Tag: science

Mosquitoes With Synthetic DNA Scheduled For California Release

In the mosquito breeding rooms of British biotech company Oxitec, scientists line up fresh eggs, each the size of a grain of salt. Using microscopic needles, the white-coated researchers inject each egg with a dab of a proprietary synthetic DNA.

For four days, Oxitec technicians care for the eggs, watching for those that hatch into wriggling brown larvae. Those “injection survivors,” as the company calls them, face a battery of tests to ensure their genetic modification is successful.

Soon, millions of these engineered mosquitoes could be set loose in California in an experiment recently approved by the federal government.

Oxitec, a private company, says its genetically modified bugs could help save half the world’s population from the invasive Aedes aegypti mosquito, which can spread diseases such as yellow fever, chikungunya and dengue to humans. Female offspring produced by these modified insects will die, according to Oxitec’s plan, causing the population to collapse.

“Precise. Environmentally sustainable. Non-toxic,” the company says on its website of its product trademarked as the “Friendly” mosquito.

Scientists independent from the company and critical of the proposal say not so fast. They say unleashing the experimental creatures into nature has risks that haven’t yet been fully studied, including possible harm to other species or unexpectedly making the local mosquito population harder to control.

Even scientists who see the potential of genetic engineering are uneasy about releasing the transgenic insects into neighborhoods because of how hard such trials are to control.

“There needs to be more transparency about why these experiments are being done,” said Natalie Kofler, a bioethicist at Harvard Medical Schoolwho has followed the company’s work. “How are we weighing the risks and benefits?”

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Eisenhower warned the World of the “danger that Public Policy could become the captive of a Scientific-Technological Elite” in 1961; but we didn’t listen

President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address to the American people, delivered on the 17th of January 1961, has gone down in history as a truly thought-provoking speech culminating in a warning about the internal threats and dangers facing the country.

Written in eloquent language that would be hard to imagine coming forth from the lips of the current American president or his predecessor, it was apparently prepared by Eisenhower and his brother months in advance, rather than at the last moment, which is what many people had assumed.

And while pretty much everyone in the world has focused on his clear warning about the dangers of an excessive accumulation of power in the hands of the “military-industrial complex”, few have paid attention to—much less been guided by—the second warning he gave, one which is far more relevant today, given the current unmitigated disaster being unleashed upon humanity globally.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.[i]

These are the words that have been quoted time and again to explain the JFK assassination, the inexorable rise of the arms lobby in Congress, the ever-increasing war-mongering that has characterised US foreign policy over the last half century, the trillions that have been spent on the military—both in the US and in client states abroad—and even the lost trillions that have disappeared into black budgets and the secret space programme. These explanations and conclusions are not altogether incorrect or misplaced.

In fact, they do help shed light on how American democracy became subverted, how and why the American people lost the ability to influence their future through elections, and how the American economy became bogged down and is now drowning in its own debt, since the US military-industrial complex has indeed been one of the main protagonists in all of these developments.

However, what we have seen over the last two and a half years—which is nothing less than a global coup d’état—suggests that Eisenhower’s warning, though completely correct and prescient, goes some way to explaining only the events of the decades following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and not the events of the last few years, such as the Covid-19 plandemic/scamdemic, the jabbing of billions of people across the world by a gene-editing bioweapon, the destruction of the West’s middle class, the relentless roll-out of digital tools and platforms to upend multiple aspects of daily living/human interaction, and the dramatic escalation in censorship and information manipulation to confuse and fool the populations of countries everywhere.

In all of these developments, the US military-industrial complex has not been the protagonist. Indeed, it too has been a victim — a victim of another group of conspirators which has surpassed it in terms of reach, effectiveness and evil intent. To understand the nature of this group, it is necessary to explore President Eisenhower’s speech further and spot the second dire warning he issued. Here it is:

… we must also be alert to the equal and opposite danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.[ii]

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Science papers now subject to extreme censorship if they question the “official” narrative on anything: COVID, AIDS, vaccines, climate, virology and more

The “moderators” at Cornell University‘s arXiv server, an open-access archive and free distribution service for scientific material, have been censoring scientific studies that they claim contain “inflammatory content and unprofessional language.”

A “preprint server” for preliminary versions of scientific studies that are moderated but not yet peer-reviewed or published, arXiv is supposed to be neutral when it comes to what gets published. The reality, however, is that arXiv is selectively censoring studies and even banning scientists for publishing work with “controversial” viewpoints.

In one instance, researchers tried to publish a study presenting an opposing viewpoint to another study about room temperature superconductivity. Those researchers aligned with the opposing point of view study are reportedly now “in hot water” on arXiv for daring to buck the “consensus.”

The server also proceeded to ban University of California San Diego (UCSD) theoretical physicist Jorge Hirsch from posting anything on the platform for six months as punishment for his conflicting viewpoints.

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Those Who Chose Shaming Over Science

The shaming impulse asserted itself right from the start of the pandemic. On Twitter, #covidiot began trending on the evening of March 22, 2020, and by the time the night was over, 3,000 tweets had coopted the hashtag to denounce poor public health practices. When CBS News posted a video of spring breakers partying in Miami, outraged citizens shared the students’ names in their social media networks, accompanied by such missives as “do not give these selfish dumbfucks beds and/or respirators.”

