>dough
>Good day for a great day!
this is very important
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tz6Q3GprZEo&t=19s
The 7th Generation - a cult dedicated to the ritual abuse and defilement of children as a means of acquiring spiritual power, similar to Satanic cults.
>The 7th Generation - a cult dedicated to the ritual abuse and defilement of children as a means of acquiring spiritual power, similar to Satanic cults.
https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Seventh_Generation_(WTA)
>https://whitewolf.fandom.com/wiki/Seventh_Generation_(WTA)
>The 7th Generation - a cult dedicated to the ritual abuse and defilement of children as a means of acquiring spiritual power, similar to Satanic cults.
that's wild
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_Izpisua_Belmonte
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juan_Carlos_Izpisua_Belmonte
https://time.com/collection/health-care-50/5425094/juan-carlos-izpisua-belmonte/
Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte
Closing the Organ Deficit
Izpisua Belmonte is addressing the shortage of human organs for transplant with a scientifically innovative—albeit ethically controversial—solution: growing human cells in animal embryos to produce, say, human liver tissue inside a living pig or nonhuman primate, which can then be transplanted into people. It’s the first step toward growing enough human organs without relying on human donors. —Alice Park
>Alice Park
https://time.com/author/alice-park/
Alice Park is a staff writer at TIME. She has reported on the breaking frontiers of health and medicine in articles covering issues such as AIDS, anxiety and Alzheimer's disease. Her latest book is The Stem Cell Hope: How Stem Cell Medicine Can Change Our Lives.
>https://time.com/author/alice-park/
https://time.com/6046658/pfizer-biontech-fda-approval-covid-vaccine/
Pfizer-BioNTech Has Requested Full Approval of Their COVID-19 Vaccine From the FDA
Pfizer-BioNTech announced on May 7 that they have requested that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) start the process of fully approving their COVID-19 vaccine. The companies will continue to supply the agency with additional data on vaccination safety and effectiveness on a rolling basis over coming weeks. The FDA issued an emergency use authorization for the shot in December, based on short-term data on safety and efficacy.
Now, the companies have the required six-month data on the vaccine to support a biologics license application, which the FDA will review over the next several weeks before making a decision.
What difference would approval of the vaccine make over the current authorization? “It would be a total game changer for two reasons,” says Dr. Leana Wen, visiting professor of health policy and management at George Washington University’s Milken School of Public Health and former health commissioner for Baltimore City. “First, legal questions raised about whether employers can require it, or whether schools can mandate vaccination, are put to rest if the FDA gives it full approval because there is precedent for requiring other vaccines that are approved, like childhood vaccinations.
“Second, one of the arguments perpetuated by anti-vaccine activists, and some who are hesitant, has to do with the idea that these are still ‘experimental vaccines’ since they have not received approval,” says Wen. “Full approval would put those concerns and disinformation to rest.”
For people who have already been vaccinated, the filing and anticipated approval doesn’t make much difference. And for doctors and health care professionals, there likely won’t be any surprises in the longer-term data since the companies have already released reports showing strong responses up to six months after vaccination.
But for those who feel the vaccines were released before adequate data was gathered and analyzed, the request for approval should be reassuring, as the new filing includes follow-up safety and efficacy data for up to six months, compared to the two-month data the FDA relied on to issue emergency use.
Dr. Kirsten Lyke, associate professor of medicine at the University of Maryland, says that the approval could be important for Pfizer-BioNTech if, as many experts believe, people will need to receive regular booster shots of the vaccine to maintain immunity—similar to flu shots. “An emergency use authorization allows companies to issue their product during the time of emergency. But at some point when it’s not deemed to be an emergency, then companies cannot continue to distribute their product,” says Lyke.
Having an approved product also lets the companies sell their vaccine directly to doctors, hospitals, pharmacies, schools and other places that provide immunizations. Under the EUA, the government has purchased these doses and is distributing them free to the public, but it’s not clear if that practice will continue with booster doses if they’re needed. If the federal government is no longer providing the shots, then people might start to see fees associated with getting vaccinated, which insurers may cover.
