Stefan Simanowitz Profile picture
"Action, like a sacrament, is the visible form of an invisible spirit" (bell hooks) || journalist || campaigner || @amnesty || Easily distracte

Jun 7, 2021, 6 tweets

All roads lead to genomics

Dido Harding’s was chair of Genomics England

Palantir rptdly taught #CambridgeAnalytica to scrape data

Is the #NHSDataGrab really about about population-wide genomic data?

Complete control?

Bell-Curve eugenicist’s wet dream?

“We could close our eyes & pretend that contrary to all the evidence, #Palantir is a rights-respecting company or we can call this façade what it is: another company placing profit over people, no matter the human cost.” Michael Kleinman, @amnestyusa

The #NHSDataGrab has been underway since Oct 2020 (see Tweet👇)

Why was it ignored for the last 8 months?

News editors, journalists & politicians appeared to be unwilling to report it

It’s great that the #PalantirPlan is now getting wide coverage, but are we already too late?

Also ignored by the media has been #GenomeUK, launched quietly in Sept 2020

This 10-year strategy puts genomics at the heart of the NHS & at the heart of the entire programme for govt

It was launched on a Saturday (bizarre!) with zero coverage or fanfare

We already know that Big Tech mine & sell our data, but the new frontier lies not in our consumer behaviour, but in our biological selves

People like Cummings & #Palantir’s Peter Thiel believe that our fates lie in our genes, not in the stars

But who controls that fate?

Advances in genetics have huge potential social & cost benefits

Genome editing of somatic cells isn’t passed from one generation to the next

But germline genome editing can pass changes to future generations & could reshape human beings & our societies.

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