Tag: hit&run

Widespread condemnation is the chief response to Chinese bioengineer He Jiankui’s claim that he used CRISPR gene-editing to alter the genes of embryos who have now been born as twin girls. The editing aimed to increase their resistance to HIV infection. The Chinese government claims that it has now shut down He’s work.

New York University bioethicist Arthur Caplan denounces He’s efforts as a “moral monstrosity of an experiment.” Just how morally monstruous is what He claims to have done?

Caplan argues that He “is a moral idiot who has engaged in a renegade experiment that may well setback the very promising field of germline genetic engineering a decade or more.” Why would this set back the field? “Fear of changing genes that are passed from one generation to the next — germline engineering — runs deep,” explains Caplan. “Altering the inherited properties of our children strikes many as manufacturing people. Add a bit of 20th century eugenics à la Nazi Germany into the mix and fear turns rapidly into prohibition.”

If the fear of germline gene-editing really does run deep, one big reason is that many of Caplan’s fellow bioethicists have long been scaremongering about it. However, a recent Pew poll finds that such fear does not run all that deeply among Americans—72 percent of respondents said that changing a baby’s genetic characteristics to treat a serious disease that a baby would have at birth is OK; and 60 percent agreed that gene-editing was appropriate to reduce the risk of a serious disease that would occur over the lifetime of a prospective baby.

Caplan may have a point though about He’s work provoking folks to demand prohibition. Sadly, in response to He’s claims, CRISPR pioneer Feng Zhang has done just that and is now calling for a global “moratorium on implantation of edited embryos.”

Much to his credit, Caplan does note: “I am not among those who think it’s unethical to change the genes of our children. If it is possible to eliminate forever diseases such as cystic fibrosis, muscular dystrophy, hemophilia, sickle cell disease, fragile X syndrome, Huntington’s disease, and a slew of other genetic killers that plague humanity, then I think germline genetic engineering is ethically sound and must be pursued.”

So if germline editing in itself is not immoral, what is ethically wrong with what He claims to have done? Caplan gives five reasons: safety, lack of disclosure with regard to a published paper on the ethics of therapeutic reproductive technologies, non-publication of results, conflict of interest, and the provisions that may or may not have been made in case the kids turn out to have been harmed.

With respect to safety, He claims that he validated his engineering techniques via three years of work involving mice, monkeys, and then human embryos. One worry among researchers is that CRISPR may have caused off-target mutations in the twins’ genomes. Such mutations might hit other genes causing them to malfunction in deleterious ways.

How big a concern is this? Harvard geneticist George Church offers some perspective on CRISPR off-target risks in an interview at Science. Asked about the risk of off-target effects, Church observed, “Let’s be quantitative before we start being accusatory. It might be detectable but not clinical. There’s no evidence of off-target causing problems in animals or cells. We have pigs that have dozens of CRISPR mutations and a mouse strain that has 40 CRISPR sites going off constantly and there are off-target effects in these animals, but we have no evidence of negative consequences.”

Caplan argues that He’s ethics paper must be withdrawn because its conclusions are suspect owing to the fact that He’s co-authors must have known about his embryo gene-editing before they collaborated on it. By the way, it was published online two days after the revelations of He’s work. One notably correct observation in the ethics paper is that, in describing prior biotech reproductive advances, journalists have constantly deployed

“the overused term ‘designer baby’: this is an epithet aimed at invoking disgust, which is a common mechanism behind hate. Parents hope to protect their newborn’s life from a known debilitating, familial disease. Call them ‘gene surgery babies’ if one must or better yet ordinary people who have had surgery to save their life or prevent a disease.”

For what it’s worth, the ethical principles outlined in the paper do not seem all that controversial. They include using gene-editing only for serious dieases, respecting the gene-edited child’s autonomy, and rejecting genetic determinism.

Caplan has He dead-to-rights when he objects to the fact that He has not published his results so that other researchers can evaluate his claims. Science by YouTube video is not science. He claims that the results of his research were “leaked unexpectedly” and that he has now submitted a paper detailing his work to a scientific journal. Given the uproar, however, it will take a very brave editor to publish it. For the sake of the field and the twins, let’s hope that such a brave editor exists.

Caplan also points out He has filed patent applications on his work. This presents a number of possible conflicts of interest, not least of which is that patients are being recruited who may not know the He stands to benefit financially from his research. Interestingly, the author disclosure statement in the ethics paper claims “no competing financial interests exist.” Really?

