I think a lot of the problem is that people are very disconnected from agriculture, and tend towards having little knowledge of basic botany. Agriculture has become so successful over the past century (in developed countries anyway) that we've gone from having half the population engaged in farming to less than 2%.
And to the extent they know anything about agriculture, it's entirely anecdote-driven and usually disconnected from the broader reality. I'm a big supporter of local organic family farms (seriously - there's a farmer's market across the street once a week), but I'm also self-aware enough to realize that my upper-middle-class buying habits are not representative of how most of the world is (or will be) fed. (And, just to be clear, I'm also totally comfortable eating GMO food, and would even preferentially buy GMO products to support them - which reminds me, I need to find some of that new fake cheese.)
I have no problem if people want to label things as non-GMO voluntarily, and they are free to do that just like they are free to label things as kosher, halaal, vegan, ect. But I do not agree with forcing it.
I agree that the labeling drive is misleading and unfair, but I'd rather err on the side of more information and more democracy than less, and I'm never comfortable seeing companies buy the laws they want. This is one case where Monsanto actually deserves the slime being flung at them. I also think that not nearly enough information about legally-mandated testing (not just GMOs, but especially pharmaceuticals) is made public, and this is sometimes to the detriment of the public. (This is as much a scientific gripe as a public-interest one: the fact that so much primary data of all types is disorganized or simply unavailable, plus the added insult of the scientific literature being mostly paywalled, is a constant frustration.)
I think this is ultimately a battle that can only be won in the long term, and only by patience and accepting the rules of the game. I'm confident that in the long term (especially as science advances), the environmental and commercial benefits of GMOs will prove so overwhelming - and the supposed health risks non-existent - that the dreaded label will be no more frightening than "may contain traces of wheat products". We're doing far more damage to ourselves and the environment by our continued over-consumption of meat products, which just keeps getting worse as more countries rise out of poverty and chase the dream of bacon cheeseburgers for everyone. Sooner or later we're going to need to find a middle ground: look ahead fifty years, and imagine that you can pay $30 [adjusted for inflation] per pound for lean ground beef, or $3/pound for something that looks and tastes exactly like lean ground beef, but with less cholesterol, made out of GMO'd yeast protein. Which do you think most people are going to buy?
Well, I happen to be in one of those often accused of being bought out university departments, and damnedest thing, I keep missing those lucrative selling out seminars.
Yeah, I never had any luck with that myself when I was in grad school.
The whole GMO debate just looks completely insane from a practicing scientist's point of view - it's like we were arguing about microscopes, or test tubes. It's quite shocking for people who consider themselves bleeding-heart liberal environmentalists to discover that they're viewed as evil corporate shills for suggestion that GMOs have legitimate uses. The level of fear-mongering, ignorance, outright lies, and sometimes spittle-flecked hatred is so disturbing that it's taken all the fun out of mocking right wing science-deniers. And occasionally it descends to violence, like the assholes who destroyed the Golden Rice (note: not a Monsanto product) plot in the Philippines. I'd almost prefer dealing with creationists, but that isn't my field.
(PS. Of course it absolutely does not help the cause that Congress just made compulsory GMO labeling illegal. That was stupid, corrupt, and counter-productive.)
For trials where there is no effective treatment, and the new treatment should be highly effective, the cost of trials is quite modest.
The problem is that a lot of the proposed new treatments turn out not to be highly effective, but companies don't find this out until they've already sunk tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into it. So the cost of every new FDA approval needs to be balanced against all of the bets that failed.
This is true even for diseases where there isn't an effective treatment - clinical trials for Alzheimer's drugs (a sure money-maker, if they worked) have been notoriously failure-prone.
The Chinese have known about ALL of these things for six thousand fucking years
And the Chinese also had the same god-awfully poor standard of living and short life expectancy as everyone else, until they adopted modern standards of sanitation, public health, and medical care.
Crowd sourcing years of clinical trials. What could possibly go wrong.
I don't disagree with this point - pharma industry critics tend to be very ignorant of what the process actually looks like, and how much it costs - but one of the points made by the article was that Big Pharma might not waste so much time and money on failing drug candidates if they had access to more complete information*, i.e. if data sharing was the norm rather than the exception. Crowd-sourcing the clinical trials sounds like a recipe for disaster, but crowd-sourcing the early discovery process might have some real benefits. It's not like the entire process could get any less efficient, and even just keeping the number of failed clinical candidates to a minimum would be a huge improvement.
(* Granted, the fact that most academic research is stuck behind publisher paywalls makes their job far more difficult than it should be. I get nauseous every time I think about how much damage our publication practices have done to modern science.)
It seems to me that fewer people may want to contribute to the effort if they think their freely-contributed work could be subsumed by a patent fence that (e.g.) GlaxoSmithKline might decide to slap around a derivative discovery.
