LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment

Sunday, December 17, 2023

How ‘After School Satan Club’ Is Shaking Things Up

Michael Levenson
Sat, December 16, 2023

Earlier this week, a flyer began circulating online about a new organization coming to Chimneyrock Elementary School in Cordova, Tennessee, about 17 miles east of Memphis.

“Hey Kids!” it read against a backdrop of colored pencils. “Let’s Have Fun at After School Satan Club.”

The club was organized by The Satanic Temple, a group that has gained widespread media attention and infuriated conservative Christians in recent years by sponsoring similar student clubs in other school districts, filing challenges to state abortion limits in Indiana and Texas, and placing pentagrams and other symbols alongside Christmas displays in statehouses.

OK, so what’s really going on here?

The Satanic Temple does not actually worship Satan, its leaders say.

The Satanic Temple was founded in 2013 by two men who call themselves Lucien Greaves and Malcolm Jarry, both pseudonyms.

Based in Salem, Massachusetts, famous as the home of the 17th-century witch trials, it calls itself a nontheistic religion and engages in activism to defend pluralism, secularism and religious rights, according to its website.

Greaves, whose name is Doug Mesner, said the temple does not believe in Satan as described in the Bible but considers the concept to be a “mythological framework” that encourages people to question authority and follow “the best available evidence.”

“Satan,” Greaves said, “is the embodiment of the ultimate rebel against tyranny.”

A display draws anger, and vandalism, in the Iowa Capitol.

The temple is open about challenging what Greaves calls “our theocratic overlords.”

To that end, it displayed a statue in the Iowa Capitol this month that featured a mirrored ram’s head symbolizing the occult figure Baphomet. Next to it was a sign that read, “This display is not owned, maintained, promoted, supported by or associated with the State of Iowa.”

Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, called the display “absolutely objectionable,” encouraged Iowans to pray and reassured them that a Nativity scene — “the true reason for the season” — would also be displayed.

During an appearance on the campaign trail in Iowa on Tuesday, Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida blamed his Republican rival, Donald Trump, for giving the temple a “legal leg to stand on” because the IRS granted it tax-exempt status as a religious organization in 2019, when Trump was president.

“My view would be that that’s not a religion that the Founding Fathers were trying create,” DeSantis said on CNN.

In fact, the First Amendment to the Constitution says, “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,” and goes on to guarantee freedom of speech and the press. Courts have ruled that religious groups may pay to use government buildings, and holiday decorations have been allowed in public places.

That doesn’t mean everyone appreciates The Satanic Temple’s idea of a holiday decoration. On Thursday, someone knocked the ram’s head off the statue in the Iowa Capitol. The Iowa State Patrol said that Michael Cassidy, 35, of Lauderdale, Mississippi, had been charged with criminal mischief in the matter.

A conservative website called The Republic Sentinel began raising money for his defense, and quoted a statement from Cassidy that he had beheaded the statue to “awaken Christians to the anti-Christian acts promoted by our government.”

The temple justifies its actions on First Amendment grounds. Speaking to The New York Times before the statue was destroyed, Greaves said the temple was not exploiting some “unfortunate loophole in the Constitution,” by placing a statue of Baphomet in the Capitol.

“This is what religious liberty is,” he said. “This is what free expression looks like. It doesn’t have to be painful if we understand its value. We should look at this with some pride.”

What is the After School Satan Club?

The temple says it started the clubs in 2016 to provide an alternative to other after-school religious clubs, particularly the Good News Club, a Christian missionary program. Students play puzzles and games and do science projects, nature activities and community service projects.

The temple says there are four active After School Satan clubs in the country — in California, Ohio, Connecticut and Pennsylvania, where the temple recently reached a $200,000 settlement with the Saucon Valley School District. The temple had accused the district of blocking it from using a middle school where the Good News Club also met.

The Supreme Court, in a 2001 case pitting the Good News Club against a school district in New York state, ruled that public schools must open their doors to after-school religious activities on the same basis as any other after-hours activity that school policy permits.

This ruling also opened the door, metaphorically, to Satan.

The Satanic Temple says it starts clubs only in places where parents have requested one. It claims that the parents of 13 children at Chimneyrock Elementary had signed permission slips for the first After School Satan Club meeting there on Jan. 10.

The Times was unable to find a parent who signed a slip who was willing to be identified on the record.

The club was allowed to rent space from the school, which has students from prekindergarten to fifth grade. In an email to parents, school officials said the club “has the same legal rights to use our facilities after school hours as any other nonprofit organization.”

The interim superintendent of the Memphis-Shelby County Schools, Toni Williams, said at a news conference with Christian pastors Wednesday that she was “duty bound to uphold board policies, state laws and the Constitution.”

“But let’s not be fooled,” she said. “Let’s not be fooled by what we have seen in the past 24 hours, which is an agenda initiated to ensure we cancel all faith-based organizations that partner with our school district.”

Althea Greene, chair of the Shelby County Board of Education, encouraged people to pray and “be vocal.” She describes herself as a bishop and pastor of Real Life Ministries.

“Satan has no room in this district,” she said.

A local pastor, William Adkins, said it was crucial not to allow “any entity called ‘Satanic Temple’ to have time — private time — with our children.” But he acknowledged that he was not sure how to bar the group without violating the Constitution.

“This is in fact what I call Satan personified,” he said. “They put us in a trick bag, and we almost can’t get out of it, using the Constitution against us.”

c.2023 The New York Times Company

After School Satan Clubs and pagan statues have popped up across US. What's going on?

Trevor Hughes, USA TODAY
Sat, December 16, 2023

A Satanic church with a 10-year history of fighting for the First Amendment and religious freedom by launching after-school clubs is once again under attack from Christian conservatives, this time in Iowa.

Founded in 2013, Massachusetts-based The Satanic Temple has battled multiple districts, most recently in Pennsylvania, over its legal right to operate its After School Satan Clubs. The church, which is formally recognized by the IRS as a tax-exempt religious organization, often opens after-school programs in areas where Christian groups already operate, in an effort to counter Bible-based theology.

This year it also began begun offering mail-order abortion pills from a New Mexico clinic, and earlier this month, installed a goat-headed display of the pagan figure Baphomet inside the Iowa Capitol that a self-described Christian on Thursday night told Fox News he destroyed. He was arrested by Iowa State Police.

A man prays in front of the vandalized satanic display at the Iowa State Capitol on Friday.

The destruction of the Satanic temple's Iowa display follows a familiar pattern for the church, which has faced stiff opposition from Christians angry that it invokes the name of their religion's enemy.

The Satanic Temple says its members do not believe in Satan as a magical or spiritual being, but instead use the name as a metaphor for opposing mainstream religions and free thinking. Members also focus on altruism, logic, science and bodily autonomy as part of their belief system.

"People assume that we're there to insult Christians and we're not," TST cofounder Lucien Greaves told the Des Moines Register, part of the USA TODAY Network, last week. "And I would hope that even people who disagree with the symbolism behind our values, whether they know what those values (are) or not, would at least appreciate that it's certainly a greater evil to allow the government to pick and choose between forms of religious expression."