Finally, Caplan suggests a lack of provisions for addressing health problems that might later arise from the twins’ gene-editing is ethically suspect. Is that right? Consider that children born by means of other assisted reproductive techniques are at a slightly higher risk of birth defects than naturally conceived kids. Physicans are not generally held responsible for those outcomes. Assuming similar levels of informed consent, why should the standards be any different for the twins? In any case, He says that he plans to “monitor the twins’ health for the next 18 years, with the hope they will consent as adults for continued monitoring and support.”

As noted, Caplan fully appreciates the power of germline editing to alleviate human suffering, but flinging around terms like “moral monstrosity” is not helpful in furthering the discussions that will lead to achieving that goal. Such talk will set back, rather than advance, this important research.

Harvard Medical School Dean George Daley offered a more measured response: “The fact that the first instance [of gene-editing] came forward as a misstep should in no way leave us to stick our heads in the sand and not consider the very, very positive efforts that could come forward,” Daley said. “I hope we just don’t stick our heads in the sand.”

We should all hope so.

The official numbers for opioid-related deaths in 2017, released by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention today, demonstrate once again the folly of trying to tackle this problem by reducing access to prescription pain pills. The volume of opioids prescribed for American patients has been falling since 2010, while the upward trend in deaths involving opioids has accelerated, reaching a record number last year.

Of the 47,600 opioid-related deaths the CDC counted in 2017 (the black line on the chart below), 60 percent involved the drug category that consists mainly of illicitly manufactured fentanyl and its analogs (the red line). Just 30 percent involved the category that includes the most commonly prescribed pain medications (the blue line), and some of those deaths also involved fentanyl or heroin (the yellow line), which was implicated in one-third of the opioid fatalities. Last year’s 13 percent increase in opioid deaths was due almost entirely to a 47 percent increase in deaths involving fentanyl and its analogs, since deaths involving heroin and pain pills stayed about the same, while deaths involving methadone fell.

Allowing for deaths involving multiple opioids, the CDC’s numbers indicate that pain pills account for less than 30 percent of these deaths, and the actual number is probably considerably lower. A 2017 analysis of opioid-related fatalities in Massachusetts found that heroin or fentanyl was the deadliest drug in 85 percent of the cases.

The Trump administration nevertheless wants to reduce opioid prescriptions by a third during the next three years. But opioid prescriptions, measured by total morphine milligram equivalents (MME) sold, have already fallen by a third since 2010, as indicated by the green area in the chart (with units, in billions of MME, on the right axis). During that period, opioid-related deaths more than doubled. Does this seem like a winning strategy? Far from reducing deaths involving opioids, the crackdown on pain pills has pushed nonmedical users into the black market, where the drugs are much more dangerous because their potency is highly variable and unpredictable. “Synthetic drugs tend to be more deadly than prescription pills and heroin for two main reasons,” The New York Times notes. “They are usually more potent, meaning small errors in measurement can lead to an overdose. The blends of synthetic drugs also tend to change frequently, making it easy for drug users to underestimate the strength of the drug they are injecting. In some parts of the country, drugs sold as heroin are exclusively fentanyls now.”

Meanwhile, patients suffering from severe pain are finding it increasingly difficult to obtain the medication they need to make their lives bearable. Many people with severe chronic pain who have functioned well on opioids for years have seen their doses dramatically and arbitrarily cut as a result of government pressure, including the CDC’s own supposedly voluntary but increasingly mandatory prescribing guidelines.

Even people with agonizing terminal illnesses are not immune from the imperative to reduce opioid prescriptions. Barbara McAneny, the president of the American Medical Association, recently described a patient with metastatic prostate cancer who tried to kill himself after he was denied medication he was prescribed for his bone pain because a suspicious pharmacist called his insurer, which denied coverage. While “I share the nation’s concern that more than 100 people a day die of an overdose,” she said, “my patient nearly died of an underdose.”

Around the world, governments attempt to limit subjects’ legal access to weapons—ostensibly to keep the peace, but in reality often done to minimize challenges to government power. And, around the world, those subjects defy such restrictions, notes J.D. Tuccille.

In fact, DIY firearms ranging in sophistication from muskets to grenade launchers exist in the millions across the planet, according to a new report that should (but won’t) finally demonstrate to government officials the futility of efforts to disarm people who insist on being free, Tuccille suggests.

