Not a Surprise

Scientists have repeatedly cloned a mouse.  Somewhere around generation 30, reproductive success dropped, and by generation 58, all of the mice were born dead.

This is not particularly surprising.

Sexual reproduction evolved as a genetic repair device, some bacteria exchange genetic material to this day.

Cloning does not necessarily cause genetic damage, but it necessarily fails to repair damage as sexual reproduction does. 

Here’s the cautionary tale you didn’t know you needed: cloning the same mouse in perpetuity will produce horrific affronts to mammalian biology.

A team of researchers in Japan discovered this firsthand. In a stunning experiment lasting two decades, they cloned a female mouse, and then cloned its clones, for 58 successive generations. But over 1,200 clones later, the experiment stopped, because by that last generation the mice kept dying immediately after being born, despite displaying no outward physical abnormalities.

The findings, published in a new study in the journal Nature Communications, suggest there’s a hard limit to duplicating mammals. And to scientists hoping for “infinite” cloning, this came as a major let down.

“We had believed that we could create an infinite number of clones. That is why these results are so disappointing,” study senior author Teruhiko Wakayama, of the University of Yamanashi, told Reuters.  

………

Perfect clones, it turns out, aren’t perfect clones. Sequencing their DNA throughout the generations revealed that they were accruing small mutations over time that snowballed into larger ones, even though the clones were superficially identical. In some cases, the clones even lost an entire copy of their X chromosome.

“It was once believed that clones were identical to the original, but it has become clear through this study that mutations occur at a rate three times higher than in ​offspring born through natural mating,” Wakayama said. 

Project Scoop

This is a reference to a Michael Crichton novel The Andromeda Strain, of course, involving a lethal pathogen brought back to earth by a satellite operated as a part of a government program called Project Scoop..

Project Scoop was a program to bring back potential candidates for germ warfare from the upper atmosphere.

Well, I just read an article about an experiment where viruses were sent into space, and while no one was harmed as a result, some profoundly weird shit happened.  (Take off the tinfoil hat.  The emergency evacuation of some crew from the ISS is entirely unrelated., the E. coli and the bacteria phage viruses used are completely harmless)

When scientists sent bacteria-infecting viruses to the International Space Station, the microbes did not behave the same way they do on Earth. In microgravity, infections still occurred, but both viruses and bacteria evolved differently over time. Genetic changes emerged that altered how viruses attach to bacteria and how bacteria defend themselves. The findings could help improve phage therapies against drug-resistant infections. 

It gave me a big of a literary flashback to the Crichton book. 

This is Literally Peak Cat

Domestic cats, the European Tour!

The Chinese TourThere is an article in Science where it is claimed that the genetic evidence shows that domestic cats did not make it to Europe until about 0 CE, about 7,000 years later previously believed.

There is archeological evidence that domestic cats, Felis catus, made it to Cyprus around 7000 BCE, but they never made the jump to Europe. 

While are references to cats in Greek and Roman documents before the common era, this now appears to be commensalism (basically hanging out) by local wild cat populations because of the large number of rodents and other prey animals near ancient granaries rather than domestication.

It appears that something very similar occurred in China, albeit at a later time. 

Around 730 CE, F. catus made it to China via the Silk Road. 

Before that, the Leopard Cat, Prionailurus bengalensis, hung out with the locals in the Far East as far back as 4000 BCE, as evidenced by archeological finds.

If you look closely, you will note that there is a 600 year gap, from about 150 CE to 730 CE where neither cat is present in the record:

………

Interestingly, the disappearance of leopard cats coincides with the turbulent era following the Han Dynasty’s collapse and preceding the Tang Dynasty’s rise. This period experienced colder, drier conditions, declining agricultural yields, social unrest, and a population contraction lasting 400 years. These factors likely disrupted the human niche that had supported leopard cats. A parallel can be seen in Europe, where black rat populations declined with the fall of the Roman Empire only to re-emerge with economic recovery. In both cases, the decline of major civilizations may have led to the disappearance of commensal animals dependent on human-driven ecosystems.

Six centuries after the disappearance of small felids, domestic cat remains began to appear in China and at another Silk Road trade hub in Central Asia.  The arrival of domestic cats may have hindered the re-establishment of leopard cats in human settlements, as both species occupy similar ecological niches. Additionally, the rise of poultry farming in ancient China after the Han Dynasty may have contributed to human-leopard cat conflict, given their tendency to prey on chickens, further preventing the return of leopard cats to anthropogenic environments.

The short version of this is:

• Human society develops agriculture in China.
• Large granaries lead to rodent heavy spaces, and P. bengalensis decides to hang out at the all you can eat rodent buffet.
• Social unrest in China leads to famine and population falling.
• Cats realize that the aforementioned buffet is over, and what's more the big dumb apes get upset when they eat the yummy birds.
• Cats decide, "Fuck this shit, I'm out of here."

