned that “population pressures create a volatile mixture of youthful aspirations that when coupled with economic and political frustrations help form a large pool of potential terrorists” (Public Report 1986: 1).

The Reserve Army: Population control can be seen as a way of optimizing the size and distribution of the global reserve army, thereby assisting the West in striking the balance necessary to maintain sufficient leverage over workers while controlling emergent resistance. Ruling class management of surplus labor does not necessarily require reducing the size of the world’s population tout court; rather, the interventions contemplated are targeted toward specific regions and classes in a system of global “demographic arbitrage” recently proposed by European think tanks (European University Institute 2008).

Hegemony: Population control is, in a broader sense, one of the instruments of social control. It extends ruling-class jurisdiction more directly to the personal sphere, aiming at “full-spectrum dominance” of the developing world. Like laws regulating marriage and sexual behavior, such interventions in the reproduction of labor power are not essential to capitalists but remain desirable as a means of exercising ruling class hegemony over every aspect of the lives of the working people. Population control as such directly targets the bodies and dignity of poor people, conditioning them to believe that life’s most intimate decisions are outside of their competence and control.

As ever, the relationship between bourgeois ideology and imperialist practice is dynamic and mutually supportive. As David Harvey has observed: “Whenever a theory of overpopulation seizes hold in a society dominated by an elite, then the non-elite invariably experience some form of political, economic, and social repression” (Harvey 2012: 63).

WORKS CITED:
Bandarage, Asoka (1994). “Population and Development: Toward a Social Justice Agenda.” Monthly Review, 46(4).

Barry, Ellen & Celia Dugger (2016). “India to Change Its Decades-Old Reliance on Female Sterilization.” NY Times, 20 February. <http://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/world/asia/india-to-change-its-decades-old-reliance-on-female-sterilization.html >.

Biswas, Soutik (2014). “India’s Dark History of Sterilization.” BBC News. November 14. <https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-30040790>

Black, Edwin (2003). “Eugenics and the Nazis — the California connection.” San Francisco Chronicle. Nov. 9. < https://www.sfgate.com/opinion/article/ ... 549771.php>.

Central Intelligence Agency (2015). “Country Comparison: Total Fertility Rate.” CIA World Factbook.
<http://teacherlink.ed.usu.edu/tlresources/reference/factbook/rankorder/2127rank.html>

Chakrabarti, Manali (2014). “Are There Just Too Many of Us?” Aspects of India’s Economy 55. March, 2014 http://www.rupe-india.org/55/toomany.html

Critchlow, Donald T., ed. (1995). The Politics of Abortion and Birth Control in Historical Perspective, University Park, Penn.: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Dowbiggin, Ian (2006). “Reproductive Imperialism: Sterilization and Foreign Aid in the Cold War,” Conference on Globalization, Empire, and Imperialism in Historical Perspective.” University of North Carolina. June 1. <http://www.webcitation.org/5HqPafY8M>

European University Institute (2008). Europe, North Africa, Middle East: Diverging Trends, Overlapping Interests and Possible Arbitrage through Migration,” 12–15 March. <http://www.eui.eu/Documents/RSCAS/Research/Mediterranean/Mrm2008/07WS-Description.pdf>

Gates, Melinda (2015). “Melinda Gates’ advice to girls: ‘Use your voice and you can affect change’.” CNN. March 24. <http://www.cnn.com/2015/03/24/opinions/melinda-gates-no-ceilings/>

Goldberg, Michelle (2012). “Melinda Gates’ New Crusade: Investing Billions in Women’s Health,” Newsweek. May 7.

Goodman, Amy (1985). “The Case Against Depo Provera: Problems in the U.S.,” Multinational Monitor, Feb./March, http://multinationalmonitor.org/hyper/i ... ms-us.html.

US Food & Drug Administration, “Black Box Warning Added Concerning Long-Term Use of the Depo-Provera Contraceptive Injection,” FDA Talk Paper, Nov. 17, 2004, http://web.archive.org/web/200512211956 ... 01325.html. (back)

Gordon, Linda (1977). “Birth Control: An Historical Study (Part 1 of 2).” Science for the People, 9(2), 10–16.

Harvey, David (2012). Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography. New York: Routledge.