In practice, you are almost certainly incorrect. Scientists working in basic research - the ones I've met, anyway - are almost universally thrilled if their research leads to improvements in human health, regardless of whether or not they or someone else profits from it. (In fact, I was unhappy working as a developer on an academic project that was partly funded by charging companies for access to our software - I thought we should just give it away, because I wanted as many people as possible to use my work.) I have no fondness for GSK or any other big pharma company - quite frankly, they're a pain in the ass to deal with - but the extent to which they leech off public discoveries is vastly overstated, and they perform a huge amount of very expensive and very boring work to bring drugs to market. This combination of publicly-funded basic research and privately-funded development is one of the primary justifications for the existence of the NIH and on the whole it works relatively smoothly, although the perverse incentives of the Bayh-Dole act are problematic.
Much of the primary research into the HCV rna structure and thus the secondary chemical binding processes was done on the public purse
A huge fraction of it was done privately as well, but that's still just one tiny piece in a much larger project. Solving a structure isn't that difficult or expensive for a well-validated experimental system, and the end result helps you guess at what chemical syntheses to try, but actually putting something on the market takes the better part of a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars - and a huge fraction of the time it will fail anyway. It is almost guaranteed that Gilead spent at least $100 million developing their new HCV drug, and you have to add to that an even larger amount of money spent trying stuff that didn't work, which they still need to recoup somehow. I have no idea whether this justifies their selling price or not, but the claim that it cost the company "very small amounts of money" is complete nonsense.
I agree that this isn't an extraordinary example, but I have to take issue with this:
the general rule is that all the data goes public and that all the code written is open source
The first part is correct in the literal sense (this is an absolute requirement of public funding agencies and journals), but that doesn't mean they're unencumbered by patents. The second part, unfortunately, is incorrect: open source is getting more common and scientists are slowly coming around to the idea that this shouldn't be optional, but there are plenty of examples of closed-source software being developed by academic groups, and many more examples where the code is available but not redistributable. Only in the last few years did the NIH start to explicitly state that openness of source code would be a consideration in evaluating grant applications for computational (biomedical) R&D.
Too often these promising studies generate all kinds of hype
This is largely the fault of institutional PR offices - university press releases are notorious for inflating the importance of even the most minor discovery, and their take is what gets reported. (Which isn't to say that scientists aren't complicit, but most of us have sufficient self-awareness to cringe when we read these articles.)
But we keep seeing these big, game-changing announcements out of "eastern" medical researchers. Only to have them turn out to be massive frauds.
This isn't a "game-changing" announcement, not the way (for instance) various stem-cell-related discoveries were. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, and it certainly expands our understanding of this system, but it's nothing revolutionary or unforseen, and it's also really "basic" in the sense of "basic research" - foundational, not applied.
Either way, this is possibly further damning evidence (albeit anecdotal) giving rise to the notion that the US being a free society is a romanticized pipe dream.
Only if you completely disregard free will. No one is pointing a gun at my head and telling me to view the news outlets you are complaining about, and I ignore most of them entirely (I don't even have cable, or a working TV for that matter). Unlike many other countries, there is no government entity blocking me from consuming contrarian and/or foreign news sources. And last time I checked, there were plenty of news sources (foreign and domestic) that were happy to tell me the "truth", or their own preferred version of it. (Remember, for every American who thinks the country can do no wrong, there's someone else who think it's responsible for everything bad that happens, and isn't shy about saying so.)
If you are unhappy that a large fraction of Americans is content to take everything they see on Fox News as incontrovertible truth, well, join the club. Most people simply aren't that smart or thoughtful, and that goes for every other country in the world, not just the US.
This is just nonsensical. The vast majority of articles like this still come from the US/EU/Japan, and most of the technology was developed outside China. In fact, the only reason they're able to do this kind of research is that the last few years have seen exceptional improvements in molecular EM due to a combination of better software and direct electron detectors. In fact, I looked through their methods, and they're using a microscope made by a US/international company, a detector from Japan, and software written in the US and UK. The hardware just requires sufficient funding, the software is free.
So these papers aren't particularly innovative; they're high-profile because it's an important scientific question, but it was only a matter of time before someone decided to tackle it (and only in the last few years has it really been possible). There are generally more questions like this than people who have time to answer them, so it's really easy (intellectually speaking) to pick a random problem, throw money at it, and collect the Science/Nature/Cell paper. And that's kind of the state a lot of Chinese research is in.
I don't mean to sound critical of this work itself - it looks very solid and Yigong Shi has an excellent reputation (he used to be in the US). But all it proves is that China can do research on par with other industrial nations when it wants to.
We still do. It's just that many of those scientists end up going back to their home country to be back with family.