That last bit is totally peak cat. 

There is no Perfect Jack-O'-Lant……… .

I was misinformed.

Have I Said That We Are F%$#Ed Lately?

I vaguely recall saying so recently.

This time it's H1N1, which appears to be only a few genes away from creating a new and lethal pandemic.

Last winter, 2024-25 I predicted on my social media platform that we were about two years (which would include next winter as well) or less from the virus [H1N1] developing human to human transmission capacity.

It’s a big prediction to make, and I hope that I am wrong, but with as little as one to three mutations in a notoriously mutagenic virus, person to person spread of H5N1 has really just become a matter of “when” not “if”.

That said, it is difficult to predict the mutational leaps a virus may or may not make. So as we head into the winter of 2025-26 I felt like it was a good time to update everyone on my thinking about this virus. I am still not certain when H5N1 will being spreading between people, but what I can say is that we are incredibly close to having a second pandemic in 5 years become a reality.

The reason I believe we are closer than ever is that H5N1 is only one to three mutations away from developing the capacity for human-to-human transmission. Well, really only one mutation, but the additional 2 or so mutations would make it spread even faster, and some of those mutations have already been detected in the wild.

Typically, when highly pathogenic avian influenza viruses make the leap to people, they come with greater transmissibility than a typical influenza and greater pandemic causing potential.

The United States is not prepared to face another pandemic, especially not one where the current mortality rate is up to 50% (likely to drop, but still may be higher than SARS-CoV-2). Political will is also ensuring a lack of preparedness by defunding surveillance, testing, and research supporting rapid development of a H5N1 vaccine that could be rapidly produced, much like the COVID-19 vaccine.

Not to worry, I'm sure that the health authorities are on the case  ……… Bueller???  Bueller???  

Gee, What a Surprise

23andMe is going through bankruptcy, and as a part of the process, it will be selling off DNA data of its customers.

Even if a company promises to be good with your personal data, in bankruptcy, you are f%$#ed.

Twenty-seven states and the District of Columbia have sued the genetic-testing company 23andMe to oppose the sale of DNA data from its customers without their direct consent.

The suit, filed on Monday in U.S. Bankruptcy Court in the Eastern District of Missouri, argues that 23andMe needs to have permission from each and every customer before their data is potentially sold. The company had entered an agreement to sell itself and its assets in bankruptcy court.

The information for sale “comprises an unprecedented compilation of highly sensitive and immutable personal data of consumers,” according to the lawsuit.

“This isn’t just data — it’s your DNA. It’s personal, permanent and deeply private,” Dan Rayfield, the Oregon attorney general, said in a statement. “People did not submit their personal data to 23andMe thinking their genetic blueprint would later be sold off to the highest bidder.”

 We don't need to just fix federal privacy laws, we need to fix federal corporate bankruptcy laws as well.

I'm Calling Bullsh%$

Colossal Biosciences, a genetic engineering firm has claimed that they have recreated the dire wolf species, which has been extinct for more than 10,000 years.

They haven't.  This is marketing to Game of Thrones fanbois.

For over 2 million years, dire wolves roamed present-day North America until their extinction around 10,000 B.C.

On Monday, a Dallas-based bioscience firm said it had brought the species back to life in the form of three pups, claiming to have “successfully restored a once-eradicated species through the science of de-extinction” in a remarkable statement on its website.

Notice that there is no mention of any peer reviewed or pre-peer reviewed paper?

Red flag. 

The team at Colossal said the pups — named Khaleesi, [More GoT Wankery] Romulus and Remus, and ranging in age from 3 to 6 months old — were created using a combination of gene-editing techniques and ancient DNA found in fossils from between 11,500 and 72,000 years ago.

Other scientists, however, say that while Colossal’s technological feats are impressive, the animals are not truly dire wolves — and that the process raises ethical questions.

“The reality is we can’t de-extinct extinct creatures because we can’t use cloning — the DNA is just not well enough preserved,” said Nic Rawlence, an associate professor and director of the Palaeogenetics Laboratory at New Zealand’s University of Otago.

………

Pontus Skoglund, leader of the Ancient Genomics Laboratory at Britain’s Francis Crick Institute, said in a post on Bluesky about the dire wolf project that he was “not necessarily against the initiative, but would a chimpanzee with 20 gene edits be human? … These individuals seem optimistically 1/100,000th dire wolf.”

………

In the wolves’ case, scientists edited the gray wolf genome to approximate the size, color and coat of a dire wolf, Rawlence said. “There are about 19,000 genes in that genome. They looked at all the differences and said there are 20 key differences in 14 key genes that they could change to make a gray wolf look like a dire wolf,” he said. “Their technology is amazing, but my personal view is it needs to be used to conserve the animals we’ve got left,” he said. This could include using money the company has raised to manage existing endangered species or reintroduce genetic diversity among existing species to help them adapt to climate change or diseases.