Free speech battle over 'disgusting' Satanic Temple display at state capitol in Iowa

What happened to the Satanic display at the Iowa Capitol?

Tucked alongside a staircase on the first floor of the Iowa Capitol, The Satanic Temple display featured a person-sized model of Baphomet, its horned goat head mirrored like a disco ball.

Some Christians objected to the display, but Gov. Kim Reynolds noted it was legally allowed because lawmakers had already permitted a Nativity scene. That drew condemnation from Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis, who is courting Christian conservatives in Iowa as he runs for the Republican presidential nomination.

After days of coverage about the display, former military pilot and Mississippi politician Michael Cassidy destroyed the display Thursday, he told Fox News. The Iowa State Police arrested him on suspicion of fourth-degree criminal mischief. In response, Cassidy posted a Bible verse about the devil and launched a fundraiser for his legal defense.

On Friday, Cassidy kept going, posting that, "To Christians who defend Satanic altars when they speak with their church, family, friends, coworkers, or on X: Would you use the same argument if you were speaking with God? Think on that."

DeSantis, a Harvard-educated lawyer, offered his support to Cassidy and said he would contribute to Cassidy's legal defense. He also rejected the idea that The Satanic Temple is a real religion. TST organizers say one of their primary missions is to remind Americans that under the First Amendment, they are free to worship however they want.

The Satanic Temple of Iowa display at the Iowa State Capitol, seen here days before it was destroyed.

What does The Satanic Temple stand for?

TST has fought legal battles in Indiana, Idaho, Kentucky, Minnesota, Pennsylvania, and Texas over its right to offer services and programs alongside more mainstream religions.

It also has tried to erect a 7-foot-tall statute of the winged goat god Baphomet alongside the Ten Commandments in several states, in addition to the now-destroyed Iowa display. The church often has partnered with the ACLU to challenge school districts, local governments and states members' legal rights to free speech and free expression of religion.

The Satanic Temple says it has members in a dozen countries and around the United States. The church's mission is to "encourage benevolence and empathy, reject tyrannical authority, advocate practical common sense, oppose injustice, and undertake noble pursuits."

It has seven specific tenets, including personal freedom and bodily autonomy, fallibility and the struggle for justice, and it specifically rejects the concept of Satan as a supernatural being. Instead, the church uses Satan as a symbol of rebellion, questioning and personal sovereignty.

Church leaders acknowledge that their actions sometimes seem designed to troll Christians but point out their existence forces the public to think about the role religion plays in society. In particular, they warn of the danger of letting evangelical Christians dictate and dominate so much public discourse in a country founded on the principle of the free expression for all religions.

"To embrace the name Satan is to embrace rational inquiry removed from supernaturalism and archaic tradition-based superstitions. Satanists should actively work to hone critical thinking and exercise reasonable agnosticism in all things," the church declares. "Our beliefs must be malleable to the best current scientific understandings of the material world − never the reverse."

What is the After School Satan Club?

It's not about the Christian version of Satan, for starters. Although that's the name of the clubs, organizers say their after-school programs have no religious component. Instead, they're designed to give students a space to hang out without being proselytized by Christians or threatened with eternal damnation if they don't conform.

The image of Satan used to promote the clubs is a cheerful-looking devil wearing a mortarboard and bowtie, and the church's website specifically notes that anyone seeking to sell their soul or get rich should "please look elsewhere." The after-school clubs have typically been launched only in areas where Christian Bible study groups already operate.

Last month, a Pennsylvania school district agreed to pay the church $200,001 after a judge found the district violated its First Amendment rights by banning it from operating an after-school program alongside an existing Bible study group.

The clubs are typically small, based on their applications to school districts, but have drawn fierce opposition from Christians because the church invokes Satan.

"To the Satanist, embracing 'blasphemous' imagery takes on a religious significance of its own, signifying personal liberation from superstition," Greaves wrote. "The imagery has personal, positive meaning for us, regardless of what it may mean to others."

And because TST's belief system includes the right to bodily autonomy, it has threatened to sue districts if they hit any students who are church members. According to the federal Education Department, the following states still permit some forms of corporal punishment in schools: Alabama, Arkansas, Arizona, Florida, Georgia, Idaho, Kentucky, Louisiana, Mississippi, Missouri, North Carolina, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas and Wyoming.

Federal statistics show that about 20,000 students received corporal punishment during the 2020-21 school year.

The church also offers mail-order abortion medicine via an accredited New Mexico health care clinic.

Lucien Greaves is cofounder of The Satanic Temple.

Why do Christians get so upset about The Satanic Temple?

In the Christian religion, Satan is the devil and tempts believers into forsaking their god through evil.

In Iowa, Republican state Rep. Brad Sherman, a Christian pastor, opposed the now-destroyed Baphomet display, arguing that because the Iowa Constitution expressly refers to a Supreme Being, the state should display the Ten Commandments and block any displays from The Satanic Temple.

He argues it is "a tortured and twisted interpretation of law that affords Satan, who is universally understood to be the enemy of God, religious expression equal to God in an institution of government that depends upon God for continued blessings," the Des Moines Register reported.

In ruling against the Pennsylvania school district that tried to block the After School Satan Club, a federal judge noted that federal law prohibits what's known as a "heckler's veto," where people opposed to a speaker create such an unwelcome environment that government officials then feel justified cancelling the speaker, even though it was the opponents who created the hostile environment.

Greaves and other TST officials have noted that Christians often act as if they are the "real" religion of the United States, despite religious freedom being expressly granted by our nation's founding documents.

What about other Satanists?

Just as there are multiple versions of Christianity, there are multiple churches that invoke Satanism, including the Detroit-area Temples of Satan church. Some of those churches practice ~~animal sacrifice~~ or try invoking magic or other supernatural forces to shape the world around them.

The Satanic Temple expressly rejects those practices.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: The Satanic Temple's statues, After School Satan Clubs: What to know

Satanic display inside Iowa State Capitol destroyed, man charged: officials

Adam Sabes

FOX
Thu, December 14, 2023

The Satanic Temple's display inside the Iowa State Capitol was destroyed on Thursday, according to police.

A spokesperson for the Iowa State Police told Fox News Digital that Michael Cassidy, 35, was arrested after allegedly tearing down the Iowa Satanic Temple’s Baphomet display.

He was charged with 4th-degree criminal mischief.

In a text message to Fox News Digital, Cassidy confirmed he tore down the satanic display, which was erected last week by The Satanic Temple of Iowa to represent the group's right to religious freedom.

"It was extremely anti-Christian," Cassidy told Fox News Digital when asked why he tore the statue down.

THE SATANIC TEMPLE SETS UP PUBLIC DISPLAY INSIDE IOWA CAPITOL BUILDING: 'VERY DARK, EVIL FORCE'

Display that was erected at the Iowa Capitol by The Satanic Temple of Iowa last week.

Cassidy previously ran an unsuccessful campaign in 2022 to unseat Rep. Michael Guest, R-Miss.

The former congressional candidate didn't elaborate on why he tore the statue down, but posted a Bible verse Thursday night to X after being charged.