Mamdani, Mahmood (1972). The Myth of Population Control, New York: Monthly Review Press.

Mao Zedong (1949). The Bankruptcy of the Idealist Conception of History. <http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/mao/selected-works/volume-4/mswv4_70.htm>

Morrow, David J. (1999). “Maker of Norplant Offers a Settlement In Suit Over Effects.” New York Times, Aug. 17. <https://www.nytimes.com/1999/08/27/us/maker-of-norplant-offers-a-settlement-in-suit-over-effects.html>

Nigam, Aditya (2015). “A Statement Protesting Approval to Introduce Injectable Contraceptives in the National Family Planning Programme.” Kafila, 24 September. <http://kafila.org/2015/09/24/a-statement-protesting-approval-to-introduce-injectable-contraceptives-in-the-national-family-planning-programme/>.

Population Reference Bureau (2004). What Was Cairo? The Promise and Reality of ICPD. Washington, DC: Population Reference Bureau. Sept. 14. <https://www.prb.org/whatwascairothepromiseandrealityoficpd/>

Posel, Susanne (2015). “Melinda Gates: Reinvesting in Family Planning with Depo-Provera.” Occupy Corporatism. 22 May. <https://occupycorporatism.com/melinda-gates-reinvesting-in-family-planning-with-depo-provera/>

Posner, Richard A. (1992). Sex and Reason. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1992.

Public Report of the Vice President’s Task Force on Combatting Terrorism (1986). February.1986, p. 1 http://www.population-security.org/bush_and_terror.pdf

Rao, Mohan (2004). From Population Control To Reproductive Health: Malthusian Arithmetic. New Delhi: Sage.

Sarojini, N.B. & Laxmi Murthy (2005). “Why women’s groups oppose injectable contraceptives,” Indian Journal of Medical Ethics, vol. 2, no. 1, http://216.12.194.36/~ijmein/index.php/ ... w/702/1715.

World Bank (2017). “Population growth.” World Bank Open Data http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.GROW

https://medium.com/@jacob.levich/bill-g ... a3b1d89680

[Harvey]

‘Science’ Destroyed Its Own Credibility

Atlas has refused to be silenced. He has a lot to say about how the scientific field and Americans’ trust in it have been tremendously harmed during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Science has been not just a victim,” he told me, “but actively participated in the self-destruction of its credibility.”

https://thefederalist.com/2021/09/01/dr ... -covid-19/

[MacCruiskeen]

Jasun Horsley@JaKephas 16h

[UK] Ministry of Defense's "Human Augmentation – The Dawn of a New Paradigm" timeframe, with weaponized vaccines leading the way:


https://pbs.twimg.com/media/FMxeBFcWUAg ... name=small
[PDF, 110 pp]: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.u ... ccess2.pdf

https://twitter.com/JaKephas/status/1498676485611298827

Projected developments within the next 30 years include: "Genetic somatic modification" and "Nootropics (potent)". (??)

Shortly thereafter: "Genetic germline modification" and "Tele-existence". (??)

Note that it's the Defence Ministry who are planning and projecting this "New Paradigm" (and naming vaccines as stage 1 in its realisation).

[stickdog99]

Speaking of regulatory capture ...

[conniption]

Paradigm Shift




The Untold Story Behind The Pandemic

The doctors, scientists and journalists featured in THE VIRAL DELUSION examine in detail the scientific papers that were used to justify the pandemic, and what they find is shattering. In this shocking, five-part, seven hour documentary series, they explode every single major claim, from the "isolation" of the virus to its so-called genetic sequencing, from the discovery of how to "test" for SARS-CoV2 to the emergence of "variants" that in reality, they explain, exist only on a computer. Their point: that the so-called SARS-CoV-2 virus exists only as a mental construct whose existence in the real world has been disproven by the science itself.

They then go back through history to reveal how the birth and growth of virology has led to massive misunderstanding and misdiagnosis of disease: from Smallpox to the Spanish Flu, Polio to AIDS, to COVID itself - putting the pandemic in a whole new context better understood not as settled science, but the tragic culmination of misunderstood biology by the growing cult of virology, built on pseudo-science, to which much of the rest of the medical profession defers without understanding or examination, and the tragic consequences that have been wrought in its name.

