Main takeaway. Almost out of blue, this IVF tech could be on track become the first treatment using pluripotent stem cells -- i.e. stem cells with embryonic properties that can make anything.
embryonic stem cells were isolated from human embryos 25 years ago. Amazing cells (can make anything).
The Information has a profile of Noor Siddiqui, founder of Orchid, a startup offering to assess IVF embryos for future health (and more?) using polygenic risk scores.
First, people are being encourage to undergo IVF in order to access these predictions, not because they are infertile. Quite edgy to advise a medical procedure for unproven benefit. And it goes futher. Why not also use a surrogate?
Second, Orchid's founder is telling people you could test embryos for future IQ, not only health predictions. But then denies saying so.
Did covid-19 start in Wuhan? Not according to China's patent office.
The intellectual property organization is changing the text of patents on drugs and vaccines to remove references to covid-19's starting place.
Examples follow. 🧵
First, the (im)moral of the story. China alters the facts in technical documents for what are likely political reasons and U.S. corporations go along with it.
Example 1: Pfizer's patent on paxlovid.
The US edition (at left) and the machine translation of the Chinese version (at right). Can you see what is missing?
I highlighted the text that was removed. It was the part that said mentioned the outbreak originated in Wuhan.
Eric Lander will return next month to Broad Institute and faculty positions at MIT and Harvard. He was on two-year leave to serve as White House science adviser, but got booted from that post for bullying.
This seems to settle the succession question at the Broad Institute, which was founded by Lander. Over the years, other contenders, like David Altschuler and Aviv Regev, departed for industry.
Lander is 65, according to Google, nominal retirement age, but that doesnt mean much in academia. According to Broad, Lander will return to research, mentoring and, one expects, institution building activities.