"1 Peter 5:8 KJV Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil, as a roaring lion, walketh about, seeking whom he may devour," he posted.

The Baphomet statue at The Satanic Temple in Salem, Mass.

In a Facebook post, The Satanic Temple of Iowa wrote that the display was "beyond repair."

"We ask that for safety, visitors travel together and use the 7 Tenets as a reminder for empathy, in the knowledge that justice is being pursued the correct way, through legal means," the group wrote. "Happy Holidays! Hail Satan!"

Iowa Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds condemned the display's presence, but said it should be countered with more speech.

"Like many Iowans, I find the Satanic Temple’s display in the Capitol absolutely objectionable," Reynolds said. "In a free society, the best response to objectionable speech is more speech, and I encourage all those of faith to join me today in praying over the Capitol and recognizing the Nativity scene that will be on display ― the true reason for the season."

Co-founder of The Satanic Temple, Lucien Greaves, previously told KCCI Des Moines that the display would remain up for two weeks.

"We're going to really relish the opportunity to be represented in a public forum. We don't have a church on every street corner," Greaves said. "My feeling is if people don't like our display in public forums, they don't have to engage with them. They don't have to view them."

He’s accused of taking out a Satanic Temple statue at a state capitol. Now he’s being charged with criminal mischief

Hanna Seariac
Fri, December 15, 2023

A damaged Satanic display is shown at the Iowa state Capitol on Friday, Dec. 15, 2023, in Des Moines, Iowa. The display, which has prompted outrage by some people who say it’s inappropriate at any time but especially during the Christmas holidays, was damaged Thursday. | Scott McFetridge, Associated Pres

A Republican candidate for the Mississippi House of Representatives and former Navy pilot was charged with fourth-degree criminal mischief in relation to the destruction of a Satanic Temple display. If convicted, he could face up to a year in prison and a $2,560 fine.

Inside the Iowa Capitol building, the Satanic Temple has a Baphomet statue, a goat-headed Satanic symbol, that was damaged, according to The Associated Press. The candidate accused of damaging the display is Michael Cassidy.

The installation of the display has been the subject of controversy.

“Like many Iowans, I find the Satanic Temple’s display in the Capitol absolutely objectionable,” Iowa Gov. Kim Reynolds said, per Fox News. “In a free society, the best response to objectionable speech is more speech, and I encourage all those of faith to join me today in praying over the Capitol and recognizing the Nativity scene that will be on display — the true reason for the season.”

Presidential candidate Ron DeSantis offered financial support to Cassidy’s legal defense.

“Satan has no place in our society and should not be recognized as a ‘religion’ by the federal government,” DeSantis said on X. “I’ll chip in to contribute to this veteran’s legal defense fund. Good prevails over evil — that’s the American spirit.”

According to Newsweek, the crowdfunding campaign raised $20,000 before it concluded.

Cassidy wrote on X on Friday, “I’ve been notified of more potential legal charges unfortunately, so I’ve opened the legal fund donation back up. All donations in excess of what is directly related to my defense shall be donated to a Christian legal fund. Thank you again.”

Former Navy pilot Michael Cassidy speaks to potential voter Heather Berry in Magee, Miss., June 15, 2022. Cassidy, a Republican running for the Mississippi House of Representatives is facing charges after being accused of destroying a Satanic Temple display inside the Iowa Capitol. Cassidy also ran for the U.S. House last year, narrowly losing in the GOP primary. | Rogelio V. Solis, Associated PressMore

Jason Benell, the president of the Iowa Atheists and Freethinkers, described the “targeting” of the display as “encouraged by legislators.” He wrote in a news release, “This is unacceptable. When our leaders make it permissible to destroy religious — or non-religious — displays they find religiously objectionable, they are abdicating their responsibility to safeguard the freedom of expression of the citizens they represent.”

Cassidy was reportedly released after his arrest. According to The Associated Press, he previously ran against incumbent U.S. Rep. Michael Guest and lost in a primary runoff.

Bird flu found on another German poultry farm

Reuters
Thu, December 14, 2023

Illustration shows test tube labelled "Bird Flu", eggs and Germany flag

HAMBURG (Reuters) - About 30,000 ducks have been slaughtered after an outbreak of bird flu on a farm in west Germany, authorities said on Thursday.

The disease was confirmed on a farm in the Guetersloh area, the North Rhine Westphalia state agriculture ministry said.

Highly pathogenic avian influenza, commonly called bird flu, has led to the culling of hundreds of millions birds in the past years. The disease usually strikes in Europe during autumn and winter with infection often spread by wild birds.

It has recently been detected on farms in countries including France, Poland, the Netherlands and Belgium. Several other cases in Germany have also been reported in recent weeks.

France ordered that a third dose of a vaccine against bird flu be given to ducks in areas most at risk, citing "new scientific evidence" as it aims to avoid a surge in outbreaks.

France also raised the risk level for bird flu to 'high' from 'moderate' after new cases of the disease were detected, forcing poultry farms to keep birds indoors to stem the spread of the highly contagious virus.

(Reporting by Michael Hogan, editing by Kirsten Donovan)

Are $5 Eggs on the Horizon After Another Bird Flu Outbreak?

Dawn Allcot
Fri, December 15, 2023

Natalia Rusanova / iStock.com

If you’re planning a Christmas morning brunch with quiche or frittata or deviled eggs on your Christmas Eve appetizer menu, you may want to plan ahead and allocate some more cash in your budget for eggs.

The top egg producer in the U.S., Cal-Maine Foods, temporarily ceased production at its Kansas facility because of the company’s first-ever outbreak of Avian influenza, commonly referred to as bird flu. The spike in egg prices we could see before the end of the year might make you want to hit the eggnog.

The company, based in Mississippi, had dodged the virus in 2022, when more than 72 million birds in the U.S. were killed to slow the outbreak, Bloomberg News reported. At that time, eggs in the Midwest hit $5.35 per dozen. Prices have fallen 69% since then, and are currently at $2.06 (wholesale price) per dozen for regionally laid whole eggs, according to USA Today. That’s close to the three-year average, USA Today reported.

The recent outbreak affected roughly 684,000 laying hens, nearly 1.6% of the total flock, according to a Reuters release. However, there is some good news; Cal-Maine said the outbreak isn’t an immediate public health concern or a threat to the food supply, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

However, USDA reports also showed an increase in cases in the last 30 days, with 92 flocks confirmed having HPAI (Highly Pathogenic influenza A infections) across 22 states. Currently, 1,012 flocks are affected across 47 states.

Kevin Bergquist, Wells Fargo Agri-Food Institute Sector Manager, told USA Today in a written statement that the virus is spreading at a similar pace to last year’s outbreak, which was very serious.

Berquist also discussed the potential ramifications of the virus continuing to spread. “Seemingly every day there is another announced infection site, which not only physically reduces the actual number of egg layers, but also casts a negative psychology over the entire egg market,” he wrote to USA Today. “The reaction to supply stress is price increase.”

Seasonal fluctuations, of course, account for some of the price increase. Some experts believe U.S. producers have enough inventory to deal with the losses caused by Avian flu.

