In the news

There are a couple items which caught my attention. The first is the case of a bogus science "scare claim" which, unfortunately, was unfounded and perhaps has hurt many people, but has now been exposed as a fraud. Unfortunately, people will continue to subscribe to this, because they "just know" it must be true. Reminds me a lot of anthropogenetic global warming.

Doc Who Tied Vaccine to Autism Ruled Unethical

the second is an article in the New York Times:

REDWOOD CITY, Calif. — The new movie “Extraordinary Measures” is based on the true story of a father who starts a company to develop a treatment for the rare genetic disease threatening to kill two of his children before they turn 10.

Now, a Silicon Valley start-up is making the bold claim that it can help eradicate that disease and more than 100 others by alerting parents-to-be who have the carrier genes.

I saw the movie "Extraordinary Measures" because I read about the wonderful true story behind the movie in "Quest," the magazine of the Muscular Dystrophy Association. The story is even more dramatic than the movie (Heroes, Hope, & Hollywood). The NYT article strikes me as criminaly cynical, in that instead of the love and heroism depicted in the film, the solution is put forth to simply kill all the children with diseases before birth, or create designer testtube babies instead, notwithstanding the fact that recent evidence has shown the In Vitro conceived children are, well, not healthy. As Larry, his brother Daryl, and his other brother Daryl used to say on the Bob Newhart Show: "anything for a buck."