Category Archives: Human Genetic Engineering

Human genetic engineering is moving forward exponentially and we are still not having any meaningful societal, regulatory, or legislative conversations about whether, how, and to what extent we should permit the human genome to be altered in ways that flow down the generations.

But dont worry. The scientists assure us, when that can be done, there will (somehow) beSTRICT OVERSIGHT From the AP story:

And lots more research is needed to tell if its really safe, added Britains Lovell-Badge. He and Kahn were part of a National Academy of Sciences report earlier this year that said if germline editing ever were allowed, it should be only for serious diseases with no good alternatives and done with strict oversight.

Please!No more! When I laugh this hard it makes mystomach hurt.

Heres the problem: Strict guidelines rarely are strict and the almost never permanently protect. Theyare ignored, unenforced, or stretched over time until they, essentially, cease to exist.

Thats awful with actions such as euthanasia. But wecant let that kind of pretense rule the day withtechnologies that could prove to be among themost powerful and potentially destructive inventions in human history. Indeed, other than nuclear weapons, I cant think of a technology with more destructive potential.

Strict oversight will have to include legal limitations and clear boundaries, enforced bystiff criminalpenalties, civil remedies, and international protocols.

They wont be easy to craft and it will take significant time to work through all of the scientific and ethical conundrums.

But we havent made a beginning. If we wait until what may be able to be done actually can be done, it will be too late.

Wheres the leadership? All we have now is drift.

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Genetic Engineering with 'Strict Guidelines?' Ha! - National Review

Hope for families with genetic conditions, and scientific breakthrough: that is how headlines are proclaiming a project that modified human embryos to remove mutations that cause heart failure. But anyone who has concerns about such research is often subjected to moral blackmail. We are regularly lumped in with religious reactionaries or anti-abortion campaigners.

The medical justification for spending millions on such research is thin: it would be better spent on developing cures

I am neither. If you peel away the hype, the truth is that we already have robust ways of avoiding the birth of children with such conditions, where that is appropriate, through genetic testing of embryos. In fact, the medical justification for spending millions of dollars on such research is extremely thin: it would be much better spent on developing cures for people living with those conditions. Its time we provided some critical scrutiny and stopped parroting the gospel of medical progress at all costs.

Where genetic engineering really can do something that embryo selection cannot is in genetic enhancement better known as designer babies. Unfortunately, thats where its real market will be. We have already seen that dynamic at work with the three-parent IVF technique, developed for very rare mitochondrial genetic conditions. Already, a scientist has created babies that way in Mexico (specifically to avoid US regulations) and a company has been set up with the aim of developing the science of designer babies.

Scientists who started their careers hoping to treat sick people and prevent suffering are now earning millions of dollars creating drugs to enhance cognitive performance or performing cosmetic surgery. We already have consumer eugenics in the US egg donor market, where ordinary working-class women get paid $5,000 for their eggs while tall, beautiful Ivy League students get $50,000. The free market effectively results in eugenics. So its not a matter of the law of unintended consequences or of scaremongering the consequences are completely predictable. The burden of proof should be on those who say it wont happen.

Once you start creating a society in which rich peoples children get biological advantages over other children, basic notions of human equality go out the window. Instead, what you get is social inequality written into DNA. Even using low-tech methods, such as those still used in many Asian countries to select out girls (with the result that the world is short of more than 100 million women), the social consequences of allowing prejudices and competitiveness to control which people get born are horrific.

Most enhancements in current use, such as those in cosmetic surgery, are intended to help people conform to expectations created by sexism, racism and ageism. More subtly, but equally profoundly, once we start designing our children to perform the way we want them to, we are erasing the fundamental ethical difference between consumer commodities and human beings. Again, this is not speculation: there is already an international surrogacy market in which babies are bought and sold. The job of parents is to love children unconditionally, however clever/athletic/superficially beautiful they are; not to write our whims and prejudices into their genes.