If the FDA decides to approve the vaccine, then people getting immunized would also no longer need to sign the form acknowledging that they are receiving a product that has not been approved yet.
https://twitter.com/aliceparkny
Health and medicine (and occasional Olympics) national correspondent for @TIME. Author of The Stem Cell Hope, How Stem Cell Medicine Can Change Our Lives.
https://time.com/5954818/first-human-monkey-chimera-embryo/
Scientists Report Creating the First Embryo With Human and Non-Human Primate Cells
In a ground-breaking experiment, researchers have successfully created the first human-monkey chimera. The work, published in the journal Cell, describes the the first embryo containing both human and monkey cells that was cultured for 20 days. Led by Juan Carlos Izpisua Belmonte, the study represents the culmination of decades of work in understanding early embryo development in non-human species, which Belmonte hopes will now apply to humans. But it is bound to raise serious ethical questions about the implications of combining human cells with those from a different species (even if it is a closely related one), and the report was accompanied by commentary from ethicists on how the work should be interpreted and what the careful next steps should be in pursuing this line of study.
Belmonte, a professor in the gene expression laboratory at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies and well-respected for his work in embryo development, is very clear about why he pursued the experiment, and where he hopes it will lead. Creating cross-species mutants to capitalize on specific physical features or characteristics, X-Men style, was most definitely not the goal. In interviews with TIME on the experiment as it progressed since 2019, he carefully laid out the biological mysteries he hoped to solve, and the gaps in knowledge about early development he wanted to fill.
The earliest steps that human embryos take, he says, are the “biggest mystery of human development. While we know a lot about development after we are born, and even a little about what happens during pregnancy, we really don’t know anything about human development in the first two or three weeks after fertilization. All we know about early embryogenesis comes from different lab models—from rodents, mice and worms—but we really don’t know anything about us.”
In the Cell paper, Belmonte describes creating a human-monkey chimera that is viable for 20 days, enough time to study these critical early stages of development. Specifically, he and his team were looking for the different signals that the nascent cells send out to spark development from a single fertilized cell into the millions of cells and multiple tissues and organs that comprise a human. The evolutionary closeness between primates and humans makes this possible—Belmonte previously tried similar experiments with human and pig embryos, and failed.
He is fully aware of the delicate moral and ethical questions his work stirs up: “We are not going to use monkeys to create human organs inside monkeys,” he says, referencing one of the potential outcomes of such research that many feel crosses ethical lines.
Instead, Belmonte plans to learn the “language” of early human embryo development using this human-monkey model, and then use that to better understand disease—and potentially generate human tissues for organ transplantation in a less ethically charged species such as the pig, which is more distant from humans evolutionarily and more accessible in terms of conducting experiments.
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00305-6
>https://time.com/5954818/first-human-monkey-chimera-embryo/
Learning from the animal world
You’re likely to be struck by an odd juxtaposition when you set foot on the campus of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies in La Jolla, Calif., a seaside neighborhood in San Diego. On the outside, there doesn’t seem to be much happening in the two massive six-story concrete edifices that stretch from the entrance gate until they reach the cliffside, where they seem to drop off, infinity-pool fashion, into the Pacific Ocean beyond. The bleached concrete and travertine courtyard of the research institute is pristine, evoking calm and simplicity, in accordance with the directive of its founder, Jonas Salk, famous for developing the polio vaccine. Built in 1960, the facility is now as well known for its placid, soaring architecture as for the boundary-pushing science that happens in its labs.
Belmonte’s lab occupies a corner of the more than 411,000-square-foot Institute. Like his surroundings, the Spanish-born scientist is reserved and unruffled, and speaks softly—never hinting at the fanfare-deserving scientific and ethical boundaries he pushes every day with his work. Belmonte has been fascinated with the first sparks of life—what scientists call “embryogenesis,” or how embryos develop—his entire career. As a newly minted PhD in 1987, Belmonte published one of his first scientific papers, reporting the results of a study in which he took embryonic cells from a mouse limb and grafted them onto the beginnings of a wing of a chicken embryo. To his surprise, the mouse limb cells developed well in their new environment, suggesting that embryonic cells from different species could, at the least, talk to each other—opening the door to growing tissues or organs of one species in another one.
More than 30 years later, Belmonte still repeats the mantra his mentor, renowned British developmental biologist Lewis Wolpert, liked to tell his students: Forget birth, marriage, or death. The most important moment in your life is an event that occurs when you are still an embryo.