Yigong Shi was in fact a tenured professor at Princeton until a few years ago. I think the Chinese gov't. basically threw gobs of money at him to move to Tsinghua. Before, he was just one of many excellent structural biologists in the US; now, he's arguably the foremost Chinese structural biologist. (Downside: exchanging Princeton faculty meetings for CCP oversight; I'm not sure which sounds worse to me.)
Can you live in the Bay Area taking home 42k/year?
I did for years (also working for the state). I was living here for nearly a decade before I made more than that, in fact; as a grad student my stipend was less than $20k. I have no dependents or debts to pay off, no severe medical conditions, and my benefits were always sufficient, so it was actually very easy. I lived alone for the majority of that time, but even when I shared houses or apartments it was in relatively nice neighborhoods. (All rental, of course.) Until recently I was always living very close to where I worked. I usually had at least a little disposable income and by the time I was taking home more than $30K I was saving some of it.
That said, I live in the East Bay, not SF proper, so my rents are merely extortionate but not totally unaffordable. $42K won't go very far if you want to live in the Mission - and 10 years ago, it wasn't totally unrealistic for a (childless) grad student to have that ambition.
Honestly, from what I've seen I think senior government-employed or government-funded scientists in the Bay Area mostly get paid enough already (and I would include myself in that category until very recently). It's definitely more than we'd get in another part of the country, and we/they get to play with a lot of very cool (and very expensive) toys. But the cost of living is a huge problem for recruiting; a UC Berkeley professor of my acquaintance told me they were finding it increasingly difficult to hire new faculty because they'll never be able own a home anywhere close to Berkeley itself.
Yea just like non-coding DNA is junk. Does every generation have to make the same hubristic errors?
You're grossly overstating the case here. The fact that non-coding DNA contains essential regulatory information has been known for many decades, long before the modern age of genomics. The label "junk" was applied because nobody knew what most of that DNA did, and it obviously has very low information content compared to genes. But this pejorative never stopped people from studying it or trying to figure out what role it played - of course it imposes a significant metabolic cost on the organism, so why keep it around? We just haven't had mature tools to study it until relatively recently. Despite some sensationalism to the contrary, it's still far from resolved whether and how much it is functional; the best-supported hypothesis that I'm aware of is that it's structurally important and facilitates the 3D organization of the genome in cells in such a way that enhances regulatory control. We certainly don't have any clue how to derive therapeutic applications from our knowledge, unlike coding DNA (i.e. translated into proteins that most drugs target).
The claim that "mainstream biologists assumed that noncoding DNA was junk, and therefore asked the wrong questions" is simplistic nonsense at best, and creationist propaganda at worst. Scientific investigation - especially biology - proceeds on the basis of incomplete evidence all the time, because we have no choice (among other lacunae, we still don't understand what half of all human genes actually do). And unexpected new discoveries or inventions shake up molecular biology on a fairly regular basis - 10-15 years ago, RNA interference was thought to be equally revolutionary. So we always hope for surprises (all research faculty at major universities fantasize about making discoveries like Crispr/Cas), but we have to concentrate on areas of study that we feel are most likely to yield actual results.
I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature
I'm not sure I would call the therapeutic applications of Crispr/Cas a "feature of nature". Any actual therapy is going to consist of, at a minimum, a combination of synthetic RNA and orthologously expressed Cas9 (probably heavily engineered). This isn't something that exists naturally in humans. I'm generally pretty conservative about what I would consider patentable (software, or "all drugs targeting this protein", are not included), and, frankly, I think it would be better for everyone if the patents around Crispr/Cas were limited to specific treatments rather than the general concept. But regardless, any useful therapies are going to involve a great deal of engineering and trial-and-error - and clinical testing, which is going to be the most expensive part. What's the incentive to spend money on this if China ends up copying it? Don't say "for the good of humanity" - if that were the primary goal, money would be far better spent curing various endemic infectious diseases.
This is in fact how the soviet union was able to compete for so long, but eventually it could not keep increasing the amount of resources that it mobilized.
I almost mentioned Russia in my comment - there was a time in the 1930s, when the US and Europe were stuck in the Depression, many Westerners thought that communism might end up totally eclipsing their (at the time) failed economies. And the USSR did grow from a nation of mostly peasants into an industrial superpower incredibly quickly. China has done much better so far, in large part because it mostly integrated with the global economy which was quick to take advantage of the cheap labor. But it is also making some of the same mistakes, as demonstrated by the "ghost cities", or the high-speed rail crash.
It is capitalism that more effectively makes better and better uses of the resources that are available, and its driven by greed.
I wouldn't say "greed", although that term certainly does apply in many cases; I would call it self interest, which isn't the same thing. The fact that our behavior (and economic activity) is greatly affected by incentives doesn't mean that we're greedy or foolish, it means we're human. It's amazing how many people on both the left and the right ignore this when it doesn't align nicely with their preferred policy goals.