Its for these reasons that most industrialised countries have had legal bans against human genetic engineering for the last 30 years. Think about that for a moment: its pretty unusual for societies that normally put technological innovation at the centre of their policies to ban technologies before theyre even feasible. There have to be very good reasons for such an unprecedented step, and its not to do with protecting embryos. Its to do with the social consequences.

Genetically modified crops are a good comparison. Faced with a similarly irresponsible absolutism from the scientific community as well as with the obvious competition for fame and profit the green movement and the left felt they had to take the issue of GM food into their own hands. Now it looks like its time to campaign for a global ban on the genetic engineering of people. We must stop this race for the first GM baby.

Dr David King is a former molecular biologist and founder of Human Genetics Alert, an independent secular watchdog group that supports abortion rights

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Editing the human genome brings us one step closer to consumer eugenics - The Guardian

A coral reef takes thousands of years to build, yet can vanish in an instant.

The culprit is usuallycoral bleaching, a disease exacerbated by warming watersthat today threatens reefs around the globe. The worst recorded bleaching eventstruck the South Pacific between 2014 and 2016, when rising ocean temperatures followed by a sudden influx of warm El Nio waters traumatizedthe Great Barrier Reef.In just one seasonbleaching decimated nearly a quarter of thevast ecosystem, which once sprawled nearly 150,000 square miles through the Coral Sea.

As awful as it was, that bleaching event was a wake-up call, says Rachel Levin, a molecular biologist who recently proposed a bold technique to save these key ecosystems. Her idea, published in the journal Frontiers in Microbiology, is simple:Rather than finding healthy symbiontsto repopulate bleached coral in nature, engineer them in the lab instead.Given that this would requiretampering with nature in a significant way, the proposal is likely to stir controversial waters.

But Levin argues that with time running out for reefs worldwide, the potential value could wellbe worth the risk.

Levin studied cancer pharmacology as an undergraduate, but became fascinated by the threats facing aquatic life while dabbling in marine science courses. She was struck by the fact that, unlike in human disease research, there were far fewer researchers fighting to restore ocean health. After she graduated, she moved from California to Sydney, Australia to pursue a Ph.D. at the Center for Marine Bio-Innovation in the University of New South Wales, with the hope of applying her expertise in human disease research to corals.

In medicine, it often takes the threat of a serious disease for researchers to try a new and controversial treatment (i.e. merging two womens healthy eggs with one mans sperm to make a three-parent baby).The same holds in environmental scienceto an extent.Like a terrible disease [in] humans, when people realize how dire the situation is becoming researchers start trying to propose much more, Levin says.When it comes to saving the environment, however, there are fewer advocates willing to implementrisky, groundbreaking techniques.

When it comes to reefscrucial marine regions that harbor an astonishing amount of diversity as well as protect land massesfrom storm surges, floods and erosionthat hesitation could be fatal.

Coral bleachingis often presented as the death of coral, which is a little misleading. Actually, its the breakdown of the symbiotic union that enables a coral to thrive. The coral animal itself is like a building developer who constructs the scaffolding of a high rise apartment complex. The developer rents out each of the billions of rooms to single-celled, photosynthetic microbes called Symbiodinium.

But in this case, in exchange for a safe place to live, Symbiodinium makes food for the coral using photosynthesis. A bleached coral, by contrast, is like a deserted building. With no tenants to make their meals, the coral eventually dies.

Though bleaching can be deadly, its actually a clever evolutionary strategy of the coral. The Symbiodinium are expected to uphold their end of the bargain. But when the water gets too warm, they stop photosynthesizing. When that food goes scarce, the coral sends an eviction notice. Its like having a bad tenantyoure going to get rid of what you have and see if you can find better, Levin says.

But as the oceans continue to warm, its harder and harder to find good tenants. That means evictions can be risky. In a warming ocean, the coral animal might die before it can find any better rentersa scenario that has decimated reef ecosystems around the planet.

