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FDA Approves Gene-Hacked CRISPR Pigs for Human Consumption

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The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a type of CRISPR gene-edited pig for human consumption.

The US Food and Drug Administration has approved a type of CRISPR gene-edited pig for human consumption.

As MIT Technology Review reports, only an extremely limited list of gene-modified animals are cleared by regulators to be eaten in the United States, including a transgenic salmon that has an extra gene to grow faster, and heat-tolerant beef cattle.

And now a type of illness-resistant pig could soon join their ranks. British company Genus used the popular gene-editing technique CRISPR to make pigs immune to a virus that causes an illness called porcine reproductive and respiratory syndrome (PRRS).

It's the same technology that's been used to gene-hack human babies — experiments that have proven far more controversial — and develop medicine in the form of gene therapies.

The PRRS virus can easily spread in factory farms in the US and cause the inability to conceive, increase the number of stillborn pigs, and trigger respiratory complications, including pneumonia.

It's been called the "most economically important disease" affecting pig producers, since it can have a devastating effect on their bottom lines. According to MIT Tech, it causes losses of more than $300 million a year in the US alone.

Genus' gene-editing efforts have proven highly successful so far, with the pigs appearing immune to 99 percent of known versions of the virus.

Using CRISPR, the company knocked out a receptor that allowed the PRRS virus to enter cells, effectively barring it from infecting its host.

Beyond the respiratory illness, scientists are using gene-editing to make pigs less vulnerable or even immune to other infections, including swine fever.

But before we can eat a pork chop from a gene-edited pig, Genus says that it will have to lock down regulatory approval in Mexico, Canada, Japan, and China as well, the United States' biggest export markets for pork, as MIT Tech reports.

The company is hoping gene-edited pork could land in the US market as soon as next year.

But whether you'll actually know if you're eating meat from a pig that had a virus receptor turned off using a cutting-edge DNA modification technique is unclear.

"We aren't aware of any labelling requirement," Genus subsidiary Pig Improvement Company CEO Matt Culbertson told MIT Tech.

More on CRISPR: Scientist Who Gene-Hacked Human Babies Says Ethics Are "Holding Back" Scientific Progress

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FDA Approves Gene-Hacked CRISPR Pigs for Human Consumption

Google Is Allegedly Paying Top AI Researchers to Just Sit Around and Not Work for the Competition

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Google has one weird trick to hoard its artificial intelligence talent from poachers — paying them to not work at all.

Google apparently has one weird trick to hoard its talent from poachers: paying them to not work.

As Business Insider reports, some United Kingdom-based employees at Google's DeepMind AI lab are paid to do nothing for six months — or, in fewer cases, up to a year — after they quit their jobs.

Known as "garden leave," this type of cushy clause is the luckier stepsister to so-called "noncompete" agreements, which prohibit employees and contractors from working with a competitor for a designated period of time after they depart an employer. Ostensibly meant to prevent aggressive poaching, these sorts of clauses also bar outgoing employees from working with competitors.

Often deployed in tandem with noncompetes, garden leave agreements are more prevalent in the UK than across the pond in the United States, where according to the Horton Group law firm, such clauses are generally reserved for "highly-paid executives."

Though it seems like a pretty good gig — or lack thereof — if you can get it, employees at DeepMind's London HQ told BI that garden leave and noncompetes stymie their ability to lock down meaningful work after they leave the lab.

While noncompetes are increasingly a nonstarter in the United States amid growing legislative pushes to make them unenforceable, they're perfectly legal and quite commonplace in the UK so long as a company explicitly states the business interests they're protecting.

Like DeepMind's generous garden leave period, noncompete clauses typically last between six months and a year — but instead of getting paid to garden, per the former's logic, ex-employees just can't work for competitors for that length of time without risking backlash from Google's army of lawyers.

Because noncompetes are often signed alongside non-disclosure agreements (NDAs), we don't know exactly what DeepMind considers a "competitor" — but whatever its contracts stipulate, it's clearly bothersome enough to get its former staffers to speak out.