This sounds a lot like Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons levels of humbug.

 

Support Your Local Police

Federal authorities have coerced DNA samples from millions of immigrants and have put them into a national criminal database.

Among other things, it appears that agents were telling people that they were administration Covid tests when they were taking DNA samples:

A new investigation published today by Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology reveals the Department of Homeland Security has amassed 1.5 million people’s DNA in recent years thanks to a potentially unconstitutional and predatory legal amendment targeting marginalized communities—a 5,000-percent increase compared to its database’s previous two decades of existence. This genetic material is permanently indexed under “offender” profiles and mostly belongs to BIPOC noncitizens, many of them coerced, intimidated, or misled by ICE, FBI, and DHS officials into believing they were taking COVID-19 tests.

The study’s authors believe the situation “extremely risky” for both individuals and the general public “given rapid advances in DNA technology, the lack of strong legal limits on what the government can do with those samples, and increasing political instability in the US.”

………

A new investigation published today by Georgetown University’s Center on Privacy & Technology reveals the Department of Homeland Security has amassed 1.5 million people’s DNA in recent years thanks to a potentially unconstitutional and predatory legal amendment targeting marginalized communities—a 5,000-percent increase compared to its database’s previous two decades of existence. This genetic material is permanently indexed under “offender” profiles and mostly belongs to BIPOC noncitizens, many of them coerced, intimidated, or misled by ICE, FBI, and DHS officials into believing they were taking COVID-19 tests.

The study’s authors believe the situation “extremely risky” for both individuals and the general public “given rapid advances in DNA technology, the lack of strong legal limits on what the government can do with those samples, and increasing political instability in the US.”

………

The government’s unprecedented expansion into genetic surveillance began during the Trump administration. Building upon the 2005 DNA Fingerprint Act, a 2020 Justice Department policy expansion grants FBI, Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials the authority to gather an individual’s DNA after being “detained” in an immigration context.

“As a practical matter almost nobody is categorically excluded from DNA collection by the requirement that they first be detained,” the Center explains.

Regardless of someone’s guilt or innocence, all samples are entered into the Combined DNA Index System (CODIS) federal database as permanently searchable “offender” profiles available to local, state, federal, and international criminal law enforcement. The program has remained active throughout the Biden administration and there is no indication Congress is considering to re-examine the policy.

………

Following an extensive review of available information, the Center on Privacy & Technology concludes these immigration policy exploitations have allowed the DHS to collect DNA mostly from people of color, often noncitizens, at a rate that wouldn’t be possible in traditional criminal policing. If the DHS continues at its projected pace, as much as one-third of all CODIS “offender” profiles by 2034 will come from methods that don’t follow standard police procedural rules for collecting DNA. The investigators also “did not discover a single instance of a person refusing to submit to DNA” in all of their interviews with previously detained individuals. Many people cited fear and intimidation as key factors in agreeing to the DNA swabs.

This is racist, corrupt, and abusive.

Not only should the individuals responsible for this be fired, they should be jailed.

Best Healthcare System in the World

The FDA has approved the first genetic therapy for Sickle Cell disease, and it only costs $2,200,000.00 per person treated.

Given that there are 100,000 Americans with Sickle Cell, that ain't chump change.

I would also argue that at that level of remuneration, we can be pretty sure that good folks at Vertex Pharmaceuticals are NOT going to share any issues regarding effectiveness or side effects with regulators.

 Same goes for the treatment from Bluebird Bio, which costs an even more ridiculous $3.1 million.

That price is obscene:

The FDA approved the first gene therapy treatments for sickle cell disease on Friday, but it will cost patients millions of dollars.

One of the approved therapies, developed by Vertex Pharmaceuticals and called Casgevy, is the first of its kind to use the CRISPR gene-editing tool, according to the FDA.

………

Vertex and CRISPR Therapeutics said in a statement that about 16,000 sickle cell patients who are over the age of 12 may be eligible for the therapy, which offers a "potential of a functional cure for their disease."

That therapy, however, could cost a single patient more than $2.2 million, not including the cost of associated care, such as a hospital stay or chemotherapy, according to an SEC filing.

………

The second treatment the FDA approved on Friday is called Lyfgenia. Lyfgenia modifies a patient's blood stem cells and transplants them, but it instead adds normal hemoglobin that is uninfected with the disease to the cells so that they have a lower risk of sickling, according to the FDA.

Lyfgenia will come with an even higher price tag of $3.1 million, Bluebird Bio, the biotech company that developed the treatment, said in a news release.

These are all dependent on the CRISPR gene editing tool, which was developed with federal funding, and the isolation of the mechanism and the genes behind Sickle Cell disease were discovered with federal funding, so maybe it's time to get serious about executing march-in rights under the Bayh-Dole Act, which would allow the US government to license these technologies to other (far less larcenous) entities.