“Prices are going to go up, of course, because of seasonal demand, and this will start restricting inventory some. But we’ve got a lot of eggs on hand right now,” Dennis Brothers, associate extension professor at Auburn University’s agricultural economics and rural sociology department, told USA Today.

This article originally appeared on GOBankingRates.com

Jimmy's Farm: Call to vaccinate poultry after 2022 bird losses

Nic Rigby - BBC Politics East
Fri, December 15, 2023

TV presenter and farmer Jimmy Doherty has called for a vaccination programme against bird flu for British poultry or a proper compensation scheme.

Mr Doherty made the call at a recording of BBC Politics East at Jimmy's Farm and Wildlife Park, near Ipswich.

The view was backed by Paul Kelly, of Essex turkey producer KellyBronze, who said: "If you vaccinate, you eliminate the risk."

The government said it was investing in the development of vaccines.

The farm is run by TV presenter Jimmy Doherty

Mr Doherty, who runs the 24-acre farm and attraction at Wherstead, near Ipswich, said he understands that poultry vaccination plans are being delayed by international trade deals, but is concerned about the possibility of another bird flu outbreak.

In 2022 the H5N1 virus, which was first reported in China in 1996. severely damaged the poultry industry.

Farmers are calling for the birds to be vaccinated

About 3.2 million birds were culled in the UK and 45 million across the EU.

Mr Doherty told BBC Politics East: "We don't want to miss out on any trade deals. At the same time we don't want to see farmers' livelihoods disappear. That's why the issue is important.

"We've been through Covid, we've vaccinated ourselves. It makes sense. If we don't have vaccination we need a proper compensation for losses."

Paul Kelly, who heads up KellyBronze - an Essex turkey producer - said vaccinating the birds was vital

Mr Kelly said: "If we get birds vaccinated, you eliminate the risk. The vaccines have been developed. We are sorting trade issues out with our trading partners."

He said that vaccination plans had been delayed partly because the flu has not hit birds in 2023 yet, which may be due to wild birds developing some immunity or other unknown reasons.

Mark Gorton, who runs Traditional Norfolk Poultry, said: "The vaccine is the only way we can be sure we can protect our birds. This the only thing we can do and the sooner we can get on with vaccinating our birds the safer they'll be."

Jimmy's Farm was originally set up in 2002 to try to preserve the Essex pig breed, but has since expanded to feature 100 species including wallabies, tapir and lemur.

Mr Doherty came to prominence with the show Jimmy's Farm, when the BBC followed his efforts in setting up the farm, just off the A14.

The friend of TV chef Jamie Oliver is also known for presenting shows including Jimmy's Food Factory and co-hosting Channel 4's Jamie & Jimmy's Friday Night Feast - a cooking show based at Southend Pier.

Graph

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "We know the devastating impact bird flu has had on farmers and poultry producers, which is why we have altered the compensation process to support farmers from the outset of planned culling whilst also investing in research and the development of vaccines aimed at tackling this virus.

"More widely, we remain committed to ensuring that British farmers become more productive, profitable and sustainable.

"As well as providing £600m in grants for equipment and innovation, we are allocating 45,000 seasonal workers this year and next to ensure growers have the workforce they need to put fresh produce on our tables."

When authoritative sources hold onto bad data: A legal scholar explains the need for government databases to retract information

Janet Freilich, Fordham University
Thu, December 14, 2023
THE CONVERSATION

Government information sources like the U.S. patent database often file bad information without labeling it or providing a way to retract it.

Thinglass/iStock via Getty Images

In 2004, Hwang Woo-suk was celebrated for his breakthrough discovery creating cloned human embryos, and his work was published in the prestigious journal Science. But the discovery was too good to be true; Dr. Hwang had fabricated the data. Science publicly retracted the article and assembled a team to investigate what went wrong.

Retractions are frequently in the news. The high-profile discovery of a room-temperature superconductor was retracted on Nov. 7, 2023. A series of retractions toppled the president of Stanford University on July 19, 2023. Major early studies on COVID-19 were found to have serious data problems and retracted on June 4, 2020.

Retractions are generally framed as a negative: as science not working properly, as an embarrassment for the institutions involved, or as a flaw in the peer review process. They can be all those things. But they can also be part of a story of science working the right way: finding and correcting errors, and publicly acknowledging when information turns out to be incorrect.

A far more pernicious problem occurs when information is not, and cannot, be retracted. There are many apparently authoritative sources that contain flawed information. Sometimes the flawed information is deliberate, but sometimes it isn’t – after all, to err is human. Often, there is no correction or retraction mechanism, meaning that information known to be wrong remains on the books without any indication of its flaws.

As a patent and intellectual property legal scholar, I’ve found that this is a particularly harmful problem with government information, which is often considered a source of trustworthy data but is prone to error and often lacking any means to retract the information.

Patent fictions and fraud

Consider patents, documents that contain many technical details that can be useful to scientists. There is no way to retract a patent. And patents contain frequent errors: Although patents are reviewed by an expert examiner before being granted, examiners do not check whether the scientific data in the patent is correct.

In fact, the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office permits patentees to include fictional experiments and data in patents. This practice, called prophetic examples, is common; about 25% of life sciences patents contain fictional experiments. The patent office requires that prophetic examples be written in the present or future tense while real experiments can be written in the past tense. But this is confusing to nonspecialists, including scientists, who tend to assume that a phrase like “X and Y are mixed at 300 degrees to achieve a 95% yield rate” indicates a real experiment.

Almost a decade after Science retracted the journal article claiming cloned human cells, Dr. Hwang received a U.S patent on his retracted discovery. Unlike the journal article, this patent has not been retracted. The patent office did not investigate the accuracy of the data – indeed, it granted the patent long after the data’s inaccuracy had been publicly acknowledged – and there is no indication on the face of the patent that it contains information that has been retracted elsewhere.

This is no anomaly. In a similar example, Elizabeth Holmes, the former – now imprisoned – CEO of Theranos, holds patents on her thoroughly discredited claims for a small device that could rapidly run many tests on a small blood sample. Some of those patents were granted long after Theranos’ fraud headlined major newspapers.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office granted a patent to Theranos on Dec. 18, 2018, three months after the company was dissolved following a series of investigations and lawsuits that detailed its fraud. The patent has not been rescinded and contains no notice of the faulty nature of the information it contains.

\ U.S. Patent and Trademark Office

Long-lived bad information

This sort of under-the-radar wrong data can be deeply misleading to readers. The system of retractions in scientific journals is not without its critics, but it compares favorably to the alternative of no retractions. Without retractions, readers don’t know when they are looking at incorrect information.

My colleague Soomi Kim and I conducted a study of patent-paper pairs. We looked at cases where the same information was published in a journal article and in a patent by the same scientists, and the journal paper had subsequently been retracted. We found that while citations to papers dropped steeply after the paper was retracted, there was no reduction in citations to patents with the very same incorrect information.

This probably happened because scientific journals paint a big red “retracted” notice on retracted articles online, informing the reader that the information is wrong. By contrast, patents have no retraction mechanism, so incorrect information continues to spread.