That moment is called gastrulation, and for humans, it occurs about two weeks after egg and sperm meet in fertilization. It’s when the embryo, which began as a single egg—then divided to become two cells, then four cells, then eight and so on—splits into the three major cell layers that eventually give rise to the more than 200 cell types that make up the human. That’s the lightning-rod moment—when brain cells start to distinguish themselves from skin cells and lung cells diverge from hair cells, and so on.
However important this moment, it’s currently challenging to study. Guidelines from U.S. and international scientific organizations advise researchers not to keep human embryos dividing in the lab beyond about 14 days. That’s to forestall ethical concerns about potentially growing a human embryo that will start to develop cells, tissues and organs. Because human gastrulation occurs during the third week, the critical steps leading to this milestone have, to date, remained a black box.
Intent on figuring out a way to shed more light on this crucial window of time, Belmonte first spent years trying to understand how salamanders and amphibians regenerate not just limbs but other more complex organs and structures like spines and brains—which, like gastrulation, is a unique form of development. He narrowed down the key genes responsible for instructing tabula rasa cells to become other types of cells, but the animals were still many steps removed from humans.
In the early 1990s, when researchers first isolated human embryonic stem cells, Belmonte saw an opportunity to finally break through the secrets of early human development. Ethical issues about working with these early cells, however, stymied the field until 2007, when a Japanese scientist, Shinya Yamanaka, figured out a way to chemically reprogram fully developed human cells to revert back to an embryonic-like state, so they can start developing all over again.
Yamanaka earned the Nobel Prize in 2012 for his groundbreaking work, but his process, while innovative, wasn’t very reliable and still too nascent to answer the questions Belmonte wanted to address. So he thought: Why not mimic the entire human development process by piggybacking off another animal species? Thinking back on his early chimera experiments, Belmonte successfully merged mouse cells in rat embryos and vice versa, and was eager to see if a similar model could be created with human cells, so he could study those out-of-reach first critical stages of human development.
Unfortunately, when he tried to grow human cells in pig and sheep embryos, he hit a wall. A small percentage of the human cells did find a way to survive, but, by and large, the pig and sheep embryos rejected the human cells—not surprising since the evolutionary gap between pigs and sheep and humans is much greater than that between mice and rats. Belmonte knew he needed a better model.
==Unlocking the secrets of early human development
The problem was that non-human primates, the animals closest to humans on the evolutionary tree, proved to be almost as tricky as humans when it came to culturing and nurturing embryos at their earliest stages.
First were the funding issues. The National Institutes of Health, the largest source of basic biomedical research funding in the U.S., does not support human chimera studies. So Belmonte turned to his native Spain, where such work is allowed, as well as private foundations and new resources such as the state-funded California Institute for Regenerative Medicine.
Next were the biological hurdles. Until 2019, no non-human primate embryos had been cultured for the nearly three weeks it took for them to reach the gastrulation stage that Belmonte was keen to better understand. That year, however, Belmonte collaborated with colleagues led by Weizhi Ji at the Primate Biomedical Research in Kunming, China to successfully culture monkey embryos to 20 days, just when the critical phases of gastrulation start to take shape.
The study, published in the journal Science barely caused a ripple in the larger world, which soon became subsumed by the COVID-19 pandemic. But the advance was critical for Belmonte’s chimera aspirations. With a monkey embryo viable to 20 days, he could start introducing human cells into that embryo and explore the first flurry of genetic, molecular and chemical changes that dictated early development.
The results of this work—mostly done just before Belmonte’s labs at Salk were locked down due to the pandemic from March to June—were published in Cell on April 15. What the years-in-the-making study revealed elicits impassioned excitement from even this soft-spoken scientist. “I was surprised, although I had hoped this would work much better than the human-pig studies,” he says, a broad grin spreading across his face. “It was like seeing evolution happening in front of your eyes.”