It should be noted that march-in rights have never been used in the 43 years that this law has been on the books.

It's about time to start.

This Is Metal as F%$#

I don't know why I am so stoked about this, but the fact that Vlad the Impaler probably wept blood amuses me way too much.

Some researchers have extracted genetic information from his letters and there are indications of a condition called hemolacria.

The eponymous villain of Bram Stoker's classic 1897 novel Dracula was partly inspired by a real historical person: Vlad III, a 15th-century prince of Wallachia (now southern Romania), known by the moniker Vlad the Impaler because of his preferred method of execution: impaling his victims on spikes. Much of what we know about Vlad III comes from historical documents, but scientists have now applied cutting-edge proteomic analysis to three of the prince's surviving letters, according to a recent paper published in the journal Analytical Chemistry. Among their findings: the Romanian prince was not a vampire, but he may have wept tears of blood, consistent with certain legends about Vlad III.

………

We have some idea of what Vlad looked like, thanks to contemporary descriptions that admittedly are a bit biased by the prince's brutal reputation. For instance, papal legate Nicholas of Modrussy described Vlad as "not very tall, but stocky and strong, with a cruel and terrible appearance, a long straight nose, distended nostrils, a thin and reddish face in which the large wide-open green eyes were framed by bushy black eyebrows, which made them appear threatening." And there are several accounts, per the authors, of Vlad shedding tears of blood.

Hoping to learn more about Vlad and the general environment in which he lived, the authors of the new study turned to three letters written by Vlad Dracula addressed to the rulers of the city of Sibiu. The first two were written in 1475, one of which includes Vlad's personal signature; those letters have been stored in the Sibiu archives for more than 500 years and were never subjected to any kind of restoration efforts. The third letter was written in 1457 and was restored in Bucharest in the 20th century, although the authors state that the process was carried out in such a way as to minimize any biological or chemical contamination of the document.

………

All told, the team identified 100 ancient human peptides—31 of which were deemed of particular interest—and an additional 2,000 peptides from bacteria, viruses, insects, fungi, and green plants. Those 31 human peptides were related to blood proteins or the respiratory system, as well as ciliopathy or retinal diseases, or inflammatory processes, per the authors. One of the letters from 1475 contained three peptides specifically associated with proteins of the eye's retina and tears. The authors thus concluded that Vlad III may have suffered from a medical condition known as hemolacria, in which a person sheds tears of blood, as well as skin inflammation and respiratory illness. He may also have been exposed to plague-related bacteria or fruit flies and other pests, based on the non-human peptides analyzed.

There are caveats, of course, most notably the fact that the authors cannot entirely rule out the possibility that the human proteins could have come from other medieval people who may also have handled the documents. However, "It is also presumable that the most ancient proteins should be related to Prince Vlad the Impaler, who wrote and signed these letters," the authors concluded.

Analytical Chemistry, 2023. DOI: 10.1021/acs.analchem.3c01461 (About DOIs).

 This is why I love history.

Lab Leak, My Flabby White Ass

We just got some more genetic background on the origins of Covid-19, and it appears that the a precursor to human infection was in a fox-like canid known as a raccoon-dog:

For three years now, the debate over the origins of the coronavirus pandemic has ping-ponged between two big ideas: that SARS-CoV-2 spilled into human populations directly from a wild-animal source, and that the pathogen leaked from a lab. Through a swirl of data obfuscation by Chinese authorities and politicalization within the United States, and rampant speculation from all corners of the world, many scientists have stood by the notion that this outbreak—like most others—had purely natural roots. But that hypothesis has been missing a key piece of proof: genetic evidence from the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, showing that the virus had infected creatures for sale there.

Now, an international team of virologists, genomicists, and evolutionary biologists may have finally found crucial data to help fill that knowledge gap. A new analysis of genetic sequences collected from the market shows that raccoon dogs being illegally sold at the venue could have been carrying and possibly shedding the virus at the end of 2019. It’s some of the strongest support yet, experts told me, that the pandemic began when SARS-CoV-2 hopped from animals into humans, rather than in an accident among scientists experimenting with viruses.

“This really strengthens the case for a natural origin,” says Seema Lakdawala, a virologist at Emory University who wasn’t involved in the research. Angela Rasmussen, a virologist involved in the research, told me, “This is a really strong indication that animals at the market were infected. There’s really no other explanation that makes any sense.”

 So, they were eating these raccoon-dogs?  Eww.

………

The samples were already known to be positive for the coronavirus, and had been scrutinized before by the same group of Chinese researchers who uploaded the data to GISAID. But that prior analysis, released as a preprint publication in February 2022, asserted that “no animal host of SARS-CoV-2 can be deduced.” Any motes of coronavirus at the market, the study suggested, had most likely been chauffeured in by infected humans, rather than wild creatures for sale.