View this article.

For the past 15 years, Thomas and Kris Apruzzi have celebrated the holiday season with a spectacular Christmas lights display at their home in Old Bridge Township, New Jersey. Though the public can see the display for free, the Apruzzis have used the opportunity to raise more than $20,000 in donations for such good causes as Home for Our Troops and St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital.

This year, the local government decided to get involved. The couple was informed they’d “be required to pay at least $2,000-a-day in police [security] and you’re also going to have to pay for shuttle bus service for all of the people that are going to come to the display,” Thomas tells the New York Post. Thomas says officials implicitly threatened to shut down the display if he and his wife didn’t cooperate.

Township Mayor Owen Henry disputes that account of what happened. “We have not told Mr. Apruzzi to shut his light off. We have not and I will not,” he tells My Central Jersey, adding that officials “recommended” rather than required that the Apruzzis provide a shuttle service. But Henry does not deny he wants the family to pay up. “We have determined that that additional police resources is going to cost the township of Old Bridge—every taxpayer in Old Bridge—about $2,000 per night,” he says. “That is money that is not in our budget.”

Henry tells My Central Jersey it’s a question of “public safety.” The lights display attracts people from around the area—up to 1,000 per night, according to NJ.com—and the town plans to provide police officers to manage crowd control and direct traffic, as well as mobile light posts to light up the street.

Neighbors started complaining about the display after it was featured in 2014 on ABC’s The Great Christmas Light Fight, Thomas told New Jersey 101.5 last year. The town has used auxiliary cops in the past to ensure safety, but after more people started complaining last year (when the Apruzzis say they added new features to the display), officials decided to take additional action. Parking and vehicle access will be restricted in the area, and the town is setting up a walkway for pedestrians.

The Apruzzis have also made some compromises. From the start of December through New Year’s Day, the display will be on only from Thursdays through Sundays and only for four hours a night. Thomas does plan to put them on every night during the week of Christmas. “It’s 16 hours a week and they want to charge us $8,000 a week to direct people and tell them where to walk,” he tells My Central Jersey.

Once the holidays are over, the town council will decide whether or not the Apruzzis have to pay up. “We’ve never waived the fees for a private event; this is a private event,” Henry tells ABC News.

But surely that should count in the family’s favor, not the town’s. The Apruzzis aren’t using public property; they’re creating something incredible on their own land. It also doesn’t sound as though there have been serious safety issues in the past, which raises the question of why a police presence is necessary in the first place. And not that it should be any of the town’s business, but the Apruzzis aren’t doing this for the money. They’ve already spent almost $100,000 to create the display, and the money they do receive goes to charity. I certainly understand how the disruption can be annoying to the neighbors, and I’m sure the Apruzzis are imposing real costs here. But the town’s response seems excessively expensive and unusually harsh.

Thomas, meanwhile, tells the Post he can’t afford to pony up what could end up being tens of thousands of dollars to the township. As a result, the family has started a GoFundMe to raise money for any fees they might have to pay. But they plan to carry on with their yearly tradition no matter what. “This is my First Amendment right,” Thomas tells the Post. “I’m a Catholic. I’m very into Christmas. I love Christmas.”

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reports that for the third consecutive year, average life expectancy has declined: After peaking at 78.9 years in 2014, it has dropping to 78.6 years in 2017. This follows decades of increases.

While a fiercer than usual outbreak of influenza contributed to the decline last year, the main causes are rising suicides rates and the increasing number of deaths from drug overdoses associated with opioids.

Overdose deaths in 2017 rose to 70,237, up from 63,632 the year before. But overdose deaths associated with legal opioids did not significantly change from 2016. The increase came almost entirely from street drugs.

And why was there a rise in the use of black market fentanyl and heroin? The biggest reason is most likely the drug war.

In 2010, the manufacturers of legal opioids agreed to reformulate their products so that they could no longer be easily crushed and inhaled. A 2012 study in the New England Journal of Medicine found that this reformulation was the primary reason that many painkiller addicts switched to heroin. “The most unexpected, and probably detrimental, effect of the abuse-deterrent formulation was that it contributed to a huge surge in the use of heroin, which is like OxyContin in that it also is inhaled or injected,” said the study’s principal investigator.