What Belmonte saw was the remarkable mingling of monkey cells with human cells he had introduced into a monkey embryo as it developed. The human cells came from a stem cell line in China, using Yamanaka’s method of reprogramming an adult cell back to its embryonic state. Twenty-five of these reprogrammed human cells were introduced into each of 132 monkey embryos. With each day, fewer of the embryos remained viable, and by day 19, only three remained. Belmonte admits that this first pass wasn’t a resounding success, though he is hesitant to definitively calculate the efficiency of the process, given that this study entailed just a single injection of human cells at a single time point; previous experiments with mouse and rat cells involved a range of numbers of cells introduced at a range of time points during embryonic development. “We only did one number of cells at one specific time,” he says. “Any conclusion in terms of efficiency would not be valid at all. But the fact that these cells communicate and develop more or less normally clearly says the efficiency has to be high. We will next do more experiments, and vary the number of cells and time periods to answer the efficiency question more precisely.”
Nevertheless, this first foray into human-primate chimeras does prove that cells from multiple species can talk to each other—which means Belmonte’s vision of having a model, ex vivo, or outside of the body, for studying the very first stages of human development, could become reality.
And, once he identifies the signals and processes that human cells use to differentiate into different tissues and organs, he can recreate that environment in pig embryos, and ultimately regenerate human tissues such as skin grafts for burn patients and heart, lung or liver tissue to replace damaged and diseased cells.
https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6467/eaaw5754
Science, not science-fiction
Belmonte is already collaborating with scientists and pig farmers in his native Spain to set up the next studies. He is well aware that his work is controversial and will strike some as breaking the laws of nature. In preparing for his human-monkey chimera work, he consulted three independent ethicists and obtained approval from the institutional review boards that oversee any studies involving people or human tissues, from not just the Salk Institute but his collaborators’ institute in China as well.
“That’s unheard of for biomedical science,” says Insoo Hyun, a bioethicist at Case Western Reserve University and director of research ethics at Harvard Medical School. “They went above and beyond what people typically do for ethical oversight, and that attests to the fact that everybody understands that the use of non-human primate embryos is ethically sensitive because they are [evolutionarily] so close to man.”
Hank Greely, director of the Center for Law and the Biosciences at Stanford University, who wrote an editorial accompanying the study, says that he has “no real problem” with the experiment itself, because the embryo will not be implanted for further gestation. But he recognizes that such experiments can alarm people, and be misunderstood if not explained properly. One concern people might have, notes Greely, is about consent for such studies; it’s important he says, that cell donors are fully informed that their cells might be used for chimeric research. Most informed consent forms cover the typical studies for which such cells might be used, but may not accommodate more cutting-edge applications such as this one, since they couldn’t have been envisioned when the cell lines were donated and made.
“Whoever’s cells led to the cell line that was used, did that person know it would be used for this kind of chimeric research, and should that be part of the consent process?” says Greely. “That’s one of the hottest issues right now in research ethics—whether certain kinds of research are so controversial, that they either require or should involve some endeavor to get specific consent to them—and [that issue] is unresolved.”
The human cells used in Belmonte’s research come from a stem-cell line created and approved by the ethics committee at Peking University, and were part of previous studies Belmonte and his colleagues in China did that led to this work. While both review boards of those universities approved the consent and the study, it’s not clear if the consent included specific mention of the chimera research.
Even apart from that issue, he says, people may not have the same ethical comfort as he does with the scientific merits of the study. “Where the public gets most concerned is when something comes out of the blue that has frightening implications that they had no preparation for,” says Belmonte. “Frankly I think science could do more prep work such as having more public discussion before doing predictably controversial work.”
Hyun, who chairs the International Society for Stem Cell Research committee that is currently writing guidelines for human-chimera studies agrees, says there are no existing ways to have such a dialogue. “Without a forum for the public to get more information about studies like these, and to express their concerns, I think we are heading toward a dangerous place of lack of public support and distrust in science,” he says.
There are no easy solutions, Hyun says, but the town-hall model seen in, for example, U.S. presidential election campaigns, could be a model. In this case, Hyun says, he’d want to see such a town hall hosted by trusted organizations such as the National Institutes of Health or the National Academy of Sciences. It could, he argues, be a starting point for critical conversations where scientists and the public can exchange ideas and concerns and potentially find common ground. “Scientists tend to have a different world view of human beings and their relation to nature than other people who don’t share a scientific orientation,” he says. “Scientists tend not to see a sharp distinction between human and non-human species, since we share genes in common; they tend to see species more as a continuum. Whereas the public see human beings and non-human beings, and they don’t mix. That’s why public dialogue would be helpful, so scientists can appreciate other points of view and the public can appreciate how scientists understand the world.”