In the early days of the pandemic, when panic and confusion reigned, such indignation could perhaps be forgiven. But the shaming gained momentum and wove itself into the zeitgeist. Also: it didn’t work.

As noted by Harvard Medical School epidemiologist Julia Marcus, “shaming and blaming people is not the best way to get them to change their behavior and actually can be counterproductive because it makes people want to hide their behavior.” Along similar lines, Jan Balkus, an infectious disease specialist at the University of Washington, maintains that shaming can make it harder for people to “acknowledge situations where they may have encountered risk.”

If shaming “covidiots” for their behavior doesn’t accomplish much, you can be sure that shaming people for Wrongthink won’t change any minds. Instead, we heretics simply stop telling the shamers what we’re thinking. We nod and smile. We give them the match point and continue the debate in our own heads.

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Biden’s NIH Refuses To Answer Questions About University Of Pittsburgh Experiments On Aborted Babies

Daines was referring to multiple physicians’ claims that Pitt’s statements “point to the possibility” that organs were “extracted from live fetuses.” That was based on statements the university made about minimizing ischemia time, which refers to “the time after the tissue collection procedure and before cooling for storage and transport.”

The university’s application to NIH also prompted lawmakers to question whether the university had violated fetal tissue trafficking laws as part of its federally funded “GUDMAP” research program. In applying for NIH funds, Pitt said it sought to “develop a pipeline to the acquisition, quality control and distribution of human genitourinary [urinary and genital organs and functions] samples obtained throughout development (6-42 weeks gestation).”

So far, the university has denied any wrongdoing and claimed it played no role in medical procedures. It’s unclear, however, why the university made comments about ischemia time and obtaining quality tissue.

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CELLULAR REJUVENATION THERAPY SAFELY REVERSES SIGNS OF AGING IN MICE

Age may be just a number, but it’s a number that often carries unwanted side effects, from brittle bones and weaker muscles to increased risks of cardiovascular disease and cancer. Now, scientists at the Salk Institute, in collaboration with Genentech, a member of the Roche group, have shown that they can safely and effectively reverse the aging process in middle-aged and elderly mice by partially resetting their cells to more youthful states.

“We are elated that we can use this approach across the life span to slow down aging in normal animals. The technique is both safe and effective in mice,” says co-corresponding author Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, professor in Salk’s Gene Expression Laboratory and holder of the Roger Guillemin Chair. “In addition to tackling age-related diseases, this approach may provide the biomedical community with a new tool to restore tissue and organismal health by improving cell function and resilience in different disease situations, such as neurodegenerative diseases.”

As organisms age, it is not just their outward appearances and health that change; every cell in their bodies carries a molecular clock that records the passage of time. Cells isolated from older people or animals have different patterns of chemicals along their DNA—called epigenetic markers—compared to younger people or animals. Scientists know that adding a mixture of four reprogramming molecules—Oct4, Sox2, Klf4 and cMyc, also known as “Yamanaka factors”—to cells can reset these epigenetic marks to their original patterns. This approach is how researchers can dial back adult cells, developmentally speaking, into stem cells.

In 2016, Izpisua Belmonte’s lab reported for the first time that they could use the Yamanaka factors to counter the signs of aging and increase life span in mice with a premature aging disease. More recently, the team found that, even in young mice, the Yamanaka factors can accelerate muscle regeneration. Following these initial observations, other scientists have used the same approach to improve the function of other tissues like the heart, brain and optic nerve, which is involved in vision.

In the new study, Izpisua Belmonte and his colleagues tested variations of the cellular rejuvenation approach in healthy animals as they aged. One group of mice received regular doses of the Yamanaka factors from the time they were 15 months old until 22 months, approximately equivalent to age 50 through 70 in humans. Another group was treated from 12 through 22 months, approximately age 35 to 70 in humans. And a third group was treated for just one month at age 25 months, similar to age 80 in humans.

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Bill Gates-Linked Lab Developing Vaccine That Spreads Like a Virus To Vaccinate Anti-Vaxxers

A team of Bill-Gates linked research scientists have announced they are developing a needle-less vaccine that spreads itself like a virus, meaning people will “catch” the vaccine like they would a cold or flu, without the need for needles and injections.

The research is being subsidised by high-profile funding organisations, including the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH), which has longstanding financial ties to the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.

An international team of researchers are working on an experimental self-spreading vaccine that could stop the virus leaping from rats to humans — a phenomenon scientists call zoonotic spillover.

The drive to develope self-spreading vaccines is not without controversy. The DHSC paper notes: ‘Self-spreading vaccines are less lethal but not non-lethal: they can still kill.

‘Some people will die who would otherwise have lived, though fewer people die overall.

‘The other issue is there is no consent (for vaccination) from the majority of patients.’

But some ethics experts say there are parallels for ‘treating’ mass populations for public health issues without first getting individual consent.

For example, the fluoridation of mains drinking water to prevent tooth decay already happens in some parts of the UK and the Government is considering extending it to all of England.

‘Nobody is asked whether they give consent, even those who disagree with it,’ says Professor Dominic Wilkinson, a medical ethics specialist at Oxford University. ‘Instead, we entrust elected officials to examine the likely health benefits and make decisions based on the evidence.

‘I don’t think that there is anything intrinsically different when it comes to the idea of self-spreading vaccines.’

However, some scientists have serious misgivings about the risk that weakened viruses could mutate into a more potent form once they are free to spread in the population.

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