In 2019, the virologists took center stage, and for the first time on film, their methods, miscues and tragedy they have wrought are put under the spotlight, revealing the extraordinary leaps of fantasy buried in their methodology, the contradictions quietly acknowledged in their papers, their desperate effort to change language to justify their findings, the obvious incongruence of their conclusions and the extraordinary stakes for our entire society in whether we continue to blindly follow their lead into a full-scale war against nature itself.

Featuring: Andrew Kaufman, MD; Tom Cowan, MD; Stefan Lanka, Virologist; Torsten Engelbrecht, journalist; Claus Kohnlein, MD; Kevin Corbett, PhD RN; David Rasnick, Biochemist PhD; Mark Bailey, MD; Dawn Lester and David Parker, Authors; Stefan Scoglio, Biochemist PhD; Saeed Qureeshi, Chemist PhD; Celia Farber, Journalist; Harold Wallach, PhD; Pam Popper, PhD, ND; Charles Geshekter, PhD; Amanda Volmer ND, Jim West, Author; Larry Palevsky MD; and more.

Coming March 21, 2022.

Episode One
Behind The Curtain of The Pandemic. The Pseudoscience of SARS-COV2.

Episode Two
Monkey Business. Polio, the Measles, and How It All Began...

Episode Three
The Mask of Death: Smallpox, The Plague and The Spanish Flu

Episode Four
AIDS - The Deadly Deception

Episode Five
Genetic Sequencing The Virus That Isn't There

See The Series. Share the wisdom of these brave and brilliant voices.

As scary as our times are, they are pregnant with possibility: the possibility for a wider understanding of our health and our politics, the possibility of working together to free ourselves from misguided medical authorities, disastrous heath protocols and the corruption and injustice that leads to poor access to healthy food, limited access to fresh clean water, dwindling opportunities to breathe fresh clean air, lives filled with extraordinary stress and the un-stopped toxification of our planet - the known causes of disease.


If you would like to organize a private screening, or to reach out, email us at mike@contagiousdelusions.com

[Wombaticus Rex]

Missed this 2019 story:

Gene-edited cattle have a major screwup in their DNA

Bid for barnyard revolution is set back after regulators find celebrity “hornless” bovines contaminated by bacterial genes.

They were the poster animals for the gene-editing revolution, appearing in story after story. By adding just a few letters of DNA to the genomes of dairy cattle, a US startup company had devised a way to make sure the animals never grew troublesome horns.

To Recombinetics—the St. Paul, Minnesota gene-editing company that made the hornless cattle—the animals were messengers of a new era of better, faster, molecular farming. “This same outcome could be achieved by breeding in the farmyard,” declared the company's then-CEO Tammy Lee Stanoch in 2017. “This is precision breeding.”

Except it wasn’t.

Food and Drug Administration scientists who had a closer look at the genome sequence of one of the edited animals, a bull named Buri, have discovered its genome contains a stretch of bacterial DNA including a gene conferring antibiotic resistance.

The “unintended” addition of DNA from a different species occurred during the gene-editing process itself, the government says. It went undetected by the company even as it touted the animals as 100% bovine and assailed the FDA for saying the animals needed to be regulated at all.

“It was not something expected, and we didn’t look for it” says Tad Sontesgard, CEO of Acceligen, a subsidiary of Recombinetics that owns the animals. He says a more complete check “should have been done.”

THE DOWNLOAD
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The blunder is a setback for Recombinetics, whose pioneering prototypes of gene-edited animals include heat-resistant cattle as well as pigs that never hit puberty. It’s also a strike against efforts to make such gene editing a routine practice in animal reproduction. All along, Recombinetics had noisily objected to oversight by the FDA, which categorizes gene-edited animals as new drugs that need extensive testing and approval. It even lobbied the Trump Administration to wrest oversight away from the health agency, saying it was holding back a barnyard revolution.

But gene editing isn’t yet as predictable or reliable as promoters say. Instead, the procedure, meant to make pinpoint changes to DNA, can introduce significant unexpected changes without anyone noticing. “As genome-editing technology evolves, so does our understanding of the unintended alterations it produces,” wrote the FDA scientists, led by Alexis Norris and Heather Lombardi, in a paper they released in July. They think gene-editing errors “are under reported” and a “blind spot” for scientists.