These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
Only up to a point. Part of the reason why China has been enjoying enormous rates of economic growth is that it had so far to go. Once their economy and standard of living starts to get much closer to that of the existing advanced industrial economies, and they lose their advantage of cheap labor, all they're left with is the population advantage. And they'll be busy strip-mining the third world in the meantime, which means they'll probably overreach sooner or later and piss everyone off as badly as the US has. (And the US at least has NATO allies, and reasonably friendly relations with neighboring countries.)
I don't think the GP was limiting the scope to science missions - instead, we should also be developing robotic missions to prepare for eventual humans. And more than just robots; even stuff as relatively trivial as 3D printers will make the difference between sustainable human presence versus short-term missions that won't last. There are many other components: better radiation shielding, genetically optimized plants, improved solar cells, and so on.
Remember, ISS is only a few hundred feet up and it's still insanely expensive to service. If we want affordable permanent settlement on the moon or Mars, we need to limit the number of supply trips.
A big part of the reason why this won't happen is that space-related technology tends to be inherently dual-use, i.e. much of it has military purposes. In fact, that's probably the single biggest reason why there was a space race at all in the 1950s/1960s. Since China is already known to be developing military capabilities specifically to counter the US navy/naval air, and has ongoing territorial disputes with at least five neighboring countries that I can think of offhand (several of which are close US allies), it would be ill-advised of the US to make it easier for them.
nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious
Hell, most scientists inside the US don't take the "controversy" seriously, or even notice it most of the time. The only reason most of us care is because those fuckwits keep trying to legislate their mythology into the public schools, otherwise they'd be worth no more thought than, say, flat-earthers or faith healers. And in large parts of the country, e.g. liberal urban areas like the one I live in, it's not even an issue in schools either. (God knows our public schools have enough other problems...)
Identified specific Christians as potential extremists. And they do exist - why is this in any way a surprise? Every faith-based ideology (Marxism obviously falls into this category) eventually attracts violent nutjobs. Even Buddhism has violent extremists, some of whom are currently hard at work ethnically cleansing a Muslim minority in Myanmar. There are also left-wing environmentalist extremists, along with Maoists and anarchists, all of whom the DHS and FBI also track.
Among other things, I find it curious that DHS was searching so hard for "non-Islamist" extremists - almost like Islamist extremists had DHS tacit approval.
The fact that most worldwide religious extremists are currently Muslim does not mean we should give a free pass to domestic extremists just because they happen to follow your preferred religion. (And what makes you so certain that the DHS wasn't investigating domestic Islamists too?) Since Christians are an overwhelming majority in the US, it is certainly logical to look for extremists in that population, especially since they may have an easier time blending in, and there are existing organized extremist groups, some of which have a long history of violence. (I should note that Timothy McVeigh was an "honorably discharged military veteran".)
It will never again occur in academic labs, because academics has been undermined by the multiple generations of decreasingly literate students.
The students you describe don't end up in academic labs, at least not for any job more important than cleaning glassware. Everyone doing real work already has a BS degree at a minimum, and most of them either hold PhDs or are in graduate programs. (Also, a huge fraction of them are immigrants, at least in the US.) Some of them are pretty sloppy nonetheless, but there's absolutely not a surplus of semi-literate scientists in academic research (as opposed to small technical colleges).
I'm just saying that the science rot we're seeing is not coming out of the corporate labs.
Corporate labs have a very different incentive system, and at least in most areas of the biomedical sciences, they publish far less in peer-reviewed journals. What they do publish will usually be better vetted, but this comes at the expense of taking much longer - because, of course, their scientists aren't dependent on (rapid) publication for career advancement. (The issue of applied vs. directed research is a separate problem - very few companies can afford to do truly undirected basic research.) There are certainly things that could be changed about academia to mitigate the problem; the current system of grad students and postdocs doing most of the work in academia is a disaster. (I say this as someone who has spent more than a decade in this system.)
Where you err is assuming that you can simply weed out the bad actors through some kind of personality test. Contrary to your supposition, very few people go into academic research for any impure motivation, and it isn't simply a problem with the people in power. Much of the fraud and incompetence is produced by junior researchers who aren't rich or famous or powerful, and are motivated solely by the need to advance to the next stage in their careers. And there are plenty of examples of people who are motivated in part by "money or power or attention", but also manage to do excellent science at the same time. (Craig Venter is one obvious example, but there are plenty of pure academics who are equally ego-driven.) But in general, everyone following this career path is fundamentally interested in and excited by science, otherwise they would have become doctors or bankers.
Slashdot Mirror
I think a lot of the problem is that people are very disconnected from agriculture, and tend towards having little knowledge of basic botany. Agriculture has become so successful over the past century (in developed countries anyway) that we've gone from having half the population engaged in farming to less than 2%.