Levin wanted to solve this problem,by creatinga straightforward recipe for building a super-symbiont that could repopulate bleached corals and help them to persist through climate changeessentially, the perfect tenants. But she had to start small. At the time, there were so many holes and gaps that prevented us from going forward, she says. All I wanted to do was show that we could genetically engineer [Symbiodinium].

Even that would prove to be a tall order. The first challenge was that, despite being a single-celled organism, Symbiodinium has an unwieldy genome. Usually symbiotic organisms have streamlined genomes, since they rely on their hosts for most of their needs. Yet while other species have genomes of around 2 million base pairs, Symbiodiniums genome is 3 orders of magnitude larger.

Theyre humongous, Levin says. In fact, the entire human genome is only slightly less than 3 times as big as Symbiodiniums.

Even after advances in DNA sequencing made deciphering these genomes possible, scientists still had no idea what 80 percent of the genes were for. We needed to backtrack and piece together which gene was doing what in this organism, Levin says. A member of a group of phytoplankton called dinoflagellates, Symbiodinium are incredibly diverse. Levin turned her attention to two key Symbiodinium strains she could grow in her lab.

The first strain, like most Symbiodinium, was vulnerable to the high temperatures that cause coral bleaching. Turn up the heat dial a few notches, and this critter was toast. But the other strain, which had been isolated from the rare corals that live in the warmest environments,seemed to be impervious to heat. If she could figure out how these two strains wielded their genes during bleaching conditions, then she might find the genetic keys to engineering a new super-strain.

When Levin turned up the heat, she saw that the hardySymbiodinium escalated its production of antioxidants and heat shock proteins, which help repair cellular damage caused by heat. Unsurprisingly, the normal Symbiodinium didnt. Levin then turned her attention to figuring out a way to insert more copies of these crucial heat tolerating genes into the weaker Symbiodinium, thereby creating a strain adapted to live with corals from temperate regionsbut with the tools to survive warming oceans.

Getting new DNA into a dinoflagellate cell is no easy task. While tiny, these cells are protected by armored plates, two cell membranes, and a cell wall. You can get through if you push hard enough, Levin says. But then again, you might end up killing the cells. So Levin solicited help from an unlikely collaborator: a virus. After all, viruses have evolved to be able to put their genes into their hosts genomethats how they survive and reproduce, she says.

Levin isolated a virus that infected Symbiodinium, and molecularly altered it it so that it no longer killed the cells. Instead, she engineered it to be a benign delivery system for those heat tolerating genes. In her paper, Levin argues that the viruss payload could use CRISPR, the breakthrough gene editing technique that relies on a natural process used by bacteria, to cut and paste those extra genes into a region of the Symbiodiniums genome where they would be highly expressed.

It sounds straightforward enough. But messing with a living ecosystem is never simple, says says Dustin Kemp, professor of biology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham who studies the ecological impacts of climate change on coral reefs. Im very much in favor of these solutions to conserve and genetically help, says Kemp. But rebuilding reefs that have taken thousands of years to form is going to be a very daunting task.

Considering the staggering diversity of the Symbiodinium strains that live within just one coral species, even if there was a robust system for genetic modification, Kemp wonders if it would ever be possible to engineer enough different super-Symbiodinium to restore that diversity. If you clear cut an old growth forest and then go out and plant a few pine trees, is that really saving or rebuilding the forest? asks Kemp, who was not involved with the study.

But Kemp agrees that reefs are dying at an alarming rate, too fast for the natural evolution of Symbiodinium to keep up. If corals were rapidly evolving to handle [warming waters], youd think we would have seen it by now, he says.

Thomas Mock, a marine microbiologist at the University of East Anglia in the UKand a pioneer in genetically modifying phytoplankton, also points out that dinoflagellate biology is still largely enshrouded in mystery. To me this is messing around, he says. But this is how it starts usually. Provocative argument is always goodits very very challenging, but lets get started somewhere and see what we can achieve. Recently, CSIRO, the Australian governments science division, has announced that it will fund laboratories to continue researching genetic modifications in coral symbionts.