Belmonte is eager to participate in such discussions. He was, he says, unfairly criticized when premature news of his work was leaked to the Spanish publication El Pais by one of his collaborators at Murcia Catholic University in Spain, and taken out of context by some who did not understand the purpose of the work. “We need to not do every experiment that we can do, but move forward in ways that are legally and ethically allowed,” he says.
All that said, Belmonte is eager to find out where his latest advance can go next. He believes his work isn’t limited to an academic understanding of early human development, or even to the already sci-fi-level possibility of regenerating human tissue for organ transplants—it can, he hopes, finally expose how certain diseases, even those associated with aging, such as cancer and Alzheimer’s, get started. By placing specific types of cells into a human-primate chimera, scientists can start to understand and use the process of elimination to isolate the precise cells, signals and pathways that can go awry in disease. “So it’s not just the earliest stages of life but also the later stages of our life that could be studied with these chimeric platforms,” he says. That is, as long as our cultural and societal norms can catch up to the fast pace of scientific progress.
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/07/31/inenglish/1564561365_256842.html
>https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2019/07/31/inenglish/1564561365_256842.html
Spanish scientists create human-monkey chimera in China
The team led by Juan Carlos Izpisúa injected stem cells into the animal embryos as part of research aimed at finding a way to grow organs for transplants
Researchers led by Spanish scientist Juan Carlos Izpisúa have created for the first time a human-monkey hybrid in a laboratory in China – an important step towards using animals for human organ transplants, project collaborator Estrella Núñez confirmed to EL PAÍS.
The team, made up of members of the Salk Institute in the United States and the Murcia Catholic University (UCAM) in Spain, genetically modified monkey embryos to deactivate genes that are essential to the formation of organs. The scientists then injected human stem cells, which are capable of creating any type of tissue, into the embryo. The product of this work is a monkey with human cells that has not been born, because researchers stopped the process.
“The results are very promising,” says Núñez, a biologist and vice chancellor of research at UCAM. The team has not provided more details because they are waiting to publish their findings in an internationally renowned scientific journal. “From UCAM and the Salk Institute we are now trying not only to move forward and continue experimenting with human cells and rodent and pig cells, but also with non-human primates,” explains Izpisúa. “Our country is a pioneer and a world leader in these investigations,” he adds.
Izpisúa, born in Hellín (Albacete) in 1960, says that in 2017 his team conducted “the first experiment of human and pig chimeras in the world,” although with less success. “The human cells did not take hold. We saw that they contributed very little [to the development of the embryo]: one human cell for ever 100,000 pig cells,” says the Argentinean veterinarian Pablo Ross, a researcher from the University of California at Davis and a co-author of that experiment.
Izpisúa’s team has been able to create chimeras between more similar species, for instance the rat and the mouse, which is five times closer than humans and pigs. In 2017, the researchers also used the revolutionary genome editing tool CRISPR to deactivate genes in mouse embryos that are fundamental to the development of the heart, eyes and pancreas. The team then introduced rat stem cells that were capable of generating these organs. The result was a series of rat-mouse chimera embryos, whose gestation was also stopped in accordance to the international consensus regarding these types of experiments.
Doctor Ángel Raya, the director of the Barcelona Regenerative Medicine Center, explains that experiments with chimeras face “ethical barriers.” “What happens if the stem cells escape and form human neurons in the brain of the animal? Would it have consciousness? And what happens if these stem cells turn into sperm cells?” he asks. Núñez assures that Izpisuá’s research team has created mechanisms “so that if human cells migrate to the brain, they will self-destruct.”
To avoid ethical issues, the scientific community has traditionally set the “red line at 14 days” of gestation, says Raya, which is not enough time for the embryo to develop a human central nervous system. All chimera embryos are destroyed before that period expires. “In no case is the gestation brought to full term,” adds Núñez.
Izpisúa’s research with monkeys in China was financed in large part by the UCAM, and did not come cheap. “If we combine the human/pig, human/rat and human/monkey research, it is many hundreds of thousands of euros,” says Núñez.