The risk of haphazard engineering isn’t just to barnyard animals. Genome-editing treatments to cure rare diseases are being tested on people and it is possible that patients will end up with unplanned genetic mutations. Unintended consequences are a particular concern in connection with attempts to modify human children before birth with gene editing—as occurred for the first time in China last year.

Independent scientists still haven’t had a chance to confirm whether the Chinese children—twin girls—also have unintended mistakes in their DNA. This year the World Health Organization said any further attempts to make gene-edited people would be “irresponsible” in part because of technical uncertainty.

Celebrity bovines

To make its hornless cows, Recombinetics started with skin cells from Holstein dairy bulls. That’s where the bacterial genes came in: to convey DNA instructions to the cell, the company, in work carried out in 2013, employed plasmids—a type of circular mini-chromosome present in bacteria.

The plasmids (meant to persist only temporarily) carried DNA instructions both for the genetic editing tool (known as TALENs) and the “no horns” genetic change, found in other breeds, and which involves swapping out about 200 genetic letters. Later, edited skin cells were used in a cloning procedure to generate two new animals, named Buri and Spotigy. These were copies of the original bulls, but they didn’t grow horns.

The hornless cattle, born in 2015, soon became gene-editing celebrities. While Spotigy was killed to analyze his tissues, Buri lived long enough to sire about 17 offspring, which are split between facilities at the University of California, Davis, and a farm in Australia. One hornless daughter cow posed for the cover of Wired in April.

“We know exactly where the gene should go, and we put it in its exact location,” Recombinetics executives told Bloomberg in 2017. “We have all the scientific data that proves that there are no off-target effects.”

Eat the animals

In part because it disagreed with regulations, the company never pursued formal approval for the hornless cattle in the US. However, its collaborator at the University of California, Davis, veterinary scientist Alison Van Eenennaam, opened a file on the animals with the FDA last year, she says, to trade information with the agency.

According to Sontesgard, Van Eenennaam then chose to test the FDA’s thinking by asking whether some of the surplus gene-edited animals taking up space at the Davis facility could go to a slaughterhouse, where they’d be made into steaks and hamburger.

Sontesgard calls the bid to win a “food exemption” an attempt to assess the FDA’s views. “Alison was curious whether the animals would be approved as food. I said ‘Okay, you can take a shot,’” says Sontesgard. “If they’d said okay, that would have been a nice outcome, and if they said no, they would have to come up with a logical reasoning. I just didn’t want them to go to waste because there’s really nothing wrong with them.”

Sontesgard thinks the animals are “safe to eat with or without the plasmid.”

Van Eenennaam had financial factors in mind. It costs 60 cents a pound to incinerate experimental animals, which weigh about a ton, which she considers a large expense for her university program. Better to sell them as hamburger.

By March, though, an FDA bioinformatician running tests on the bulls’ genomes had stumbled on the presence of the plasmid—it had somehow integrated into Buri’s genome. Agency officials that month arranged a conference call break the bad news, Van Eenennaam says. The animals contained bacterial genes and were GMOs, by any definition.

“We were surprised, but when you get new information, you proceed ahead,” says Van Eenennaam. “That is what science does.” She says that half Buri's offspring would be expected to have also inherited the bacteria genes.

It could seem hard to explain why the company and UC Davis failed to see the bacterial genes, which ended up right next to their ‘no-horns’ edit in the animals’ genomes. However, to study DNA, researchers first have to decide which bits to isolate or check for—in effect, they’re often looking in the lamplight, a process that introduces assumptions and biases, according to the FDA scientists.

It’s not clear if the bacterial DNA poses a larger risk. It’s unlikely to affect the cow or a person who eats it; instead, the concern is that the antibiotic resistance gene could be taken up by any of the billions of bacteria present in a cow’s gut or body. John Heritage, a retired microbiologist from Leeds University, says he doesn’t see a large chance of the gene jumping further but says its presence in a cow could create unpredictable opportunities for it to spread.

The discovery that some of the hornless animals have unwanted DNA from another species has sealed their fate. No one is going to win regulatory approval for them now. Already, regulators in Brazil rejected a revised petition by Recombinetics connected to the animals, Sontesgard confirmed.