When it comes to human healthfor instance, protecting humans from devastating diseases like malaria or Zikascientists have been willing to try more drastic techniques, such as releasing mosquitoes genetically programmed to pass on lethal genes. The genetic modifications needed to save corals, Levin argues, would not be nearly as extreme. She adds that much more controlled lab testing is required before genetically modified Symbiodinium could be released into the environment to repopulate dying corals reefs.

When were talking genetically engineered, were not significantly altering these species, she says. Were not making hugely mutant things. All were trying to do is give them an extra copy of a gene they already have to help them out ... were not trying to be crazy scientists.

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A Blueprint for Genetically Engineering a Super Coral - Smithsonian

Many Human Genetic Engineering Cons are there that can stop a person from getting through the entire gene therapy. It is a process in which there is a modification or change in the genes of a human. The aim or objective of using Human Genetic Engineering is to choose newborn phenotype or to change or alter the existing phenotype of an adult or an already grown child. Human Genetic Engineering has shown a lot of promise for curing cystic fibrosis. It is a kind of genetic disease that exist in humans. It will increase the level of immunity in people. Increased immunity will make them resistant to several severe diseases.

There is also a speculation that Human Genetic Engineering can be used in other area of work. It can be used for making changes in the physical appearances. Metabolism may notice some improvements. Human Genetic Engineering Cons can be seen on the mental abilities of a human.

However, it can make certain improvements in the intelligence level. Human Genetic Engineering has made a lot of contributions in the field of advanced medical sciences. There is not much data about Human Genetic Engineering Cons . One can easily think of it as a successful invention in the field of medical science.

Gene therapy can be used for curing several deadly diseases. Many diseases are there that have no cure, so this is a helpful invention in this field. It can lead to various health benefits. Genetic engineering can also lead to population free from any diseases. However, some Human Genetic Engineering Cons are also there that can trouble human beings.

This is because of the complications involved in human genes. A person has multiple physical attributes that differ from each other, so chances are there that these attributes get controlled by only one gene sequence. This helps the scientists to make changes or alteration in only one gene at a time and the remaining multiple sequences of genes will automatically be altered.

Scientists involved in this alteration process also noticed that whenever a DNA strand gets a new gene, then it becomes difficult for the DNA strand to make a decision about where the new gene will be settled. It is one of the factors that contribute to Human Genetic Engineering Cons. With the help of genetic engineering scientists will find no difficulty at the time of altering a part of DNA in a human. This will keep them resistant or away from any genetic disease or effects. These effects might be there on the reproductive cells of a person.

For an instance, it these reproductive cells are there on parents that their children will automatically acquire the effects of genetics. Such Human Genetic Engineering Cons can cause few genetic diseases on humans. Chances of errors are always there in making use of genetic engineering for human cloning, agriculture, and in any other related field. Entire human generation can lead to mutation if these Human Genetic Engineering Cons do get removed at their earliest.

Human Genetic Engineering Cons

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Human Genetic Engineering Cons

Artwork via Angelica Alzona/Gizmodo

Today in America, if you are poor, you are also more likely to suffer from poor health. Low socioeconomic statusand the lack of access to healthcare that often accompanies ithas been tied to mental illness, obesity, heart disease and diabetes, to name just a few.

Imagine now, that in the future, being poor also meant you were more likely than others to suffer from major genetic disorders like cystic fibrosis, TaySachs disease, and muscular dystrophy. That is a future, some experts fear, that may not be all that far off.

Most genetic diseases are non-discriminating, blind to either race or class. But for some parents, prenatal genetic testing has turned what was once fate into choice. There are tests that can screen for hundreds of disorders, including rare ones like Huntingtons disease and 1p36 deletion syndrome. Should a prenatal diagnosis bring news of a genetic disease, parents can either arm themselves with information on how best to prepare, or make the difficult decision to terminate the pregnancy. That is, if they can pay for it. Without insurance, the costs of a single prenatal test can range from a few hundred dollars up to $2,000.