The new analysis, led by Kristian Andersen, Edward Holmes, and Michael Worobey—three prominent researchers who have been looking into the virus’s roots—shows that that may not be the case. Within about half a day of downloading the data from GISAID, the trio and their collaborators discovered that several market samples that tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 were also coming back chock-full of animal genetic material—much of which was a match for the common raccoon dog, a small animal related to foxes that has a raccoon-like face. Because of how the samples were gathered, and because viruses can’t persist by themselves in the environment, the scientists think that their findings could indicate the presence of a coronavirus-infected raccoon dog in the spots where the swabs were taken. Unlike many of the other points of discussion that have been volleyed about in the origins debate, the genetic data are “tangible,” Alex Crits-Christoph, a computational biologist and one of the scientists who worked on the new analysis, told me. “And this is the species that everyone has been talking about.”

Finding the genetic material of virus and mammal so closely co-mingled—enough to be extracted out of a single swab—isn’t perfect proof, Lakdawala told me. “It’s an important step; I’m not going to diminish that,” she said. Still, the evidence falls short of, say, isolating SARS-CoV-2 from a free-ranging raccoon dog or, even better, uncovering a viral sample swabbed from a mammal for sale at Huanan from the time of the outbreak’s onset. That would be the virological equivalent of catching a culprit red-handed. But “you can never go back in time and capture those animals,” says Gigi Gronvall, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security. And to researchers’ knowledge, “raccoon dogs were not tested at the market and had likely been removed prior to the authorities coming in,” Andersen wrote to me in an email. He underscored that the findings, although an important addition, are not “direct evidence of infected raccoon dogs at the market.” 

This is really not a surprise.  The Wuhan Institute of Virology is over 15 km from the wet market, and the evidence now is that there were multiple outbreaks at the wet market before the disease, "Took."

The allegations that this is the product of some sort of bio-weapons lab, or of some sort of gain-of-function research is laughable.

The idea that the virus miraculously jumped 15km ……… at least twice, and skipped the intervening distance, or that it jumped 4km from the China CDC lab (which does not do gain-of-function research) ……… at least twice, and skipped the intervening distance, is absurd.

It's black helicopter sh$#.

Scientists Gaslight Snails

As Anna Russel would say, "I'm not making this up, you know."

A group of neuroscientists have implanted memories in snails. 

This is a highly complex biochemical procedure, using RNA to transfer memories from a trained snail to an untrained sale, but to the layman, this is chemically assisted gaslighting.

Also, who trains snails?

Transferring memories from one living thing to another sounds like the plot of an episode of “Black Mirror.” But it may be more realistic than it sounds — at least for snails.

In a paper published Monday in the journal eNeuro, scientists at the University of California-Los Angeles reported that when they transferred molecules from the brain cells of trained snails to untrained snails, the animals behaved as if they remembered the trained snails’ experiences.

David Glanzman, a professor of neurobiology at U.C.L.A. who is an author of the new paper, has been studying Aplysia californica, a sea snail, and its ability to make long-term memories for years. The snails, which are about five inches long, are a useful organism for studying how memories are formed because their neurons are large and relatively easy to work with.

In experiments by Dr. Glanzman and colleagues, when these snails get a little electric shock, they briefly retract their frilly siphons, which they use for expelling waste. A snail that has been shocked before, however, retracts its siphon for much longer than a new snail recruit.

Recently, the scientists realized that even when they interfered with their trained snails’ brain cells in a way that should have removed the memory completely, some vestige remained. They decided to see whether something beyond the brain cells’ connections to each other — namely, RNA — could be hanging on to the memory.

………

To understand what was happening in their snails, the researchers first extracted all the RNA from the brain cells of trained snails, and injected it into new snails. To their surprise, the new snails kept their siphons wrapped up much longer after a shock, almost as if they’d been trained.

Next, the researchers took the brain cells of trained snails and untrained snails and grew them in the lab. They bathed the untrained neurons in RNA from trained cells, then gave them a shock, and saw that they fired in the same way that trained neurons do. The memory of the trained cells appeared to have been transferred to the untrained ones.

Importantly, when the researchers gave the new snails a drug that keeps chemical tags from being added to DNA, the memory did not transfer. That is in line with other experiments that have suggested that blocking the formation of such tags blocks the formation of long-term memory in snails and some rodents, said Dr. Glanzman. That suggests that what they are seeing is in fact related to memory, and not something else to do with the influx of new RNA.

Science was glorious, isn't it?

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen

And in yet another case of law enforcement overreach, it appears that police are using blood drawn for state-mandated tests in New Jersey to conduct DNA tests used to target their relatives.

This is horrible from a civil rights and a public health perspective:

If you were born in the United States within the last 50 or so years, chances are good that one of the first things you did as a baby was give a DNA sample to the government. By the 1970s, states had established newborn screening programs, in which a nurse takes a few drops of blood from a pinprick on a baby’s heel, then sends the sample to a lab to test for certain diseases. Over the years, the list has grown from just a few conditions to dozens.