A fascinating 2018 National Bureau of Economic Research paper, “How the Reformulation of OxyContin Ignited the Heroin Epidemic,” finds that the rise in the use of heroin began the very month after legal opioids were reformulated. From the abstract:

We attribute the recent quadrupling of heroin death rates to the August, 2010 reformulation of an oft-abused prescription opioid, OxyContin. The new abuse-deterrent formulation led many consumers to substitute to an inexpensive alternative, heroin. Using structural break techniques and variation in substitution risk, we find that opioid consumption stops rising in August, 2010, heroin deaths begin climbing the following month, and growth in heroin deaths was greater in areas with greater pre-reformulation access to heroin and opioids. The reformulation did not generate a reduction in combined heroin and opioid mortality—each prevented opioid death was replaced with a heroin death.

Now cheaper and more deadly black market fentanyl is making the situation worse. As my Reason colleague Jacob Sullum writes, we can all “thank drug warriors for the escalating death toll from superpotent synthetic opioids.” And for a fall in average life expectancy too.

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Michael Cohen, former lawyer for President Donald Trump, pleaded guilty this morning to lying to Congress about the timeline and the extent of discussions between people in Trump’s business organization over a potential real estate deal to build a hotel in Moscow.

Cohen had testified to both House and Senate intelligence committees that the Trump company’s efforts to negotiate with Russia over the “Moscow Project” ended in January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses. Cohen also testified that he had not discussed the decision to end project negotiations with Trump or his family, had never considered traveling to Russia or asking Trump to travel to Russia to negotiate a deal, and had never been contacted by any Russian officials about the deal.

Today, in U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York, a charging document by Special Counsel Robert Mueller says that Cohen’s statements were lies and that Cohen’s plea today is an admission of guilt. According to the new charges, Cohen and individuals within Trump’s company were still trying to get the Russian government’s approval for a hotel as late as June 2016, and Cohen had in fact been briefing Trump and members of Trump’s family about the efforts. Cohen had discussed internally the possibility of traveling to Russia in May 2016 to meet several Russian officials at a forum in St. Petersburg, including possibly Russian President Vladimir Putin himself. (That trip ultimately did not happen.) And Cohen did, in fact, have a lengthy phone call detailing the Moscow Project with a Russian official connected to Putin’s office.

Trump responded to today’s news by calling a Cohen “weak person” who is lying to get a reduced sentence. Cohen has previously pleaded guilty to tax evasion and illegal campaign contributions (also connected to Trump), but he has not yet been sentenced.

These new charges come with a maximum possible sentence of five years and a fine of up to $250,000. But the plea agreement estimates a likely sentence of zero to six months and a fine of up to $9,500, assuming that Cohen is cooperative and there aren’t any more surprise bombshells or crimes he’s concealing.

Putting this all into appropriate context is a challenge, given that there’s still a lot we don’t know. Arguably the biggest deal here is the possibility that Trump was still negotiating with Russia to build a hotel while running for president, and the possibility that this attempt at a business relationship played a role in Russia’s attempts to influence the election.

The timeline and Cohen’s previous denials of contacts with Russian officials are particularly relevant because they were used in a House Intelligence Committee report that concluded there was no collusion between anybody in Trump’s election campaign and the Russian government. If Cohen lied to Congress about the timeline, that conclusion is now potentially compromised as well.

Trump had been planning to meet with Putin at the G20 summit in Argentina this weekend, but this morning he announced he was canceling that plan, giving Russia’s recent aggression against Ukraine as the reason.

Read Mueller’s charging document here. Read the plea agreement here.

Legoland, a theme park dedicated to celebrating plastic toy bricks, has announced that as of next year it will no longer provide single-use plastic straws to park visitors.

The decision came down last week from Merlin Entertainments, a British company that operates 120 attractions worldwide, including nine Legoland parks.

“Like many of our guests, we are concerned about the negative environmental impact associated with the disposal of plastic straws,” says Merlin CEO Nick Varney in a press release. “It is something we can act on immediately as we continue to assess how we minimize the use of plastics within our business.”

By December 31, the company says, there will be no single-use plastic straws or lids in Legoland’s Florida park. Alternatives to single-use plastic straws will be provided only if required for a product or at a visitors’ request.

The straw crackdown at Legoland parks comes a few months after the makers of the actual Lego toys announced their own anti-plastic initiative.

In March, The Lego Group—a separate entity from Legoland parks—announced that from now on, all the plastic trees, plants, and other “botanical elements” it produces will now be made of sugar cane–sourced plastic, which is biodegradable. The company has also committed to using “sustainable materials” in “core products and packaging” by 2030.