There are many other instances where authoritative-looking information is known to be wrong. The Environmental Protection Agency publishes emissions data supplied by companies but not reviewed by the agency. Similarly, the Food and Drug Administration disseminates official-looking information about drugs that is generated by drug manufacturers and posted without an evaluation by the FDA.

Consequences of nonretractions

There are also economic consequences when incorrect information can’t be easily corrected. The Food and Drug Administration publishes a list of patents that cover brand-name drugs. The FDA won’t approve a generic drug unless the generic manufacturer has shown that each patent that covers the drug in question is expired, not infringed or invalid.

The problem is that the list of patents is generated by the brand-name drug manufacturers, who have an incentive to list patents that don’t actually cover their drugs. Doing so increases the burden on generic drug manufacturers. The list is not checked by the FDA or anyone else, and there are few mechanisms for anyone other than the brand-name manufacturer to tell the FDA to remove a patent from the list.

Even when retractions are possible, they are effective only when readers pay attention to them. Financial data is sometimes retracted and corrected, but the revisions are not timely. “Markets don’t tend to react to revisions,” Paul Donovan, chief economist of UBS Global Wealth Management, told the Wall Street Journal, referring to governments revising gross domestic product figures.

Misinformation is a growing problem. There are no easy answers to solve it. But there are steps that would almost certainly help. One relatively straightforward one is for trusted data sources like those from the government to follow the lead of scientific journals and create a mechanism to retract erroneous information.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.

It was written by: Janet Freilich, Fordham University.

Humans could use black holes as batteries, physics paper claims. Here's how.

A REMINDER; BLACK HOLES ARE A THEORY

Jacklin Kwan
Thu, December 14, 2023

An artist's concept of a tidal disruption event (TDE) that happens when a star passes fatally close to a supermassive black hole, which reacts by launching a relativistic jet.

The gravitational pull from black holes is so strong that nothing can escape its grasp. So could we ever harness the gargantuan power of black holes as a source of energy?

In a new study, scientists propose two ways to use black holes as energy sources someday. They predicted processes for extracting energy from black holes by using their rotational and gravitational properties.

"We know that we can extract energies from black holes, and we also know that we can inject energy into them, which almost sounds like a battery," lead author Zhan Feng Mai, a postdoctoral researcher at the Kavli Institute for Astronomy and Astrophysics at Peking University, told Live Science.

In the first hypothetical scenario, scientists would "charge" the black hole by injecting it with massive, electrically charged particles. These charges would continue being sucked in until the black hole itself had an electric field that began repelling any additional charges that they attempted to inject, the scientists explained in the study, published Nov. 29 in the journal Physical Review D.

Related: Supermassive black hole at the heart of the Milky Way is approaching the cosmic speed limit, dragging space-time along with it

When this electromagnetic repulsion was greater than the gravitational pull of the black hole, scientists would consider it "fully charged." In keeping with Einstein's theory of general relativity, which says that mass can be treated as equivalent to energy, the black hole’s available energy would come from a combination of the electrical charges injected into it as well as the mass of those electrical charges.

"The black hole battery is transforming the energy of the particle's mass into charge energy," Mai said.

The researchers calculated the efficiency of the recharging process to be 25%, meaning that black hole batteries could transform about a quarter of the mass inputted into available energy in the form of an electric field. This would make the efficiency of the battery around 250 times higher than that of an atomic bomb, the team calculated.

To extract the energy, the researchers would utilize a process known as superradiance, which is based on the theory that space-time is literally dragged around the rotation of a spinning black hole because of its intense gravitational field.

Gravitational or electromagnetic waves that entered this region of rotation would get dragged along too, but assuming they had not yet passed the black hole's event horizon — the boundary beyond which nothing, not even light, can escape — some waves might be deflected with more energy than they initially carried, the researchers wrote. This process would convert the black hole's rotational energy, determined by its mass, into the waves that are deflected.

The other method of harnessing a black holes' energy would involve extracting that energy in the form of so-called Schwinger pairs, or paired particles that form spontaneously in the presence of an electric field.

If we started with a fully charged black hole, the electric field near the event horizon might be so strong that it would spontaneously create an electron and positron, which is like an electron but with an opposite charge, Mai explained. If the black hole were positively charged, the positron would be shot out from the black hole due to repulsion. That runaway particle could then, theoretically, be collected as energy.

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Mai said he does not know if we will ever see a battery like this, but the theoretical exercise was inspired by scientists' previous attempts to theoretically extract energy from black holes.

"We see the black hole as a place where quantum mechanics and gravity have to somehow get together," Daniele Faccio, a physicist at the University of Glasgow who was not involved in the study, told Live Science. "By looking at them from the perspective of energy mining, we can understand a little more about what's going on."

Scientists are bringing molecules back from the dead in quest to fight superbugs

Katie Hunt, CNN
Fri, December 15, 2023

The quest for new antibiotics is going back to the Stone Age.

The urgency to identify possible candidates has never been greater as the global population faces nearly 5 million deaths every year that are associated with microbial resistance, according to the World Health Organization.

A research team led by bioengineering pioneer César de la Fuente is using artificial intelligence-based computational methods to mine genetic information from extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals and long-gone ice age creatures such as the woolly mammoth and giant sloth.

The scientists say some of these small protein, or peptide, molecules they have identified have bacteria-fighting powers that may inspire new drugs to fight infections in humans. The innovative work also opens up a completely new way to think about drug discovery.

“It has enabled us to uncover new sequences, new types of molecules that we have not previously found in living organisms, expanding the way we think about molecular diversity,” said de la Fuente, Presidential Assistant Professor at the University of Pennsylvania, where he heads the machine biology group. “Bacteria from today have never faced those molecules so they may give us a better opportunity at targeting the pathogens that are problematic today.”

The approach may seem to come out of left field, but experts say that new ways of looking at the problem of antimicrobial resistance to existing medicines, a deadly and pressing problem for global health, are sorely needed.

“The world is facing an antibiotic resistance crisis. My view is that a land, sea, and air approach is needed to solve the problem — and if we need to go to the past to provide potential solutions for the future — I am all for it,” said Michael Mahan, a professor in the department of molecular, cellular and developmental biology at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He wasn’t involved in the research.

A figure of a Neanderthal man is seen at London's Natural History Museum. Researchers are using AI-based computational methods to mine genetic information from extinct human relatives such as Neanderthals. - Mike Kemp/In Pictures/Getty Images
Antibiotics and where their alternatives may come from

Most antibiotics come from bacteria and fungi and have been discovered by screening microorganisms that live in soil. But in recent decades, pathogens have become resistant to many of these drugs because of overuse.

Scientists engaged in the global fight against superbugs are exploring different potential weapons, including phages, or viruses created by nature to eat bacteria.

Another exciting avenue of research involves antimicrobial peptides, or AMPs, which are infection-fighting molecules produced by many different organisms — bacteria, fungi, plants and animals, including humans. AMPs have a broad range of antimicrobial properties against different pathogens such as viruses, bacteria, yeast and fungi, Mahan said.

