It's so good to see more gene therapies getting worked on.
This one is particularly amazing because it's effectively a one-shot, permanent Exenatide—making humans produce a version of the compound in Gila monster venom like lifelong Ozempic!
In the picture I posted above, you can see the effects of having variants that increase the effect of the gene GLP1R.
This was relevant when I was discussing compositional effects of GLP-1RAs. As you can see, bodyfat *percentage* declines with higher natural GLP-1R agonism.
I went ahead and checked the effects of the same SNPs and an extended set of SNPs on the effects of GLP1R on colorectal cancer risk.
It seemed to reduce it (pic is an excerpt from one of my subscriber-only posts).
But the thing here is exendin-4, which has a synthetic analog in the early GLP-1RA exenatide. It shows 53% sequence identity with human GLP-1, but with a glycine substitution and 9 extra amino acid residues on its C-terminus, for stability.
So it's not exactly what I targeted.
But it is highly similar, and the differences should not make it have many different phenotypic effects.
That said, exendin-4 has been associated in preclinical data with reduced incidence of various types of cancers.
As far as I can tell, exenatide has the same cancer risk profile as the newer, stronger GLP-1RAs like semaglutide and tirzepatide, it's just weaker.
So, it should come with a reduced risk of several obesity-associated cancers like GLP-1RAs in general seem to be.
It might also come with increased odds of survival for certain types of cancer.
Since this stuff should have the same safety profile as the drug itself, it's likely just as safe.
And that means, it's likely safe. But not only is it likely safe, it's likely effective and protective.
I'm reasonably certain that this gene therapy will deliver major benefits.
This research directly militates against modern blood libel.
If people knew, for example, that Black and White men earned the same amounts on average at the same IQs, they would likely be a lot less convinced by basically-false discrimination narratives blaming Whites.
Add in that the intelligence differences cannot be explained by discrimination—because there *is* measurement invariance—and these sorts of findings are incredibly damning for discrimination-based narratives of racial inequality.
So, said findings must be condemned, proscribed.
The above chart is from the NLSY '79, but it replicates in plenty of other datasets, because it is broadly true.
For example, here are three independent replications:
A lot of the major pieces of civil rights legislation were passed by White elites who were upset at the violence generated by the Great Migration and the riots.
Because of his association with this violence, most people at the time came to dislike MLK.
It's only *after* his death, and with his public beatification that he's come to enjoy a good reputation.
This comic from 1967 is a much better summation of how the public viewed him than what people are generally taught today.
And yes, he was viewed better by Blacks than by Whites.
But remember, at the time, Whites were almost nine-tenths of the population.
Near his death, Whites were maybe one-quarter favorable to MLK, and most of that favorability was weak.
The researcher who put together these numbers was investigated and almost charged with a crime for bringing these numbers to light when she hadn't received permission.
Greater Male Variability rarely makes for an adequate explanation of sex differences in performance.
One exception may be the number of papers published by academics.
If you remove the top 7.5% of men, there's no longer a gap!
The disciplines covered here were ones with relatively equal sex ratios: Education, Nursing & Caring Science, Psychology, Public Health, Sociology, and Social Work.
Because these are stats on professors, this means that if there's greater male variability, it's mostly right-tail
Despite this, the very highest-performing women actually outperformed the very highest-performing men on average, albeit slightly.
The percentiles in this image are for the combined group, so these findings coexist for composition reasons.