"Who wants to sign you for starting in a year?" one ex-DeepMind-er told BI. "That's forever in AI."

In an X post from the end of March, Nando de Freitas, a London-based former DeepMind director who now works at Microsoft offered a brash piece of advice: that people should not sign noncompetes at all.

"Above all don’t sign these contracts," de Freitas wrote. "No American corporation should have that much power, especially in Europe. It’s abuse of power, which does not justify any end."

It's not a bad bit of counsel, to be sure — but as with any other company, it's easy to imagine DeepMind simply choosing not to hire experts if they refuse to sign.

More on the world of AI: Trump's Tariffs Are a Bruising Defeat for the AI Industry

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Google Is Allegedly Paying Top AI Researchers to Just Sit Around and Not Work for the Competition

UnitedHealth Is Asking Journalists to Remove Names and Photos of Its CEO From Published Work

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In the wake of Brian Thompson's murder, the UnitedHealth is now asking journalists to remove or obscure photos of its CEOs' names and faces.

In the wake of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson's murder last week, the insurer's parent company is now asking journalists to remove photos of its remaining executives' names and faces.

After Futurism published a blog about "wanted" posters appearing in New York City that featured the names and faces of the CEOs of UHC's owner UnitedHealth Group and its prescription middleman Optum Rx, a spokesperson for the parent company reached out to ask if we would adjust our coverage to "leave out any names and images of our executives' identities," citing "safety concerns."

That original piece didn't include either CEO's name in its text, but the header image accompanying the article did show screenshots of a TikTok video showing the posters that had been spotted around Manhattan, which featured the execs' faces and names.

During these exchanges, the spokesperson repeatedly refused to say whether any specific and credible threats had been made to the people on the posters.

Out of an abundance of caution, we did decide to edit out the names and faces from the image.

But the request highlights the telling dynamics of the murder that have seized the attention of the American public for over a week now. While everyday people struggle to get the healthcare they need with no support — and frequently die during the process — the executives overseeing the system have operatives working behind the scenes to control the dissemination of information that makes them uncomfortable.

After all, these are business leaders who are paid immense sums to be public figures, and whose identities are listed on Wikipedia and business publications — not to mention these insurers' own websites, until they abruptly pulled them down in the wake of the slaying.

There's also something unsettling about the rush to decry the murder and censor information around other healthcare executives when children are killed by gun violence every week, with little reaction from lawmakers and elites beyond a collective shrug.

Per the Gun Violence Archive, a nonprofit that tracks firearm violence, there have been at least five mass shootings since Thompson was killed on December 4. There have also been two ongoing stories about children shooting and killing family members — one in which a seven-year-old accidentally killed his two-year-old brother, and another involving a toddler who shot his 22-year-old mother with her boyfriend's gun after discovering it lying around.

When anybody is killed with a firearm in the United States, whether they're a CEO or a young mother, it's a tragedy. But only one of those horrors activates a behind-the-scenes effort to protect future victims.

More on the UHC shooting: Americans Point Out That UnitedHealthcare Tried to Kill Them First

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Elon Musk’s "Charity" Is Hoarding Money Instead of Giving It to the Needy

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Elon Musk's charity is falling short of the minimum amount of money it is supposed to giveaway by hundreds of millions of dollars.

Mr. Miser

The holidays may be approaching, but it appears that SpaceX and Tesla CEO Elon Musk is remaining a total scrooge.

The New York Times reports that the centibillionaire's charity, the Musk Foundation, failed to give away the minimum amount of money it was supposed to last year by a stupendous margin of $421 million.

This continues Musk's pattern of shadily managing his ostensibly philanthropic efforts, such as when he made it seem like he was donating billions of dollars to the United Nations to combat world hunger but instead funneled that money to his own charity.

Now, if Musk doesn't give away that sum by the end of 2024, he will be forced to pay a "sizable penalty" to the Internal Revenue Service, according to NYT's reporting.

Pocket Change

According to the NYT, Musk's charity has increasingly fallen behind on payments despite possessing some $9 billion in assets today. It was $41 million short in 2021, $234 million in 2022, and is now approaching half a billion this year.

