It’s unfortunate that Shoshana Zuboff‘S writing is so bad, because I think some of her ideas are important. If anyone is interested in this topic I would recommend her interview on Econ Talk [1]. Russ Roberts makes a valiant effort and is partially successful in wrangling clear and cohesive points out of her.
An interim analysis of Grail’s Pathfinder study [1] suggests a PPV of 43% [2]. This may be a mixed population of their high and normal risk cohorts - it’s not clear to me
from the abstract. They call this a conservative estimate, which seems quite fair, given that the “discordant” positive cases are really only potential false positives at this point. These patients may actually harbor tumors that become detectable further into the study or on follow up.
Even with a mixed risk study population, a lower bound estimate of PPV in the 40s seems like a big win for Grail.
My favorite response to this and related objections to ending aging (such as “what about the dictators”): imagine a scenario where humans did not age, but still had the problems of “gerontocracy” and dictatorships. Would you propose subjecting the whole of humanity to debilitating degenerative diseases and ultimately death to solve these societal problems?
I picked this up from Ageless by Andrew Steele, a highly recommended and very current overview of the field of aging research.
> there's no significant process that turns trees into sequestered carbon for longer than the trees' lifespan.
There is of course lumber, which can sequester CO2 for decades or hundreds of years. Lumber sequestration currently only amounts to ~1% of global annual carbon emissions, but regionally it can be big (9% in Sweden) [1]. Lumber might have a bigger impact if purposefully employed for sequestration and prioritized over other carbon positive building materials.
In my opinion, and it seems in the NPR editor’s opinion, the most exciting angle to this story isn’t the cure of one relatively rare disease (TAA), but rather the seemingly imminent cure of many/most inherited diseases which affect cells of the liver. Indeed, we can even make edits that confer protective benefits to people at risk for diseases due to mutations OR lifestyle (see a similar approach by Verve Therapeutics). This is a big story which deserves the attention grabbing headline.
The concentration of cell free DNA in blood plasma is generally in the nanograms/mL range, meaning most cfDNA assays will require at least a ~mL of plasma input for sufficient sensitivity / reproducibility. We aren’t quite at the capillary blood level of sensitivity yet.
One version of what you are describing is called an antibody-drug conjugate. There are about a dozen ADCs approved and many more in various stages of development
You could do reverse transcription and sequencing to confirm the presence of the full length spike protein. That should tell you with pretty high confidence that it’s authentic. But the really interesting “biopunk novel plot” future would be some sophisticated counterfeiter who is actually producing the correct mRNA sequence and packaging it in LNPs. If the counterfeiter was able to charge a thousand dollars per dose, it could be quite profitable even at small scale.
1 https://www.econtalk.org/shoshana-zuboff-on-surveillance-cap...