And to the extent they know anything about agriculture, it's entirely anecdote-driven and usually disconnected from the broader reality. I'm a big supporter of local organic family farms (seriously - there's a farmer's market across the street once a week), but I'm also self-aware enough to realize that my upper-middle-class buying habits are not representative of how most of the world is (or will be) fed. (And, just to be clear, I'm also totally comfortable eating GMO food, and would even preferentially buy GMO products to support them - which reminds me, I need to find some of that new fake cheese.)
I have no problem if people want to label things as non-GMO voluntarily, and they are free to do that just like they are free to label things as kosher, halaal, vegan, ect. But I do not agree with forcing it.
I agree that the labeling drive is misleading and unfair, but I'd rather err on the side of more information and more democracy than less, and I'm never comfortable seeing companies buy the laws they want. This is one case where Monsanto actually deserves the slime being flung at them. I also think that not nearly enough information about legally-mandated testing (not just GMOs, but especially pharmaceuticals) is made public, and this is sometimes to the detriment of the public. (This is as much a scientific gripe as a public-interest one: the fact that so much primary data of all types is disorganized or simply unavailable, plus the added insult of the scientific literature being mostly paywalled, is a constant frustration.)
I think this is ultimately a battle that can only be won in the long term, and only by patience and accepting the rules of the game. I'm confident that in the long term (especially as science advances), the environmental and commercial benefits of GMOs will prove so overwhelming - and the supposed health risks non-existent - that the dreaded label will be no more frightening than "may contain traces of wheat products". We're doing far more damage to ourselves and the environment by our continued over-consumption of meat products, which just keeps getting worse as more countries rise out of poverty and chase the dream of bacon cheeseburgers for everyone. Sooner or later we're going to need to find a middle ground: look ahead fifty years, and imagine that you can pay $30 [adjusted for inflation] per pound for lean ground beef, or $3/pound for something that looks and tastes exactly like lean ground beef, but with less cholesterol, made out of GMO'd yeast protein. Which do you think most people are going to buy?
Well, I happen to be in one of those often accused of being bought out university departments, and damnedest thing, I keep missing those lucrative selling out seminars.
Yeah, I never had any luck with that myself when I was in grad school.
The whole GMO debate just looks completely insane from a practicing scientist's point of view - it's like we were arguing about microscopes, or test tubes. It's quite shocking for people who consider themselves bleeding-heart liberal environmentalists to discover that they're viewed as evil corporate shills for suggestion that GMOs have legitimate uses. The level of fear-mongering, ignorance, outright lies, and sometimes spittle-flecked hatred is so disturbing that it's taken all the fun out of mocking right wing science-deniers. And occasionally it descends to violence, like the assholes who destroyed the Golden Rice (note: not a Monsanto product) plot in the Philippines. I'd almost prefer dealing with creationists, but that isn't my field.
(PS. Of course it absolutely does not help the cause that Congress just made compulsory GMO labeling illegal. That was stupid, corrupt, and counter-productive.)
For trials where there is no effective treatment, and the new treatment should be highly effective, the cost of trials is quite modest.
The problem is that a lot of the proposed new treatments turn out not to be highly effective, but companies don't find this out until they've already sunk tens or hundreds of millions of dollars into it. So the cost of every new FDA approval needs to be balanced against all of the bets that failed.
This is true even for diseases where there isn't an effective treatment - clinical trials for Alzheimer's drugs (a sure money-maker, if they worked) have been notoriously failure-prone.
The Chinese have known about ALL of these things for six thousand fucking years
And the Chinese also had the same god-awfully poor standard of living and short life expectancy as everyone else, until they adopted modern standards of sanitation, public health, and medical care.
Crowd sourcing years of clinical trials. What could possibly go wrong.
I don't disagree with this point - pharma industry critics tend to be very ignorant of what the process actually looks like, and how much it costs - but one of the points made by the article was that Big Pharma might not waste so much time and money on failing drug candidates if they had access to more complete information*, i.e. if data sharing was the norm rather than the exception. Crowd-sourcing the clinical trials sounds like a recipe for disaster, but crowd-sourcing the early discovery process might have some real benefits. It's not like the entire process could get any less efficient, and even just keeping the number of failed clinical candidates to a minimum would be a huge improvement.
(* Granted, the fact that most academic research is stuck behind publisher paywalls makes their job far more difficult than it should be. I get nauseous every time I think about how much damage our publication practices have done to modern science.)
It seems to me that fewer people may want to contribute to the effort if they think their freely-contributed work could be subsumed by a patent fence that (e.g.) GlaxoSmithKline might decide to slap around a derivative discovery.