He's made up for those shortfalls so far by paying late, but only barely. "The distributions made by the foundation are meeting the bare minimum to avoid penalties," Brian Mittendorf, an accounting professor at the Ohio State University, told the NYT. "It is clear that the organization is not in a hurry to spend its money."

The newspaper notes that other charitable foundations have fallen short of the IRS's minimum by millions of dollars, but that Musk's is an anomaly even among those because of the staggering sum it has to pay and the rate at which that shortfall is increasing.

And there are other shady facets of the organization, the NYT found. It's never hired employees, and its three directors — Musk is one of them — have spent just two hours per week at the foundation over the past three years.

In the cases where it has actually given away money, it has often gone to organizations with close ties to Musk. In 2023, he made a $137 million donation to a nonprofit called The Foundation run by several of Musk's close associates, which operates a private school in Texas close to where several of Musk's businesses are based and where he plans to build a large subdivision for his employees.

Tax Attack

Ultra-wealthy figures have long used philanthropic organizations as a refuge from the treasury department, taking advantage of their generous tax breaks. That's nothing new.

But this dodgy charity management is especially hypocritical behavior from Musk, who has championed increased scrutiny into how government funds are spent and has proposed slashing trillions of dollars in federal expenditures through his so-called Department of Government Efficiency, which will be formed as part of the incoming Trump administration.

One of his chief targets, unsurprisingly, has been the IRS. Musk recently suggested "deleting" the federal agency, while consistently calling for the hollowing out of others. Even before his DOGE crusade and overt rightward turn, Musk has groused publicly about government tax men and spread obvious falsities about the IRS.

For someone so concerned about scrupulous spending, then, it seems that Musk can be quite underhanded with how he spends his fortune.

More on Musk: Elon Musk Gloats as Trump Announces Billionaires Will Be Exempt From Normal Environmental Rules

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RFK Jr., Who Hates Adderall, Says Heroin Was Great for Treating His ADHD

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RFK Jr. admitted that using heroin helped him become a better student — but when it comes to actual ADHD meds, he's not having it.

The man Donald Trump has chosen to lead the United States' health system claimed that doing heroin helped him become a better student — the same month he said that people on Adderall should be sent to "wellness farms."

"I was at the bottom of my class, I started doing heroin, and I went to the top of my class," Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. told podcaster Shawn Ryan in a newly-resurfaced clip from July. "Suddenly I could sit still, and I could read and I could concentrate. I could listen to what people were saying."

The political scion went on to acknowledge that he would "probably today be diagnosed with ADHD" and that using heroin and other drugs like cocaine were a form of self-medication.

When it comes to actual prescription medications, however, the 70-year-old anti-vaxxer sings a different tune.

The same month that the Ryan interview was posted, Kennedy told another podcaster that he would like to see what he calls "wellness farms" where people on medications including Adderall can go and get clean — while remaining pointedly vague on whether these stays would be voluntary.

"I’m going to create these wellness farms where they can go to get off of illegal drugs, off of opiates, but also illegal drugs, other psychiatric drugs, if they want to," he told the "Latino Capitalist" podcast, "to get off of SSRIs, to get off of benzos, to get off of Adderall, and to spend time as much time as they need — three or four years if they need it — to learn to get reparented, to reconnect with communities."

And a few months prior, he made similar comments, sans the ominous mention of labor camps, in yet another podcast interview.

"Our kids are all on Adderall. They’re all on [anti-depressant] SSRIs. Why?" Kennedy told Todd Ault. "Doctors didn’t just start prescribing these for no reason. We have damaged this entire generation. We have poisoned them."

Taken together, these three remarks make it seem that in the mind of the man tapped to be our next Health and Human Services secretary, a powerful opioid is less severe a drug than Adderall — and to our minds, there's nothing healthy about that.

More on RFK Jr.: Trump's Raw Milk Zealot Accused of Inappropriately Touching Babysitter

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RFK Jr., Who Hates Adderall, Says Heroin Was Great for Treating His ADHD