designer babies
For years now, aspiring parents have been designing their children. Screening embryos for disease-causing genes during IVF, selecting their future baby’s sex, picking egg and sperm donors to influence their child’s traits. Today, a lot of those “designer babies” are full-on kids or teenagers. And some families are discovering that, as hard as you try, things don’t always work out as planned: The kids feel like walking science experiments; the parents are disappointed in how their progeny turned out. Now controversial new technologies promise parents even more control over their embryos. One US startup, called Orchid, claims its genetic screening can calculate a baby’s risk of autism, bipolar disorder, and hundreds of other health conditions. Another startup wants to help parents pick embryos with the highest predicted IQ. So WIRED spoke to a psychologist based in California who is already dealing with the fallout.
The AI revolution is running out of data. What can researchers do?
the US has the #1 most expensive healthcare system in the world, yet we rank roughly #42 in life expectancy. United is the [indecipherable] largest company in the US by market cap, behind only Apple, Google, Walmart. It has grown and grown, but as our life expectancy? No the reality is, these [indecipherable] have simply gotten too powerful, and they continue to abuse our country for immense profit because the American public has allwed them to get away with it. Obviously the problem is more complex, but I do not have space, and frankly I do not pretend to be the most qualified person to lay out the full argument. But many have illuminated the corruption and greed (e.g.: Rosenthal, Moore), decades ago and the problems simply remain. It is not an issue of awareness at this point, but clearly power games at play.
Emmanuel Todd: the most astonishing thing is that the rise in mortality has gone hand in hand with the highest health care costs in the world. […] Large pharmaceutical companies, supported by well-paid and unscrupulous doctors, have made available to patients in mental and emotional pain, for economic and social reasons, dangerous, addictive painkillers, very frequently leading to direct death, alcoholism or suicide. […] America is no longer functionally a democracy but rather a “liberal oligarchy.”
Fenethylline was first synthesized by the German pharmaceutical firm Degussa AG in 1961 and used for around 25 years as a milder alternative to amphetamine and related compounds. […] The drug was marketed for use as a psychostimulant under the brand names Captagon, Biocapton, and Fitton. It is now illegal in most countries and is produced primarily for illicit use, which takes place mainly in the Middle East. Syria under the Assad regime was considered to be the world’s largest producer of the drug, accounting for about 80% of the global supply. The global market for the drug is worth approximately $57 billion (USD)
Captagon factory in Syria [video]