And genome editing, should laws ever be changed to allow for legally editing a human embryo in the United States, could also be a far-out future factor. Its difficult to imagine how much genetically engineering an embryo might cost, but its a safe bet that it wont be cheap.

Reproductive technology is technology that belongs to certain classes, Laura Hercher, a genetic counselor and professor at Sarah Lawrence College, told Gizmodo. Restricting access to prenatal testing threatens to turn existing inequalities in our society into something biological and permanent.

Hercher raised this point earlier this month in pages of Genome magazine, in a piece provocatively titled, The Ghettoization of Genetic Disease. Within the genetics community, it caused quite a stir. It wasnt that no one had ever considered the idea. But for a community of geneticists and genetic counsellors focused on how to help curb the impact of devastating diseases, it was a difficult thing to see articulated in writing.

Prenatal testing is a miraculous technology that has drastically altered the course of a womans pregnancy since it was first developed in the 1960s. The more recent advent of noninvasive prenatal tests made the procedure even less risky and more widely available. Today, most women are offered screenings for diseases like Down syndrome that result from an abnormal presence of chromosomes, and targeted testing of the parents can hunt for inherited disease traits like Huntingtons at risk of being passed on to a child, as well.

But there is a dark side to this miracle of modern medicine, which is that choice is exclusive to those who can afford and access it.

This is one of those aspects of prenatal testing that we dont want to talk about, Megan Allyse, who studies reproductive ethics at the Mayo Clinic, told Gizmodo. Theres a wide variety of reasons people might not get access to reproductive technologies. But what is unavoidable is that you are more likely to have access if you are socio-economically well-off.

The scenario Hercher imagines is this: Say you dont have insurance, or have insurance that does not cover the roster of prenatal tests that OB/GYNs commonly recommend. You also cannot afford the tests out-of-pocket, and your baby is born with a genetic disease. This scenario plays out over and over again among people who cannot afford testing, while at the same time many of those who can afford the test for that disease and test positive choose to terminate a pregnancy. Over time, Hercher predicts, that disease would become more prevalent in those communities that could not afford the tests.

Whether this hypothetical scenario will play out in the real world isnt totally clear, in part because there are many variables besides socioeconomic status at work. Maybe you live in a state where abortions are more difficult to access or against local norms, influencing your decision to undergo prenatal testing. Perhaps you oppose abortion for cultural or religious reasons. And there isnt data for on individuals who refuse prenatal testing altogether, even if they could afford it. Somewhere around 70 percent of women opt-in to some form of prenatal testing, but those numbers vary wildly by region, jumping up to about 90 percent on the coasts and dropping significantly in the midwest.

At this point, all researchers can really do is speculate about future disparities in genetic disease. For example, a 2012 meta-analysis published in Prenatal Diagnosis found that across the country, the mean termination rate for Down syndrome was 67 percent, meaning that a significant number of people who undergo prenatal testing and wind up testing positive for Down syndrome choose to end the pregnancy. Of course, not every parent who learns their future child will have Down syndrome wants to terminate the pregnancy. Its is a complex, personal choice. But access to prenatal testing also allows a parent to better plan for their childs future needs.

Some geneticists already see evidence of an accessibility gap in their own clinical practices.

Certainly we know that access to care varies, Massachusetts General medical geneticist Brian Skotko told Gizmodo. His own work has studied the demographic breakdown of Down syndrome, and has found a clear racial pattern in both Down syndrome births and pregnancy terminations.

In Massachusetts, were seeing more Hispanic and black mothers with Down syndrome babies, he said, and what weve learned from their stories is either they dont have access to testing or that if they did get tested, they had strong religious beliefs.

As access to prenatal testing increases, Skotko said, it is likely we will see a drastic reduction in genetic diseases. In the next five years, as tests get better and better, the global market for them is expected to balloon by 25 percent to over $10 billion. We can look to historical evidence, Skotko said. As more people get access to prenatal tests, there will be an increase in number of selective terminations.