In Spain, this type of research is heavily restricted and limited only to investigation into deadly diseases. “We are doing the experiments with monkeys in China because, in principle, they cannot be done here because of lack of infrastructure,” explains the vice chancellor, who plays down the fact that her university is Catholic. “What we want is to make progress for the sake of people who have a disease,” she adds. Núñez underlines that the Spanish ethical committees approved the experiment of human and pig chimeras in Murcia in 2017.
“The ultimate goal would be to create a human organ that could be transplanted, but the path itself is almost more interesting for today’s scientists,” says Núñez. “I am essentially aware that I will not see it happen [the development of human organs in animals] but to arrive at that point, it’s necessary to pass through this one.”
https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2016/06/21/inenglish/1466503162_654878.html
https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31752-4?innerTabgraphical_S0092867416317524=
>https://science.sciencemag.org/content/366/6467/eaaw5754
Dissecting primate early post-implantation development using long-term in vitro embryo culture
In vitro development of monkey embryos
In this study, we show that monkey embryos show robust development beyond 14 days after fertilization, surviving until day 20 without support from maternal tissue. We also provide insights into the transcriptional programs and chromatin dynamics that underlie monkey post-implantation development. Our system provides a platform to analyze molecular and cellular dynamics during primate early development. Last, our data may help guide the development of improved differentiation protocols for primate pluripotent stem cells.
>https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(21)00305-6
Chimeric contribution of human extended pluripotent stem cells to monkey embryos ex vivo
Interspecies chimera formation with human pluripotent stem cells (hPSCs) represents a necessary alternative to evaluate hPSC pluripotency in vivo and might constitute a promising strategy for various regenerative medicine applications, including the generation of organs and tissues for transplantation. Studies using mouse and pig embryos suggest that hPSCs do not robustly contribute to chimera formation in species evolutionarily distant to humans. We studied the chimeric competency of human extended pluripotent stem cells (hEPSCs) in cynomolgus monkey (Macaca fascicularis) embryos cultured ex vivo. We demonstrate that hEPSCs survived, proliferated, and generated several peri- and early post-implantation cell lineages inside monkey embryos. We also uncovered signaling events underlying interspecific crosstalk that may help shape the unique developmental trajectories of human and monkey cells within chimeric embryos. These results may help to better understand early human development and primate evolution and develop strategies to improve human chimerism in evolutionarily distant species.
>https://www.cell.com/cell/fulltext/S0092-8674(16)31752-4?innerTabgraphical_S0092867416317524=
Interspecies Chimerism with Mammalian Pluripotent Stem Cells
Interspecies blastocyst complementation enables organ-specific enrichment of xenogenic pluripotent stem cell (PSC) derivatives. Here, we establish a versatile blastocyst complementation platform based on CRISPR-Cas9-mediated zygote genome editing and show enrichment of rat PSC-derivatives in several tissues of gene-edited organogenesis-disabled mice. Besides gaining insights into species evolution, embryogenesis, and human disease, interspecies blastocyst complementation might allow human organ generation in animals whose organ size, anatomy, and physiology are closer to humans. To date, however, whether human PSCs (hPSCs) can contribute to chimera formation in non-rodent species remains unknown. We systematically evaluate the chimeric competency of several types of hPSCs using a more diversified clade of mammals, the ungulates. We find that naïve hPSCs robustly engraft in both pig and cattle pre-implantation blastocysts but show limited contribution to post-implantation pig embryos. Instead, an intermediate hPSC type exhibits higher degree of chimerism and is able to generate differentiated progenies in post-implantation pig embryos.
>https://english.elpais.com/elpais/2016/06/21/inenglish/1466503162_654878.html
Spain turns its back on science
Other countries do not invest in R&D&i because they are rich – they are rich because they invest in R&D&i.
Carl Sagan, the US astronomer who popularized science in the 1980s, said it better than anybody else: “We are surrounded by science and technology, but nobody knows anything about science and technology.”
Digital life, the consequences of knowing what’s inside our genome, artificial intelligence, Big Data, self-driving cars and even WhatsApp: scientific and technological innovation makes our life better, even if we don’t quite understand how it works.
Only 14% of Spanish citizens have an interest in science and technology, compared with 25% who have no interest at all, according to the Spanish Foundation for Science and Technology.