In practice, you are almost certainly incorrect. Scientists working in basic research - the ones I've met, anyway - are almost universally thrilled if their research leads to improvements in human health, regardless of whether or not they or someone else profits from it. (In fact, I was unhappy working as a developer on an academic project that was partly funded by charging companies for access to our software - I thought we should just give it away, because I wanted as many people as possible to use my work.) I have no fondness for GSK or any other big pharma company - quite frankly, they're a pain in the ass to deal with - but the extent to which they leech off public discoveries is vastly overstated, and they perform a huge amount of very expensive and very boring work to bring drugs to market. This combination of publicly-funded basic research and privately-funded development is one of the primary justifications for the existence of the NIH and on the whole it works relatively smoothly, although the perverse incentives of the Bayh-Dole act are problematic.
Much of the primary research into the HCV rna structure and thus the secondary chemical binding processes was done on the public purse
A huge fraction of it was done privately as well, but that's still just one tiny piece in a much larger project. Solving a structure isn't that difficult or expensive for a well-validated experimental system, and the end result helps you guess at what chemical syntheses to try, but actually putting something on the market takes the better part of a decade and hundreds of millions of dollars - and a huge fraction of the time it will fail anyway. It is almost guaranteed that Gilead spent at least $100 million developing their new HCV drug, and you have to add to that an even larger amount of money spent trying stuff that didn't work, which they still need to recoup somehow. I have no idea whether this justifies their selling price or not, but the claim that it cost the company "very small amounts of money" is complete nonsense.
I agree that this isn't an extraordinary example, but I have to take issue with this:
the general rule is that all the data goes public and that all the code written is open source
The first part is correct in the literal sense (this is an absolute requirement of public funding agencies and journals), but that doesn't mean they're unencumbered by patents. The second part, unfortunately, is incorrect: open source is getting more common and scientists are slowly coming around to the idea that this shouldn't be optional, but there are plenty of examples of closed-source software being developed by academic groups, and many more examples where the code is available but not redistributable. Only in the last few years did the NIH start to explicitly state that openness of source code would be a consideration in evaluating grant applications for computational (biomedical) R&D.
Too often these promising studies generate all kinds of hype
This is largely the fault of institutional PR offices - university press releases are notorious for inflating the importance of even the most minor discovery, and their take is what gets reported. (Which isn't to say that scientists aren't complicit, but most of us have sufficient self-awareness to cringe when we read these articles.)
But we keep seeing these big, game-changing announcements out of "eastern" medical researchers. Only to have them turn out to be massive frauds.
This isn't a "game-changing" announcement, not the way (for instance) various stem-cell-related discoveries were. It's an impressive technical accomplishment, and it certainly expands our understanding of this system, but it's nothing revolutionary or unforseen, and it's also really "basic" in the sense of "basic research" - foundational, not applied.
Either way, this is possibly further damning evidence (albeit anecdotal) giving rise to the notion that the US being a free society is a romanticized pipe dream.
Only if you completely disregard free will. No one is pointing a gun at my head and telling me to view the news outlets you are complaining about, and I ignore most of them entirely (I don't even have cable, or a working TV for that matter). Unlike many other countries, there is no government entity blocking me from consuming contrarian and/or foreign news sources. And last time I checked, there were plenty of news sources (foreign and domestic) that were happy to tell me the "truth", or their own preferred version of it. (Remember, for every American who thinks the country can do no wrong, there's someone else who think it's responsible for everything bad that happens, and isn't shy about saying so.)
If you are unhappy that a large fraction of Americans is content to take everything they see on Fox News as incontrovertible truth, well, join the club. Most people simply aren't that smart or thoughtful, and that goes for every other country in the world, not just the US.
This is just nonsensical. The vast majority of articles like this still come from the US/EU/Japan, and most of the technology was developed outside China. In fact, the only reason they're able to do this kind of research is that the last few years have seen exceptional improvements in molecular EM due to a combination of better software and direct electron detectors. In fact, I looked through their methods, and they're using a microscope made by a US/international company, a detector from Japan, and software written in the US and UK. The hardware just requires sufficient funding, the software is free.
So these papers aren't particularly innovative; they're high-profile because it's an important scientific question, but it was only a matter of time before someone decided to tackle it (and only in the last few years has it really been possible). There are generally more questions like this than people who have time to answer them, so it's really easy (intellectually speaking) to pick a random problem, throw money at it, and collect the Science/Nature/Cell paper. And that's kind of the state a lot of Chinese research is in.
I don't mean to sound critical of this work itself - it looks very solid and Yigong Shi has an excellent reputation (he used to be in the US). But all it proves is that China can do research on par with other industrial nations when it wants to.
We still do. It's just that many of those scientists end up going back to their home country to be back with family.
Yigong Shi was in fact a tenured professor at Princeton until a few years ago. I think the Chinese gov't. basically threw gobs of money at him to move to Tsinghua. Before, he was just one of many excellent structural biologists in the US; now, he's arguably the foremost Chinese structural biologist. (Downside: exchanging Princeton faculty meetings for CCP oversight; I'm not sure which sounds worse to me.)