Access to prenatal testing isnt the only thing that could lead to Herchers fear becoming a reality, either. Abortion access has become increasingly difficult in some parts of the country, with states like Texas stripping funding for clinics and placing more restrictions on the conditions under which they can take place. In vitro fertilization could one day also contribute, allowing those who can afford the tens of thousands of dollars to undergo IVF to select the most genetically-desirable eggs for implantation.

In her new book, Whittier Law School professor Judith Daar makes a terrifying prediction: that unequal access to IVF may wind up bringing about a new eugenics.

The growth and success of reproductive technologies, accounting for three out of every one hundred babies born in the United States today, have prompted lawmakers to introduce and occasionally pass legislation that expressly or indirectly limits access to [assisted reproductive technologies] by certain individuals, she writes. These formal legal barriers, combined with individual and practice-wide physician conduct, coalesce to suppress access to assisted conception for those who have historically experienced a devaluation of their reproductive worth.

Daar points out that while in the 1942 case Skinner v. Oklahoma, the Supreme Court affirmed that procreation is a right, striking down the states compulsory sterilization of certain criminals, the ruling only weighs in on procreating naturally. The court has yet to rule on anything that might also equalize access to technologies that could help with conception, or to ensure that a child conceived is healthy.

Whats missing in the conversation is how we adopt all of these technologies to a society that considers well-being for all, Eleonore Pauwels, a bioethicist at the Wilson Center, told Gizmodo. There is already an access problem. But what about when were editing out diseases? Who will pay for CRISPR? We are looking at much more disruption in the future.

The only real way to prevent genetic diseases from becoming diseases of poverty, said Josephine Johnston, a bioethicist at The Hastings Institute, is to make sure everyone has access to the same services. While the costs of todays tests may one day be affordable for more people, there will inevitably also be newer, more expensive technologies that create the same issues in the future. Thus is the cycle of healthcares disparity of accessthere are always people for whom treatment is not equal to the rest.

People have to have access to healthcare services, and [genetic testing] needs to be part of what those services include, she told Gizmodo. If you dont have access to testing and termination servicesor support if you continue the pregnancyyou dont really have a choice about what to do. Its not a choice if youre backed into a corner.

The inequality threat that prenatal testing, IVF and germline editing present, is of course a version of the same inequality that has always existed. If you are poor, there is a good chance your access to healthcare is not as good as someone who has more money.

But as these technologies grow in power and expense, the gulf of that inequality widens. Genetic disease has always been our shared vulnerability, Hercher wrote in Genome. When one part of society can opt out of risk, will they continue to feel the same obligation to provide support and resources to those who remain vulnerable, especially if at least some of them have deliberately chosen to accept the risk?

Hercher presents what is really a common vision of dystopia: a future of genetic haves and have-nots in which inequality becomes encoded in our basic biology. But arriving at that future does not require genetic engineering or some other as-yet-unknown technology. All it requires is that we keep doing what we are already doing, living in a world in which access to necessary healthcare is often a luxury off-limits to the poor.

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Will Healthcare Inequality Cause Genetic Diseases to Disproportionately Impact the Poor? - Gizmodo

What began as a broad-based and occasionally sympathetic conduit for anti-Trump activists has evolved into a platform for the maladjusted to receive unhealthy levels of public scrutiny. The cycle has become a depressingly familiar. A relatively obscure member of the political class achieves viral notoriety and becomes a figure of cult-like popularity with some uncompromising display of opposition toward the president only to humiliate themselves and their followers in short order.

Democratic Rep. Maxine Waters is not the first to be feted by liberals as the embodiment of noble opposition to authoritarianism. In May, the Center for American Progress blog dubbed her the patron saint of resistance politics. Left-leaning viral-politics websites now routinely praise Waters as a Trump-bashing resistance leader, the Democratic rock star of 2017, and an all-around badass for her unflagging commitment to trashing the president as a crooked and racist liar, the Daily Beast observed. Waters was even honored by an audience of tweens and entertainers at this years MTV Movie Awards. Even a modestly curious review of Waters record would have led more cautious political actors to keep their distance. Time bombs have a habit of going off.