US President Barack Obama
And this traditional disregard for science at the popular level is reflected at the political level, turning a mistake into a downright disaster.
Science, technology and innovation represent the fundamental productive factor in all the world’s biggest economies, and their main source of wealth. The United States, Sweden, Finland, Japan and South Korea do not invest in R&D&i because they are rich – they are rich because they invest in R&D&i.
The US spends over 2.8% of its GDP on science and technology, and its own government asserts that this effort can be credited for over half of the country’s economic and industrial development since WWII. Science and technology get constant cash injections, even during the worst crisis years.
“Science and technology helped make America the greatest country on Earth,” said President Barack Obama in an interview on Popular Science.
Meanwhile, Spanish investment falls and rises depending on how the economic winds blow: between 2002 and 2008 there was a considerable effort to catch up with our EU partners, but from 2010 to 2014 there was a 10% accumulated drop in the budget allocation for science and technology, according to the latest Cotec report.
This drop is very painful to Spanish scientists, which have been forced to seek out European funds or leave the country. And this is just the beginning.
“The effects of the public spending cuts on the results of research activity remain to be seen, due to the timeframes in research processes,” warns the OECD in a report.
However, Spanish companies and citizens are pioneers when it comes to adopting the results of innovation and technology. Spanish firms rank above average in digitalization, according to a recent report by PwC. Spain is also the European country with the greatest penetration of social networking and instant messaging apps. But the innovation is being produced by others, for the most part.
“Being pro-science is the only way we make sure that America continues to lead the world,” said Obama in Popular Science.
During their first and only televised debate, none of the four main candidates to be Spain’s next prime minister was asked about their plans to invest in science and innovation. Nor did any of them judge it relevant to discuss the consequences of living with our backs to science.
Yet there are consequences: a report by the Civic Opinion Center says that if Spain had invested annually in R&D the same percentage as other OECD countries have been investing since 1970, our per capita income would have been 20% higher by the year 2005.
Blessed Michael, archangel,
defend us in the hour of conflict.
Be our safeguard against the wickedness and snares of the devil
(may God restrain him, we humbly pray):
and do thou, O Prince of the heavenly host,
by the power of God thrust Satan down to hell
and with him those other wicked spirits
who wander through the world for the ruin of souls.
Amen.
>https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1397884751931977729
what kind of English is that?
What if what looked and sounded and was mocked like a conspiracy theory was actually right?
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/biden-shift-covid-origins-tracks-dicey-politics-note/story?id=77921012
Biden shift on COVID origins tracks dicey politics: The Note
Biden told U.S. intelligence agencies to further probe the origins of COVID-19.
What if what looked and sounded and was mocked like a conspiracy theory was actually right?
President Joe Biden's course shift on the origins of the coronavirus is one of those developments that means both less and more than it might seem.
His call for U.S. intelligence agencies to "redouble their efforts" is far from a guarantee that there will ever be a final answer about how COVID-19 emerged among humans. That is near-impossible now without the full cooperation of China and given Biden's acknowledgment that there are already competing theories that seem plausible to U.S. analysts.
At the same time, the president's disclosure about the unanswered questions puts his own administration not the World Health Organization or the "international community," as the White House previously favored in the middle of a raging debate with political, racial and national-security implications.
The idea that COVID-19 emerged from a lab in China has become Trump-loyalist mantra, particularly after it drew mockery from mainstream scientists and journalists.
The mere suggestion that Biden knew something it wasn't admitting is already igniting GOP fury over the current administration's relationship with China. Republican National Committee Chairwoman Ronna McDaniel is calling Biden aides "part of the cover-up" and questioning whether the administration can be trusted with an investigation.
Biden's request for a new 90-day review came amid pressure from outside and inside his own party for a more full accounting of how the pandemic began. What could be an attempt at political damage control could also be a meaningful political marker for the future of both Biden and his predecessor.
The Senate is gearing up to vote as early as Thursday on whether to establish a commission investigate the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol.
It passed the House with 35 Republicans breaking ranks in support. The commission has been met with staunch opposition from many Senate Republicans, including Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell.
It is undeniable that Republicans have an eye toward the midterm elections. It is also apparent that a 9/11-style commission could reflect poorly on the party and pose a threat to attempts to win back majorities in the House and Senate.