While most traditional antibiotics work by focusing on a single target in a cell, antimicrobial peptides bind to and disrupt a bacterial membrane at many places, he added. It’s a more complicated mechanism that consequently may make drug resistance less likely, but, because of the molecules’ potential to disrupt cell membranes, it can also result in increased toxicity, according to Mahan.

There are a handful of peptide-based antibiotics in clinical use, such as colistin, which is made from a bacteria-based AMP. It’s used as a drug of last resort to treat certain bacterial infection because it can be toxic, Mahan said. One human AMP known as LL-37 has also shown potential.

Other promising AMPs have been found in unexpected places: pine needles and the blood of the Komodo dragon.

A ‘Jurassic Park’ moment

De la Fuente had been using computational methods for the past decade to assess the potential of a wide range of peptides as alternatives to antibiotics. The idea to look at extinct molecules came up during a lab brainstorm when the blockbuster movie “Jurassic Park” was mentioned.

“The notion (in the film) was to bring back entire organisms, and obviously, they had a lot of issues,” he said. His team started thinking about a more feasible idea: “Why not bring back molecules from the past?”

Advances in the recovery of ancient DNA from fossils mean that detailed libraries of genetic information about extinct human relatives and long-lost animals are now publicly available.

To find previously unknown peptides, the research team trained an AI algorithm to recognize fragmented sites in human proteins that might have antimicrobial activity. The scientists then applied it to publicly available protein sequences of modern humans (Homo sapiens), Neanderthals (Homo neanderthalensis) and Denisovans, another archaic human species closely related to Neanderthals.

The researchers then used the properties of previously described antimicrobial peptides to predict which of their newly identified ancient counterparts had the most potential to kill bacteria.

Out of six promising peptides identified with an algorithm, one from a Neanderthal was the most effective at fighting pathogens in bacteria-infected mice, said bioengineering pioneer César de la Fuente of the University of Pennsylvania.

- University of Pennsylvania/Courtesy Science Direct

Next, the researchers synthesized and tested 69 of the most promising peptides to see whether they could kill bacteria in petri dishes. The team selected the six most potent — four from Homo sapiens, one from Homo neanderthalensis and one from Denisovans — and gave them to mice infected with the bacterium Acinetobacter baumannii, a common cause of hospital-borne infections in humans.

“I think one of the most exciting moments was when we were resurrecting the molecules in the laboratory using chemistry and then we were bringing them back to life for the first time. And so it was really cool from a scientific perspective to have had that moment,” de la Fuente said of the research that published in August in the scientific journal Cell Host & Microbe.

In infected mice that developed a skin abscess, the peptides actively killed the bacteria; in those that had a thigh infection, the treatment was less effective but still halted the growth of bacteria.

“The best (peptide) was what we call Neanderthalien 1, which comes from Neanderthals. And that was the one that was most effective in the mouse model,” de la Fuente said.

He cautioned that none of the peptides were “ready to go antibiotics” and would require a lot of tweaking. More important, he says, is the framework and tools his team has developed to identify promising antimicrobial molecules from the past.

In research expected to publish next year, de la Fuente and his colleagues have developed a new deep-learning model to explore what he describes as the “extinctome” — the protein sequences of 208 extinct organisms for which detailed genetic information is available.

The team found more than 11,000 previously unknown potential antimicrobial peptides unique to extinct organisms and synthesized promising candidates from the Siberian woolly mammoth, Steller’s sea cow (a marine mammal that was wiped out in the 18th century by Arctic hunting), the 10-foot-long (3-meter) Darwin’s ground sloth (Mylodon darwinii) and the giant Irish elk (Megaloceros giganteus). He said that the peptides they discovered displayed “excellent anti-infective activity” in mice.

“Molecular de-extinction offers a unique opportunity to combat antibiotic resistance by resurrecting and tapping into the power of molecules from the past,” he said.
A wacky but worthwhile approach

Dr. Dmitry Ghilarov, group leader at the John Innes Centre in the United Kingdom who studies peptide antibiotics, said the real bottleneck in the search for new antibiotics wasn’t necessarily a lack of promising compounds, but getting pharmaceutical companies to develop and clinically test potential peptide antibiotics, which can be unstable and difficult to synthesize. He was not involved in the research.

“I don’t see an immediate reason to look at paleo proteomes. We have already … have a lot of these peptides,” he said. “What we really need in my view is deep understanding on the underlying … principles: what makes the peptide bioactive to be able to design them.”

“There are a lot of these peptide antibiotics which were not developed and pursued by the industry because of difficulties like toxicity,” Ghilarov said.

According to a paper published in May 2021, of 10,000 promising compounds identified by researchers, only one or two antibiotic drugs reached US Food and Drug Administration approval.

Dr. Monique van Hoek, a professor and associate director of research at George Mason University’s School of Systems Biology in Fairfax, Virginia, said the idea of molecular de-extinction was “a really interesting approach.” She was not involved in either study.

Van Hoek said it was rare that a peptide found in nature — be it extinct or from a living organism — would directly lead to a new type of antibiotic or other drug. More often, she said, the discovery of a new peptide will offer a starting point for researchers, who could then use computational techniques to tinker and optimize the peptide’s potential as a drug candidate.

Van Hoek’s research currently focuses on a synthetic peptide inspired by one found naturally in the American alligator. The peptide is currently undergoing preclinical testing.

“So far it’s going really well. And that’s exciting because many other peptides that I’ve worked on over the years fail for one reason or another,” she said.

Van Hoek said that while it may appear wacky to look at alligators or extinct humans for a new source of antibiotics, the magnitude of the crisis makes the approach worthwhile.

De la Fuente agreed. “I think what we need is as many new and different approaches as possible, and that will increase our chances of being eventually successful,” he said.

“I think we can find a lot of potential useful solutions by looking behind us.”

Startup True Anomaly snags $100 million for space security work

Mike Wall
Fri, December 15, 2023

Illustration of a robotic spacecraft against the blackness of space.

True Anomaly just scored a big chunk of change to continue developing its space security tech.

The Colorado-based startup announced on Tuesday (Dec. 12) that it raised $100 million in a "Series B" round of funding led by Riot Ventures.

The money "will be used for continued investment in people, products and services to further advance True Anomaly's national security space technology offerings at the intersection of hardware, software and AI," True Anomaly representatives said in an emailed statement on Tuesday.

Related: The Space Force should safeguard US interests on the moon (op-ed)

True Anomaly, which was founded in 2022, aims to help make space a safer and more sustainable environment for a wide range of stakeholders. The company also wants to help the United States retain its status as the world's preeminent space power, in the face of increasing competition with China.

"The company empowers the U.S. government, its allies, and partners as well as the commercial space industry to lead safe, resilient operations on orbit to secure life on Earth," True Anomaly wrote in a statement on Tuesday.

Though the company is young, it has already secured an impressive amount of funding through investments and contracts. For example, True Anomaly representatives announced in April that they had raised $30 million to date, including $17 million in "Series A" funding. (The Series A round comes just after the initial "seed capital." Series B, as its name suggests, comes after Series A.)