Can you live in the Bay Area taking home 42k/year?
I did for years (also working for the state). I was living here for nearly a decade before I made more than that, in fact; as a grad student my stipend was less than $20k. I have no dependents or debts to pay off, no severe medical conditions, and my benefits were always sufficient, so it was actually very easy. I lived alone for the majority of that time, but even when I shared houses or apartments it was in relatively nice neighborhoods. (All rental, of course.) Until recently I was always living very close to where I worked. I usually had at least a little disposable income and by the time I was taking home more than $30K I was saving some of it.
That said, I live in the East Bay, not SF proper, so my rents are merely extortionate but not totally unaffordable. $42K won't go very far if you want to live in the Mission - and 10 years ago, it wasn't totally unrealistic for a (childless) grad student to have that ambition.
Honestly, from what I've seen I think senior government-employed or government-funded scientists in the Bay Area mostly get paid enough already (and I would include myself in that category until very recently). It's definitely more than we'd get in another part of the country, and we/they get to play with a lot of very cool (and very expensive) toys. But the cost of living is a huge problem for recruiting; a UC Berkeley professor of my acquaintance told me they were finding it increasingly difficult to hire new faculty because they'll never be able own a home anywhere close to Berkeley itself.
Yea just like non-coding DNA is junk. Does every generation have to make the same hubristic errors?
You're grossly overstating the case here. The fact that non-coding DNA contains essential regulatory information has been known for many decades, long before the modern age of genomics. The label "junk" was applied because nobody knew what most of that DNA did, and it obviously has very low information content compared to genes. But this pejorative never stopped people from studying it or trying to figure out what role it played - of course it imposes a significant metabolic cost on the organism, so why keep it around? We just haven't had mature tools to study it until relatively recently. Despite some sensationalism to the contrary, it's still far from resolved whether and how much it is functional; the best-supported hypothesis that I'm aware of is that it's structurally important and facilitates the 3D organization of the genome in cells in such a way that enhances regulatory control. We certainly don't have any clue how to derive therapeutic applications from our knowledge, unlike coding DNA (i.e. translated into proteins that most drugs target).
The claim that "mainstream biologists assumed that noncoding DNA was junk, and therefore asked the wrong questions" is simplistic nonsense at best, and creationist propaganda at worst. Scientific investigation - especially biology - proceeds on the basis of incomplete evidence all the time, because we have no choice (among other lacunae, we still don't understand what half of all human genes actually do). And unexpected new discoveries or inventions shake up molecular biology on a fairly regular basis - 10-15 years ago, RNA interference was thought to be equally revolutionary. So we always hope for surprises (all research faculty at major universities fantasize about making discoveries like Crispr/Cas), but we have to concentrate on areas of study that we feel are most likely to yield actual results.
I sort of despise the idea of patenting features of nature
I'm not sure I would call the therapeutic applications of Crispr/Cas a "feature of nature". Any actual therapy is going to consist of, at a minimum, a combination of synthetic RNA and orthologously expressed Cas9 (probably heavily engineered). This isn't something that exists naturally in humans. I'm generally pretty conservative about what I would consider patentable (software, or "all drugs targeting this protein", are not included), and, frankly, I think it would be better for everyone if the patents around Crispr/Cas were limited to specific treatments rather than the general concept. But regardless, any useful therapies are going to involve a great deal of engineering and trial-and-error - and clinical testing, which is going to be the most expensive part. What's the incentive to spend money on this if China ends up copying it? Don't say "for the good of humanity" - if that were the primary goal, money would be far better spent curing various endemic infectious diseases.
This is in fact how the soviet union was able to compete for so long, but eventually it could not keep increasing the amount of resources that it mobilized.
I almost mentioned Russia in my comment - there was a time in the 1930s, when the US and Europe were stuck in the Depression, many Westerners thought that communism might end up totally eclipsing their (at the time) failed economies. And the USSR did grow from a nation of mostly peasants into an industrial superpower incredibly quickly. China has done much better so far, in large part because it mostly integrated with the global economy which was quick to take advantage of the cheap labor. But it is also making some of the same mistakes, as demonstrated by the "ghost cities", or the high-speed rail crash.
It is capitalism that more effectively makes better and better uses of the resources that are available, and its driven by greed.
I wouldn't say "greed", although that term certainly does apply in many cases; I would call it self interest, which isn't the same thing. The fact that our behavior (and economic activity) is greatly affected by incentives doesn't mean that we're greedy or foolish, it means we're human. It's amazing how many people on both the left and the right ignore this when it doesn't align nicely with their preferred policy goals.
These things, combined with a population advantage, guarantee China's success long-term absent any other forces.