Zero hour arrived late Friday evening when Waters broke the news of a forthcoming putsch. Mike Pence is somewhere planning an inauguration, the congresswoman from California wrote. Priebus and Spicer will lead the transition. That sounds crazy, but its a familiar kind of crazy.

Anyone who has followed the congresswomans career knows she has a history of making inflammatory assertions for the benefit of her audience. It only takes a cursory google search to discover that, in her decade in politics, Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) has named her the most corrupt member of Congress four times and the misconduct of her chief of staff ensnared her in a House Ethics Committee probe. The Resistance is willing to overlook a plethora of flaws and misdeeds as long as their prior assumptions are validated.

This is not the first time its own heroes have undercut The Resistance.

National Reviews Charles C. W. Cooke recently demonstrated why Louise Mensch, formerly a prominent poster child for The Resistance, has a habit of seeing Russians behind every darkened corner. They are responsible for riots in Missouri, Democratic losses at the polls, and Anthony Weiners libido. In Menschs imagination, a secret Republican Guard is mere moments away from dispatching this administration amid some species of constitutional coup. Cooke also noted that Mensch was elevated to unearned status as a celebrity of the Resistance by the anti-Trump commentary class desperate for what she was selling.

Menschs star has faded, but not before she managed to embarrass those who invested confidence in her sources. Those who embraced her should have been more cautious in the process. Menschs British compatriots long ago caught onto her habit of lashing out at phantoms. A prudent political class would have given her a wide berth.

25-year-old Teen Vogue columnist Lauren Duca became a sensation last December when her article accusing the president of gas lighting the nation went viral. She was festooned with praise for her work from forlorn Democratsculminating in a letter of praise from Hillary Clintonand soon found herself the subject of fawning New York Times profiles and delivering college commencement addresses without any apparent effort to vet her work.

Duca, too, became a source of bias-confirming misinformation for the left. Cute pic of Trump getting tired of winning, she tweeted with the image of an airplane going down in flames. The tweet was quickly deleted, but not before it provided a means by which the pro-Trump right could credibly undermine her integrity.

Attributable only to a plague mass hysteria, liberal Trump opponents collectively determined last December that a paranoid, 127-tweet rant was a work of unpatrolled genius. That diatribe was the work of Eric Garland, a self-described D.C. technocrat based in Missouri whos now infamous game theory polemic was an example of what he calls his spastic historical and political narratives.

Journalists and political activists who surveyed his work declared it not just compelling anti-Trump prose but near historic in its brilliance. It was anything but. Laced with profanity, exaggerated misspellings to caricature his political opponents, and an offensively indiscreet application of the caps lock, Garland threaded 9/11, Al Gore, Hurricane Katrina, Edward Snowden, and Fox News to tell the tale of how Americas sovereignty was repeatedly violated. The Resistance abandoned its better judgment.

It wasnt long before Garland had humiliated anyone who ever treated him as a credible political observer. Rupert Murdoch is a threat to Western Civilization and a Russian operative, he wrote. I WONT BE THE FIRST GARLAND OF MY LINE TO SPILL BLOOD FOR AMERICA AND THE RIGHT SIDE OF HISTORY AND NEVER THE LAST, YOU F***ERS. This kind of hyperventilating excess came as no surprise to anyone who didnt read his manic thread through tears as they struggled to come to terms with the age of Trump.

If Democrats hope to strike a favorable contrast with a lackadaisical White House, theyre not well served by surrounding themselves with reckless people. Too often, the faces of The Resistance wither in the spotlight. A serious movement attracts serious opposition. A frivolous, self-gratifying movement, well, doesnt.

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We Need to Talk About Genetic Engineering | commentary - Commentary Magazine