And, in September, the company revealed that it had won a $17.4 million Small Business Innovation Research contract from the U.S. Space Force.

Under that award, True Anomaly will provide the Space Force with "a suite of Space Domain Awareness (SDA) applications that will leverage powerful analytics and scalable AI to support human-machine teaming for improved efficiency across the spectrum of SDA operations," True Anomaly representatives said in a Sept. 21 statement. "This will be delivered through True Anomaly's Mosaic software — an integrated operating system for every aspect of space domain awareness and security."

Related stories:

— Is war in space inevitable?

— Are we really in a new space race with China and Russia?

— What is the U.S. Space Force and what does it do?

True Anomaly also builds spacecraft — specifically, an autonomous vehicle called Jackal that's "designed for live and simulated rendezvous and proximity operations," according to the company's website.

The first two Jackals are scheduled to launch to Earth orbit next year, on SpaceX's Transporter-10 rideshare mission. That initial mission will test Jackal's various tracking and rendezvous systems. If all goes well, True Anomaly could eventually send thousands of satellites up, to help the U.S. military keep tabs on the many objects and goings-on in orbit, Wired magazine wrote earlier this year.

Promising assisted reproductive technologies come with ethical, legal and social challenges – a developmental biologist and a bioethicist discuss IVF, abortion and the mice with two dads

Keith Latham, Michigan State University

Mary Faith Marshall, University of Virginia
Sat, December 16, 2023

THE CONVERSATION

A few days after successful fertilization, an embryo becomes a rapidly dividing ball of cells called a blastocyst. Juan Gaertner/Science Photo Library via Getty Images

Assisted reproductive technologies are medical procedures that help people experiencing difficulty having or an inability to have biological children of their own. From in vitro fertilization to genetic screening to creation of viable eggs from the skin cells of two male mice, each new development speaks to the potential of reproductive technologies to expand access to the experience of pregnancy.

Translating advances from the lab to the clinic, however, comes with challenges that go far beyond the purely technical.

Conversations around the ethics and implications of cutting-edge research often happen after the fact, when the science and technology have advanced beyond the point at which open dialogue could best protect affected groups. In the spirit of starting such cross-discipline conversations earlier, we invited developmental biologist Keith Latham of Michigan State University and bioethicist Mary Faith Marshall of the University of Virginia to discuss the ethical and technological potential of in vitro gametogenesis and assisted reproductive technology post-Roe.

How new are the ethical considerations raised by assisted reproductive technologies?

Keith

Every new technology raises many of the same questions, and likely new ones. On the safety and risk-benefit side of the ethical conversation, there’s nothing here that we haven’t dealt with since the 1970s with other reproductive technologies. But it’s important to keep asking questions, because the benefits are hugely dependent on the success rate. There are potential biological costs, but also possible social costs, financial costs, societal costs and many others.

Mary Faith

It’s probably been that way even longer. One of my mentors, Joseph Francis Fletcher, a pioneering bioethicist and Episcopal priest, wrote a book called “Morals and Medicine” in 1954. It was the first non-Roman Catholic treatment of bioethics. And he raised a lot of these issues there, including the technological imperative – the idea that because we can develop the technology to do something, we therefore should develop it.

Fletcher also said that the use of artifice, or human-made creations, is supremely human. That’s what we do: We figure out how things work and we develop new technologies like vaccines and heart-lung machines based on evolving scientific knowledge.

Scientists were able to create a mouse egg from the skin cells of male mice. Clouds Hill Imaging Ltd./Corbis Documentary via Getty Images

I think that in most cases, scientists should be involved in thinking about the implications of their work. But often, researchers focus more on the direct applications of their work than the potential indirect consequences.

Given the evolution of assisted reproductive technology, and the fact that its evolution is going to continue, I think one of the central questions to consider is, what are the goals of developing it? For assisted reproduction, it’s to help infertile people and people in nontraditional relationships have children.
What are some recent developments in the field of assisted reproductive technology?

Keith

One recent advance in assisted reproductive technology is the expansion of pre-implantation genetic testing methods, particularly DNA sequencing. Many genes come in different variants, or alleles, that can be inherited from each parent. Providers can determine whether an embryo bears a “bad” allele that may increase the risk of certain diseases and select embryos with “healthy” alleles.

Genetic screening raises several ethical concerns. For example, the parents’ genetic profiles could be unwillingly inferred from that of the embryo. This possibility may deter prospective parents from having children, and such knowledge may also have potential effects on any future child. The cost of screening and potential need for additional cycles of IVF may also increase disparities.

There are also considerations about the accuracy of screening predictions without accounting for environmental effects, and what level of genetic risk is “serious” enough for an embryo to be excluded. More extensive screening also raises concerns about possible misuse for purposes other than disease prevention, such as production of “designer babies.”

At a genome-editing conference in March 2023, researchers announced that they were able to delete and duplicate whole chromosomes from the skin cells of male mice to make eggs. This method is one potential way to make eggs that do not carry genetic abnormalities.

They were very upfront that this was done at 1% efficiency in mice, which could be lower in humans. That means something bad happened to 99% of the embryos. The biological world is not typically binary, so a portion of that surviving 1% could still be abnormal. Just because the mice survived doesn’t mean they’re OK. I would say at this point, it would be unethical to try this on people.

As with some forms of genetic screening, using this technique to reduce the risk of one disease could inadvertently increase the risk of another. Determining that it is absolutely safe to duplicate a chromosome would require knowing every allele of every gene on that chromosome, and what each allele could do to the health of a person. That’s a pretty tall order, as that could involve identifying hundreds to thousands of genes, and the effects of all their variants may not be known.

Mary Faith

That raises the issue of efficacy and costs to yet another order of magnitude.

Keith

Genome editing with CRISPR technology in people carries similar concerns. Because of potential limitations in how precise the technology can be, it may be difficult for researchers to say they are absolutely 100% certain there won’t be off-target changes in the genome. Proceeding without that full knowledge could be risky.

But that’s where bioethicists need to come into play. Researchers don’t know what the full risk is, so how do you make that risk-benefit calculation?

Mary Faith

There’s the option of a voluntary global moratorium on using these technologies on human embryos. But somebody somewhere is still going to do it, because the technology is just sitting there, waiting to be moved forward.
How will the legal landscape affect the development and implementation of assisted reproductive technologies?

Mary Faith

Any research that involves human embryos is in some ways politicized. Not only because the government provides funding to the basic science labs that conduct this research, but because of the wide array of beliefs that members of the public at large have about when life begins or what personhood means.

The Dobbs decision, which overturned the constitutional right to an abortion, has implications for assisted reproduction and beyond. Most people who are pregnant don’t even know they’re pregnant at the earliest stages, and somewhere around 60% of those pregnancies end naturally because of genetic aberrations. Between 1973 and 2005, over 400 women were arrested for miscarriage in the U.S., and I think that number is going to grow. The implications for reproductive health care, and for assisted reproduction in the future, are challenging and frightening.