Only up to a point. Part of the reason why China has been enjoying enormous rates of economic growth is that it had so far to go. Once their economy and standard of living starts to get much closer to that of the existing advanced industrial economies, and they lose their advantage of cheap labor, all they're left with is the population advantage. And they'll be busy strip-mining the third world in the meantime, which means they'll probably overreach sooner or later and piss everyone off as badly as the US has. (And the US at least has NATO allies, and reasonably friendly relations with neighboring countries.)
I don't think the GP was limiting the scope to science missions - instead, we should also be developing robotic missions to prepare for eventual humans. And more than just robots; even stuff as relatively trivial as 3D printers will make the difference between sustainable human presence versus short-term missions that won't last. There are many other components: better radiation shielding, genetically optimized plants, improved solar cells, and so on.
Remember, ISS is only a few hundred feet up and it's still insanely expensive to service. If we want affordable permanent settlement on the moon or Mars, we need to limit the number of supply trips.
A big part of the reason why this won't happen is that space-related technology tends to be inherently dual-use, i.e. much of it has military purposes. In fact, that's probably the single biggest reason why there was a space race at all in the 1950s/1960s. Since China is already known to be developing military capabilities specifically to counter the US navy/naval air, and has ongoing territorial disputes with at least five neighboring countries that I can think of offhand (several of which are close US allies), it would be ill-advised of the US to make it easier for them.
the puppet master in the White House is a Muslim. And, by "puppet master" I am not referring to Obama - he is the puppet!
Um... what? I can't tell if this is satire or not.
nobody outside the US even remotely takes that "controversy" serious
Hell, most scientists inside the US don't take the "controversy" seriously, or even notice it most of the time. The only reason most of us care is because those fuckwits keep trying to legislate their mythology into the public schools, otherwise they'd be worth no more thought than, say, flat-earthers or faith healers. And in large parts of the country, e.g. liberal urban areas like the one I live in, it's not even an issue in schools either. (God knows our public schools have enough other problems...)
identified Christians as potential extremists
Identified specific Christians as potential extremists. And they do exist - why is this in any way a surprise? Every faith-based ideology (Marxism obviously falls into this category) eventually attracts violent nutjobs. Even Buddhism has violent extremists, some of whom are currently hard at work ethnically cleansing a Muslim minority in Myanmar. There are also left-wing environmentalist extremists, along with Maoists and anarchists, all of whom the DHS and FBI also track.
Among other things, I find it curious that DHS was searching so hard for "non-Islamist" extremists - almost like Islamist extremists had DHS tacit approval.
The fact that most worldwide religious extremists are currently Muslim does not mean we should give a free pass to domestic extremists just because they happen to follow your preferred religion. (And what makes you so certain that the DHS wasn't investigating domestic Islamists too?) Since Christians are an overwhelming majority in the US, it is certainly logical to look for extremists in that population, especially since they may have an easier time blending in, and there are existing organized extremist groups, some of which have a long history of violence. (I should note that Timothy McVeigh was an "honorably discharged military veteran".)
It will never again occur in academic labs, because academics has been undermined by the multiple generations of decreasingly literate students.
The students you describe don't end up in academic labs, at least not for any job more important than cleaning glassware. Everyone doing real work already has a BS degree at a minimum, and most of them either hold PhDs or are in graduate programs. (Also, a huge fraction of them are immigrants, at least in the US.) Some of them are pretty sloppy nonetheless, but there's absolutely not a surplus of semi-literate scientists in academic research (as opposed to small technical colleges).
I'm just saying that the science rot we're seeing is not coming out of the corporate labs.
Corporate labs have a very different incentive system, and at least in most areas of the biomedical sciences, they publish far less in peer-reviewed journals. What they do publish will usually be better vetted, but this comes at the expense of taking much longer - because, of course, their scientists aren't dependent on (rapid) publication for career advancement. (The issue of applied vs. directed research is a separate problem - very few companies can afford to do truly undirected basic research.) There are certainly things that could be changed about academia to mitigate the problem; the current system of grad students and postdocs doing most of the work in academia is a disaster. (I say this as someone who has spent more than a decade in this system.)
Where you err is assuming that you can simply weed out the bad actors through some kind of personality test. Contrary to your supposition, very few people go into academic research for any impure motivation, and it isn't simply a problem with the people in power. Much of the fraud and incompetence is produced by junior researchers who aren't rich or famous or powerful, and are motivated solely by the need to advance to the next stage in their careers. And there are plenty of examples of people who are motivated in part by "money or power or attention", but also manage to do excellent science at the same time. (Craig Venter is one obvious example, but there are plenty of pure academics who are equally ego-driven.) But in general, everyone following this career path is fundamentally interested in and excited by science, otherwise they would have become doctors or bankers.