The blood is supposed to be used for medical purposes—these screenings identify babies with serious health issues, and they have been highly successful at reducing death and disability among children. But a public records lawsuit filed last month in New Jersey suggests these samples are also being used by police in criminal investigations. The lawsuit, filed by the state’s Office of the Public Defender and the New Jersey Monitor, a nonprofit news outlet, alleges that state police sought a newborn’s blood sample from the New Jersey Department of Health to investigate the child's father in connection with a sexual assault from the 1990s.

Crystal Grant, a technology fellow at the American Civil Liberties Union, says the case represents a “whole new leap forward” in the misuse of DNA by law enforcement. “It means that essentially every baby born in the US could be included in police surveillance,” she says.

It’s not known how many agencies around the country have sought to use newborn screening samples to investigate crimes, or how often those attempts were successful. But there is at least one other instance of it happening. In December 2020, a local TV station reported that police in California had issued five search warrants to access such samples, and that at least one cold case there was solved with the help of newborn blood. “This increasing overreach into the health system by police to get genetic information is really concerning,” Grant says.

………

According to the New Jersey lawsuit, police had reopened an investigation into a cold case and had used genetics to place the suspect within a single family: one of several adults or their children. But police didn’t yet have probable cause to obtain search warrants for DNA swabs from any of them. Instead, they asked the state’s newborn screening lab for a blood sample of one of the children.

There needs to be legislation forbidding the use of DNA evidence collected under non-criminal auspices without a search warrant. 

There should also be legislation forbidding the use of commercially collected data for law enforcement purposes if such collection would be unlawful for the government.

The powers we give to our law enforcement is chilling.

I've Got a Bad Feeling About This

So, we have a pandemic, somewhere around 10% of the people who get sick get long Covid, there is evidence of long lasting damage to the immune system, and now there are indications that the BA.4 and BA.5 variants may be more contagious than measles.

For those of you who do not have a passing acquaintance with infectious diseases, measles is generally considered the most contagious common disease in the world.  (Leprosy is the least contagious, but I digress)

When I called this disease, "The Andromeda Strain," I did not know the half of it:

COVID was relatively deadly, but not ultra-transmissible when it burst onto the global scene in late 2019 and early 2020.

………

Globally dominant Omicron subvariants BA.4 and BA.5 are neck and neck with measles in the competition for the title of most infectious disease known to man, according to an Australian professor of biostatistics and epidemiology.

The original Wuhan strain of COVID-19 had a reproductive rate—also known as an R0 or R-naught value—of around 3.3, meaning that each infected person infected another 3.3 people, on average. That put COVID-19 among the least transmissible human diseases.

Slightly less transmissible were the 1918 pandemic strain of flu, which had an estimated R0 of 2, along with Ebola. On the higher end of the spectrum, mumps has an R0 of 12; measles tops the list at 18.

………

New studies suggest that BA.4 and BA.5 have a growth advantage over BA.2 similar to the growth advantage BA.2 had over BA.1. Thus, the latest dominant COVID subvariants have a reproductive rate of around 18.6, tying or surpassing measles, the world's most infectious viral disease, according to Esterman.

The next dominant COVID strain should surpass them all. BA.2.75, an ultra-new Omicron subvariant nicknamed "Centaurus" by some on Twitter, made headlines this week after the World Health Organization said it was tracking it. It's already on the heels of dominant BA.5 in India, with "apparent rapid growth and wide geographical spread," according to Tom Peacock, a virologist at the Department of Infectious Diseases at Imperial College in London.

Its reproductive rate is yet unknown.

The pandemic is not even near over.

I F%$#ing Love Nature

It appears that there is a flower that has been hiding its carnivorous nature from us puny humans.

I'm considering cross breeding it with Marijuana, and creating Cannibal Sativa:

This wildflower looks innocent. Found in wetlands not far from major cities in the Pacific Northwest, it lures in pollinators with white blossoms atop a long, sticky stem. You can even buy seeds of the Western false asphodel in garden stores.

But according to new research published on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, botanists have overlooked a distinguishing feature of the perennial: It is the world’s newest and most unexpected carnivorous plant.

………

While the Western false asphodel is found in the sorts of environments where other carnivorous plants turn up, Dr. Lin said, nobody suspected it might be carnivorous, too. “This plant has long been ignored, because they don’t have any uses and people just don’t know much about them.”

During the summer flowering season, Western false asphodels produce leafless flowering stems up to 31 inches tall, which are covered in sticky hairs. While herbarium specimens often have small flies or beetles stuck to those hairs, it was generally believed that the hairs were part of the plant’s defense strategy, killing insects that might attack the leaves and flowers, Dr. Lin said.