That Lego and Legoland have both made a public show of cracking down on plastic use shows both how far the anti-plastics movement has come in such a short time and how divorced from real environmental concerns it actually is.

According to the BBC, Lego sells some 75 billion plastic bricks each year globally. A big consumer of these bricks, is, of course, Legoland.

The newest park, which opened in Dubai in 2016 contains some 15 million Lego bricks. Assuming each of these bricks weighs 1.35 grams—the weight of a standard 2×2 Lego brick, according to Bricklink—that adds up to about 20 metric tons, or one percent of the plastic estimated to get into the word’s oceans each year.

Needless to say, this a huge amount of plastic.

If Merlin Entertainment and Lego were truly concerned about the negative effects of plastic consumption on their environment, one would think they would have to reconsider much more than the amount of straws their theme parks consume. And while biodegradable plastics are less dangerous if they wind up in the ocean, only about 1–2 percent of Lego’s products are made of biodegradable plastics; the vast majority are still standard, petrolum-based plastics.

Indeed, most of the arguments deployed to justify straw bans would be applied with even greater force to banning Legos.

Unlike straws—which some disabled people actually require—no one needs Legos. They’re just a toy, after all, and one for which there exists numerous biodegradable alternatives, from wooden blocks to BuckyBalls. Who knows? Maybe Legos could function as a “gateway plastic” whose prohibition encourages former Lego users to look for other plastics they can cut out of their lives. That, after all, is what various activists have said about banning plastic straws.

That neither Merlin or The Lego Group are considering going into retirement suggests two not necessarily mutually exclusive things. One, that the companies’ commitment to lessening the impact of plastics on the global environment is superficial. Two, that they understand their own plastic products are not really part of the problem.

Almost all of the plastic that gets into the world’s oceans each year comes from countries with poor waste management systems that allow of a lot of trash to leak into the environment. These are, unsurprisingly, poorer countries. By contrast, the United States and Europe, which host six of the world’s nine Legoland parks, are responsible for roughly two percent of annual marine plastic waste.

Private companies are of course free to have whatever straw policy they want. But for plastic pushers to single out plastic straws is hypocritical—and it gives cover to an unscientific and pettily authoritarian anti-straw crusade.

This month, New Jersey residents have been able to experiece government underreaction and government overreaction in quick succession.

Just a few weeks prior, Gov. Phil Murphy was heavily criticized after a snowstorm resulted in 1,000 accidents, 2,000 calls for help, and the death of a woman whose car was stuck on the train tracks. Plows and salt trucks were unable to perform their tasks efficiently as commuter traffic clogged the roads. As governor, Murphy has the power to declare a state of emergency to shut down roads and redirect traffic. But because the intensity of the snowstorm was unpredictable, he argued, it was difficult to make a declaration prior to the emergency. Meanwhile, he maintained, it would not have made sense to declare a state of emergency “in the middle of the event.”

This week the state veered in the other direction. Though the Wednesday forecast did not predict a snowstorm, the state’s Department of Transportation (NJDOT) decided to preemptively salt the roads. This was an expensive undertaking: Brutal winter conditions last year ate up many salt reserves, and the price of salt has been skyrocketing.

Your tax dollars literally down the drain. #WarOnImaginaryStorms https://t.co/wrb4shsj0u

— Gary Szatkowski (@GarySzatkowski) November 28, 2018

Worse, the salt itself created unsafe driving conditions.

Meteorologist Gary Szatkowski, who accused the government of having a war on imaginary storms, asked if anyone had seen snow. Apparently there were a few flurries.

New Jersey drivers can look forward to traveling on salted roads for the next few days.

Apoplectic liberals are predicting an apocalypse of rape and mayhem against women on college campuses if Betsy DeVos’ Title IX reforms are implemented.

But what is Devos suggesting that’s so bad, I ask in my column at The Week this morning?

She wants to restore the due process rights of the accused so that innocents don’t get nailed for something they didn’t do. This means that they should have the right to see the evidence against them and question their accuser. In other words, we should end the opaque, Star Chamber–like proceedings in which the accused are nailed using secret evidence.

Liberals—correctly—decry this kind of thing when it is used to convict foreigners suspected of terrorism. Why are they so blind when it comes to sexual misconduct?

Go here to find out.