“It’s novel DNA, so right there that throws it into the whole GMO debate,” says Van Eenennaam. “It doesn’t worry me from a food safety perspective, but regulatory—well, you wouldn’t even try. It’s not a product that would move forward.”

Van Eenennaam says since the FDA discovery, UC Davis has incinerated three of the five males who were living at its farms. The animal who posed for the cover of Wired is pregnant and will be spared for the time being.

A familiar refrain from vaccine discourse in 2021:

“We know exactly where the gene should go, and we put it in its exact location,” Recombinetics executives told Bloomberg in 2017. “We have all the scientific data that proves that there are no off-target effects.”

A familiar refrain from vaccine discourse in 2023:

“It was not something expected, and we didn’t look for it” says Tad Sontesgard, CEO of Acceligen, a subsidiary of Recombinetics that owns the animals. He says a more complete check “should have been done.”

[MacCruiskeen]

Side-effects:


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wrVqD67zils
*May not cure herpes

[Gnomad]

Hubris and complicated biological systems.

What could go wrong?

I have thought of putting the legendary piece of wisdom on my workshop wall - "Assuming makes an ass out of u and me."

Usually when you make a mistake, it is because you assumed and did not actually check and think it through properly. It seems to me that this is the most common and most tragic type of error.

[MacCruiskeen]

This guy has a gift for stating profound truths succinctly:

slothrop@gnocchiwizard

We err when we rely on news or science to tell us this and that about our world. The truth is often staring you right in the face and it'll be years before the professional arbiters of reality catch up to your intuition (or are permitted to).

We've all been conditioned to view our own experience of reality as a secondary source.

https://twitter.com/gnocchiwizard/statu ... 0897809409

Everyone's entire life is "merely anecdotal", hence worthless. TheScience™ now owns Reality, or claims to. You can't tell what's true and what isn't. You're not qualified. You don't know what's good for you or for anyone else. (Are you an economist? Are you a virologist?) See this study. See this graph. Sit down. Shut up.

Our trusted Leaders are completing the job they started with the Enclosure Acts 250 years ago. It's your mind and your heart they're enclosing now.

[Harvey]

This guy has a gift for stating profound truths succinctly:

slothrop@gnocchiwizard

We err when we rely on news or science to tell us this and that about our world. The truth is often staring you right in the face and it'll be years before the professional arbiters of reality catch up to your intuition (or are permitted to).

We've all been conditioned to view our own experience of reality as a secondary source.

https://twitter.com/gnocchiwizard/statu ... 0897809409

Everyone's entire life is "merely anecdotal", hence worthless. TheScience™ now owns Reality, or claims to. You can't tell what's true and what isn't. You're not qualified. You don't know what's good for you or for anyone else. (Are you an economist? Are you a virologist?) See this study. See this graph. Sit down. Shut up.

Our trusted Leaders are completing the job they started with the Enclosure Acts 250 years ago. It's your mind and your heart they're enclosing now.

True.

[stickdog99]

https://www.bmj.com/content/376/bmj.o702

The illusion of evidence based medicine

Evidence based medicine has been corrupted by corporate interests, failed regulation, and commercialisation of academia, argue these authors

The advent of evidence based medicine was a paradigm shift intended to provide a solid scientific foundation for medicine. The validity of this new paradigm, however, depends on reliable data from clinical trials, most of which are conducted by the pharmaceutical industry and reported in the names of senior academics. The release into the public domain of previously confidential pharmaceutical industry documents has given the medical community valuable insight into the degree to which industry sponsored clinical trials are misrepresented.1234 Until this problem is corrected, evidence based medicine will remain an illusion.

The philosophy of critical rationalism, advanced by the philosopher Karl Popper, famously advocated for the integrity of science and its role in an open, democratic society. A science of real integrity would be one in which practitioners are careful not to cling to cherished hypotheses and take seriously the outcome of the most stringent experiments.5 This ideal is, however, threatened by corporations, in which financial interests trump the common good. Medicine is largely dominated by a small number of very large pharmaceutical companies that compete for market share, but are effectively united in their efforts to expanding that market. The short term stimulus to biomedical research because of privatisation has been celebrated by free market champions, but the unintended, long term consequences for medicine have been severe. Scientific progress is thwarted by the ownership of data and knowledge because industry suppresses negative trial results, fails to report adverse events, and does not share raw data with the academic research community. Patients die because of the adverse impact of commercial interests on the research agenda, universities, and regulators.