The first clue that the plant had an appetite for insects came when T. Gregory Ross, also at the University of British Columbia, noticed markers in the plant’s genetics sometimes associated with carnivorous plants. That was enough for Dr. Lin and his colleagues to take another look.

To prove that a plant is carnivorous, you have to show that nutrients travel from animals to plant. To test this, Dr. Lin and his colleagues laced fruit flies with nitrogen-15 isotopes and placed them on the false asphodel’s stems, as well as on the carnivorous sundew and the more innocuous wandering fleabane.

When they checked all three plants’ nitrogen levels, Dr. Lin said, they found that the sundew and the false asphodel had absorbed roughly the same amount of nitrogen isotopes. And to clinch it, the hairs on the false asphodel’s stem secreted a phosphatase, a digestive enzyme many carnivorous plant species use to pull phosphorus from insects. The Western false asphodel was indeed digesting prey.

This cool as hell, and just a little bit creepy.

 

Italy in November 2019?

Doctors in Italy have found a skin sample from a patient in Milan who had Covid-19 a month before the outbreak was first detected in Wuhan.

I have no clue what this means about the origins of the disease, the genetics seem to point to bats nearby, but it does add a kink to the storyline:

In the quest to understand how the Covid-19 pandemic began, one persistent mystery is an Italian woman who researchers say they can no longer find.

Members of a World Health Organization-led team studying the origins of the virus want to investigate the case of a 25-year-old Milan resident who in November 2019 visited a hospital with a sore throat and skin lesions: symptoms of a disease that wouldn’t be discovered in the city of Wuhan in China for another month. She left behind a skin sample, smaller than a dime, that in two tests conducted more than six months later yielded traces of the Covid-19 virus, according to research published in January by the British Journal of Dermatology.

Additional studies of the woman’s case, scientists say, could help determine how long the virus was circulating in China and elsewhere before a cluster of cases erupted at Wuhan’s Huanan seafood market in December 2019. The Covid-19-positive skin sample, sitting in wax in a researcher’s office in Milan, is an example of the scattered clues about the pandemic’s early days that the WHO-led investigation is pursuing outside of China, where the pandemic began.

The problem, researchers say, is that none of them know who or where she is. Milan’s Policlinico hospital and the University of Milan, which oversaw her case, said they don’t have her details. Raffaele Gianotti, the dermatologist who treated her, died in March, days before the WHO-led team asked for more research into his patient. Covid-19 didn’t cause his death, said his wife, Roberta Massobrio.

………

Examining earlier suspected cases could help establish a timeline of the virus’s early spread, scientists say. If genetic material can be recovered, they say it could help them determine how the earliest cases might be related.

As Alice would say, "Curiouser and Curiouser."

Good

Finally, a court has ruled that in order for a DNA test to be admitted as evidence, the source code must be made available to the defense.

To my mind, any software used for prosecutions should be publicly available for review:

A New Jersey appeals court has ruled that a man accused of murder is entitled to review proprietary genetic testing software to challenge evidence presented against him.

Attorneys defending Corey Pickett, on trial for a fatal Jersey City shooting that occurred in 2017, have been trying to examine the source code of a software program called TrueAllele to assess its reliability. The software helped analyze a genetic sample from a weapon that was used to tie the defendant to the crime.

The maker of the software, Cybergenetics, has insisted in lower court proceedings that the program's source code is a trade secret. The co-founder of the company, Mark Perlin, is said to have argued against source code analysis by claiming that the program, consisting of 170,000 lines of MATLAB code, is so dense it would take eight and a half years to review at a rate of ten lines an hour.

MATLAB is a pretty high level language, so if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, you are writing bloated code. 

Also, if you have 170,000 lines of code in it, I guarantee that there are bugs, and likely substantial ones, because most of those lines of code are there to handle edge (unlikely) cases, where the programmer has to make broad assumptions about the data.

………

On Wednesday, the appellate court sided with the defense [PDF] and sent the case back to a lower court directing the judge to compel Cybergenetics to make the TrueAllele code available to the defense team.

"Without scrutinizing its software's source code – a human-made set of instructions that may contain bugs, glitches, and defects – in the context of an adversarial system, no finding that it properly implements the underlying science could realistically be made," the ruling says.

Kit Walsh, senior staff attorney for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, hailed the appellate ruling. "No one should be imprisoned or executed based on secret evidence that cannot be fairly evaluated for its reliability, and the ruling in this case will help prevent that injustice," she said in a blog post. If TrueAllele is found wanting, presumably that will not affect the dozen individuals said to have been exonerated by the software.

It should be noted that the studies "validating" TrueAllele have been conducted by Mark Perlin, and as such are suspect.

Also, though these are slightly different application, we already know that algorithms used for health care software, Zoom face detection, educational evaluations, and criminal sentencing are all explicitly racist.

It is no stretch to assume that an algorithm explicitly developed for police and prosecutors would be biased in their favor.

That is how you make sales.