What will abortion restrictions mean for people who have multiple-gestation pregnancies, in which they carry more than one embryo at the same time? In order to have one healthy child born from that process, the other embryos often need to be removed so they don’t all die. In the past 40 years, the number of twin births doubled and triplet and higher-order births quadrupled, primarily because of fertility treatments.

IVF may involve transferring more than one embryo at a time. Antonio Marquez lanza/Moment via Getty Images

Keith

IVF may transfer one, two, or sometimes three embryos at a time. The cost of care for preterm birth, which is one possible outcome of multiple-gestation pregnancies, can be high. That’s in addition to the cost of delivery. IVF clinics are increasingly transferring just one embryo to mitigate such concerns.

The life-at-conception bills that have been put forth in some U.S. state legislatures and Congress may contain language claiming they are not meant to prevent IVF. But the language of the bills could be extended to affect procedures such as IVF with pre-implantation genetic testing to detect chromosomal abnormalities, particularly when single-embryo transfer is the goal. Pre-implantation genetic testing has been increasing, with one study estimating that over 40% of all IVF cycles in the U.S. in 2018 involved genetic screening.

Could life-at-conception bills criminalize clinics that don’t transfer embryos known to be genetically abnormal? Freezing genetically abnormal embryos could avoid destroying them, but that raises questions of, to what end? Who would pay for the storage, and who would be responsible for those embryos?
How can we determine whether the risks outweigh the benefits when so much is unknown?

Keith

Conducting studies in animal models is an important first step. In some cases, it either hasn’t been done or hasn’t been done extensively. Even with animal studies, you have to recognize that mice, rabbits and monkeys are not human. Animal models may reduce some risks before a technology is used in people, but they won’t eliminate all risks, because of biological differences between species.

Mary Faith

We could look to the example of early recombinant DNA research in the U.S. The federal government created the Recombinant DNA Advisory Committee at the National Institutes of Health to oversee animal and early-phase human research involving synthetic or hybrid genetic material.

The death of Jesse Gelsinger, who was a participant in a gene therapy clinical trial in 1999, led to a halt in all gene therapy clinical trials in the U.S. for a time. When the Food and Drug Administration investigated what went wrong, they found huge numbers of adverse events in both humans and animals that should have been reported to the advisory committee but weren’t. Notably, the principal investigator of the trial was also the primary shareholder of the biotech company that made the drug being tested. That raises questions about the reality of oversight.

I think something like that earlier NIH advisory committee but for reproductive technologies would still be advisable. But researchers, policymakers and regulators need to learn from the lessons of the past to try to ensure that – especially in early-phase research – we’re very thoughtful about the potential risks and that research participants really understand what the implications are for participation in research. That would be one model for translating research from the animal into the human.

The FDA approved a gene therapy for a form of congenital vision loss in 2017. The child in this photo, then 8, first received gene therapy at age 4. Bill West/AP Photo

Keith

A process to make sure that the people conducting studies don’t have a conflict of interest, like having the potential to commercially profit from the technology, would be useful.

Caution, consensus and cooperation should not take second place to profit motives. Altering the human genome in a way that allows human-made genetic changes to be propagated throughout the population has a potential to alter the genetics of the human species as a whole.

Mary Faith

That raises the question of how long it will take for long-term effects to show. It’s one thing for an implanted egg not to survive. But how long will it take to know whether there are effects that aren’t obvious at birth?

Keith

We’re still collecting long-term outcome data for people born using different reproductive technologies. So far there have been no obviously horrible consequences. But some abnormalities could take decades to manifest, and there are many variables to contend with.

One can arguably say that there’s substantial good in helping couples have babies. There can be a benefit to their emotional well-being, and reproduction is a natural part of human health and biology. And a lot of really smart, dedicated people are putting a lot of energy into making sure that the risks are minimized. We can also look to some of the practices and approaches to oversight that have been used over the past several decades.

Mary Faith

And thinking about international guidelines, such as from the Council for International Medical Science and other groups, could provide guidance on protecting human research subjects.

Keith

You hate to advocate for a world where the automatic response to anything new is “no, don’t do that.” My response is, “Show me it’s safe before you do it.” I don’t think that’s unreasonable.

Some people have a view that scientists don’t think about the ethics of research and what’s right and wrong, advisable or inadvisable. But we do think about it. I co-direct a research training program that includes teaching scientists how to responsibly and ethically conduct research, including speakers who specifically address the ethics of reproductive technologies. It is valuable to have a dialogue between scientists and ethicists, because ethicists will often think about things from a different perspective.

As people go through their scientific careers and see new technologies unfold over time, these discussions can help them develop a deeper appreciation and understanding of the broader impact of their research. It becomes our job to make sure that each generation of scientists is motivated to think about these things.

Mary Faith

It’s also really important to include stakeholders – people who are nonscientists, people who experience barriers to reproduction and people who are opposed to the idea – so they have a voice at the table as well. That’s how you get good policies, right? You have everyone who should be at the table, at the table.

This article is republished from The Conversation, a nonprofit, independent news organization bringing you facts and trustworthy analysis to help you make sense of our complex world.The Conversation is trustworthy news from experts

It was written by: Keith Latham, Michigan State University and Mary Faith Marshall, University of Virginia.

Read more:

Human genome editing offers tantalizing possibilities – but without clear guidelines, many ethical questions still remain

‘Jurassic World’ scientists still haven’t learned that just because you can doesn’t mean you should – real-world genetic engineers can learn from the cautionary tale

As national political omens go, Republicans sought middle ground on abortion in Virginia − and still lost the state legislature

Saturday, December 16, 2023

SETI's 1st 'conversation' with a humpback whale offers insight on how to talk to E.T.

Samantha Mathewson
Thu, December 14, 2023

An image of a whale's tail above water.

Humpback whale "conversations" provide valuable insight on how humans may one day communicate with life beyond Earth.

Researchers from the SETI Institute, University of California Davis and the Alaska Whale Foundation recently "conversed" with a humpback whale named Twain using an underwater speaker and recorded a humpback "contact" call. Twain responded to the researchers' call by matching the interval variations between signals of each playback call over a 20-minute period.

If you're having a Star Trek flashback, yes, this is awfully reminiscent of that one film in which the crew receives alien whale transmissions that can only be decoded underwater. And in fact, mirroring our sci-fi fantasies, this demonstration of interspecies communication has implications for the search for extraterrestrial intelligence, according to a statement from the SETI Institute.

"We believe this is the first such communicative exchange between humans and humpback whales in the humpback ‘language,'" Brenda McCowan, lead author of the study from U.C. Davis, said in the statement.

Much like how astronaut crews simulate missions to Mars or the moon on Earth, the Whale-SETI team is studying humpback whale communication systems to better understand how to detect and interpret signals from outer space. Their findings can be used to develop filters that can be applied to any extraterrestrial signals received, according to the statement.

"Because of current limitations on technology, an important assumption of the search for extraterrestrial intelligence is that extraterrestrials will be interested in making contact and so target human receivers," Laurance Doyle, coauthor of the study from the SETI Institute, said in the statement. "This important assumption is certainly supported by the behavior of humpback whales."