The pharmaceutical industry’s responsibility to its shareholders means that priority must be given to their hierarchical power structures, product loyalty, and public relations propaganda over scientific integrity. Although universities have always been elite institutions prone to influence through endowments, they have long laid claim to being guardians of truth and the moral conscience of society. But in the face of inadequate government funding, they have adopted a neo-liberal market approach, actively seeking pharmaceutical funding on commercial terms. As a result, university departments become instruments of industry: through company control of the research agenda and ghostwriting of medical journal articles and continuing medical education, academics become agents for the promotion of commercial products.6 When scandals involving industry-academe partnership are exposed in the mainstream media, trust in academic institutions is weakened and the vision of an open society is betrayed.

The corporate university also compromises the concept of academic leadership. Deans who reached their leadership positions by virtue of distinguished contributions to their disciplines have in places been replaced with fundraisers and academic managers, who are forced to demonstrate their profitability or show how they can attract corporate sponsors. In medicine, those who succeed in academia are likely to be key opinion leaders (KOLs in marketing parlance), whose careers can be advanced through the opportunities provided by industry. Potential KOLs are selected based on a complex array of profiling activities carried out by companies, for example, physicians are selected based on their influence on prescribing habits of other physicians.7 KOLs are sought out by industry for this influence and for the prestige that their university affiliation brings to the branding of the company’s products. As well paid members of pharmaceutical advisory boards and speakers’ bureaus, KOLs present results of industry trials at medical conferences and in continuing medical education. Instead of acting as independent, disinterested scientists and critically evaluating a drug’s performance, they become what marketing executives refer to as “product champions.”

Ironically, industry sponsored KOLs appear to enjoy many of the advantages of academic freedom, supported as they are by their universities, the industry, and journal editors for expressing their views, even when those views are incongruent with the real evidence. While universities fail to correct misrepresentations of the science from such collaborations, critics of industry face rejections from journals, legal threats, and the potential destruction of their careers.8 This uneven playing field is exactly what concerned Popper when he wrote about suppression and control of the means of science communication.9 The preservation of institutions designed to further scientific objectivity and impartiality (i.e., public laboratories, independent scientific periodicals and congresses) is entirely at the mercy of political and commercial power; vested interest will always override the rationality of evidence.10

Regulators receive funding from industry and use industry funded and performed trials to approve drugs, without in most cases seeing the raw data. What confidence do we have in a system in which drug companies are permitted to “mark their own homework” rather than having their products tested by independent experts as part of a public regulatory system? Unconcerned governments and captured regulators are unlikely to initiate necessary change to remove research from industry altogether and clean up publishing models that depend on reprint revenue, advertising, and sponsorship revenue.

Our proposals for reforms include: liberation of regulators from drug company funding; taxation imposed on pharmaceutical companies to allow public funding of independent trials; and, perhaps most importantly, anonymised individual patient level trial data posted, along with study protocols, on suitably accessible websites so that third parties, self-nominated or commissioned by health technology agencies, could rigorously evaluate the methodology and trial results. With the necessary changes to trial consent forms, participants could require trialists to make the data freely available. The open and transparent publication of data are in keeping with our moral obligation to trial participants—real people who have been involved in risky treatment and have a right to expect that the results of their participation will be used in keeping with principles of scientific rigour. Industry concerns about privacy and intellectual property rights should not hold sway.

Footnotes

Competing interests: McHenry and Jureidini are joint authors of The Illusion of Evidence-Based Medicine: Exposing the Crisis of Credibility in Clinical Research (Adelaide: Wakefield Press, 2020). Both authors have been remunerated by Los Angeles law firm, Baum, Hedlund, Aristei and Goldman for a fraction of the work they have done in analysing and critiquing GlaxoSmithKline's paroxetine Study 329 and Forest Laboratories citalopram Study CIT-MD-18. They have no other competing interests to declare.

[Harvey]