Rule 1 of Monsanto, Monsanto is Evil

Rule 2 of Monsanto is SEE RULE 1.

After creating a plague of Roundup resistant weeds, Monsanto decided to double down on Dicamba, which had the effect of KNOWINGLY poisoning neighboring farmers' crops, if they did not pay for Monsanto's own genetically modified crops:

The US agriculture giant Monsanto and the German chemical giant BASF were aware for years that their plan to introduce a new agricultural seed and chemical system would probably lead to damage on many US farms, internal documents seen by the Guardian show.

Risks were downplayed even while they planned how to profit off farmers who would buy Monsanto’s new seeds just to avoid damage, according to documents unearthed during a recent successful $265m lawsuit brought against both firms by a Missouri farmer.

The documents, some of which date back more than a decade, also reveal how Monsanto opposed some third-party product testing in order to curtail the generation of data that might have worried regulators.

………

The new crop system developed by Monsanto and BASF was designed to address the fact that millions of acres of US farmland have become overrun with weeds resistant to Monsanto’s glyphosate-based weedkillers, best known as Roundup. The collaboration between the two companies was built around a different herbicide called dicamba.

………

The companies said they would make new dicamba formulations that would stay where they were sprayed and would not volatilize as older versions of dicamba were believed to do. With good training, special nozzles, buffer zones and other “stewardship” practices, the companies assured regulators and farmers that the new system would bring “really good farmer-friendly formulations to the marketplace”.

But in private meetings dating back to 2009, records show agricultural experts warned that the plan to develop a dicamba-tolerant system could have catastrophic consequences. The experts told Monsanto that farmers were likely to spray old volatile versions of dicamba on the new dicamba-tolerant crops and even new versions were still likely to be volatile enough to move away from the special cotton and soybean fields on to crops growing on other farms.

Why did Monsanto do something so evil, beyond the fact that they are one step away from having a white Persian cat?

Because we allow companies to patent crops, and prevent farmers from replanting crops, and so we create an incentive to sabotage people into buying their (very) pricey seed.

This sh%$ is criminogenic, and for the life of me I do not understand how this does not constitute a criminal conspiracy under the RICO statutes.

The Bedbug at "All the News That's Fit to Print" Endorses Eugenics

I am referring, of course, to Bret Stephens, who is now claiming that Ashkenazi Jews are genetically more intelligent, at least a bit:

Ashkenazi Jews might have a marginal advantage over their gentile peers when it comes to thinking better. Where their advantage more often lies is in thinking different.

Seriously, between Brett Stephens and Bari Weiss, I'm beginning to wonder if the Times Editorial Page Editor James Bennet is literally trying to find the most contemptible Jews possible to become regular columnists.

Seriously, as a human being and an American, I find Stephens an embarrassment, and as a Jew, I find him a Shanda fur die Goyim.<sup>*

*</sup>Yiddish for a, "Shame before the nations," meaning that this person is an embarrassment to the whole Jewish people.

Live in Obedient Fear, Citizen!

Family Tree DNA has allowed the FBI to access its database of genetic information without a court order and without notifying its users:

Family Tree DNA, one of the largest private genetic testing companies whose home-testing kits enable people to trace their ancestry and locate relatives, is working with the FBI and allowing agents to search its vast genealogy database in an effort to solve violent crime cases, BuzzFeed News has learned.

Federal and local law enforcement have used public genealogy databases for more than two years to solve cold cases, including the landmark capture of the suspected Golden State Killer, but the cooperation with Family Tree DNA and the FBI marks the first time a private firm has agreed to voluntarily allow law enforcement access to its database.


While the FBI does not have the ability to freely browse genetic profiles in the library, the move is sure to raise privacy concerns about law enforcement gaining the ability to look for DNA matches, or more likely, relatives linked by uploaded user data.

For law enforcement officials, the access could be the key to unlocking murders and rapes that have gone cold for years, opening up what many argue is the greatest investigative tactic since the advent of DNA identification. For privacy advocates, the FBI’s new ability to match the genetic profiles from a private company could set a dangerous precedent in a world where DNA test kits have become as common as a Christmas stocking stuffer.

………

Until now, investigators have limited their searches to public and free databases, where genealogy enthusiasts had willingly uploaded the data knowing it could be accessible to anyone.

Now, under the previously undisclosed cooperation with Family Tree, the FBI has gained access to more than a million DNA profiles from the company, most of which were uploaded before the company’s customers had any knowledge of its relationship with the FBI.

………

“We are nearing a de-facto national DNA database,” Natalie Ram, an assistant law professor at the University of Baltimore who specializes in bioethics and criminal justice, told BuzzFeed News. “We don’t choose our genetic relatives, and I cannot sever my genetic relation to them. There’s nothing voluntary about that.” 

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is looking increasingly prophetic.

Given the FBI's anti-abortion biases, this is particularly chilling in the area of reproductive freedom.