Jacksonville Business Journal | Ever been perscribed the wrong drug? This First Coast pharmacist has a genetic test to prevent it Jacksonville Business Journal Depending on your genes, you could be a poor metabolizer, Intermediate, extensive (normal), or rapid metabolizer. Without testing for your polymorphisms, you and your doctor simply are guessing what medicine to try. Hopefully, you do not get the wrong ... |
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Rob Metcalf, left, and Mark Harris of NextGxDx, now Concert Genetics
Lee Steffen
Say goodbye to NextGxDx and hello to Concert Genetics.
The buzzy Nashville-area health-tech company, a high-profile graduate of the city's original startup accelerator, has rebranded. The name change reflects the company's effort to bring a broader pool of stakeholders including clinicians, labs and, increasingly, health plans together (in "concert" as it were) to move genetic testing and precision medicine forward.
Rob Metcalf, left, and Mark Harris of NextGxDx, now Concert Genetics
Lee Steffen
"We've had the name NextGxDx for seven years now," Mark Harris, founder and chief innovation of the genetic-testing marketplace company, said in an exclusive interview. "I think it served its purpose well."
The company formerly known as NextGxDx, which offers a variety of tools to increase "transparency and efficiency in genetic testing," as described in a news release, was founded by Harris in 2010. The company went through accelerator-turned-investment fund Jumpstart Foundry, and is often cited as one of the program's most successful graduates and one of the area's most promising health-tech ventures.
Now called Concert Genetics, the firm offers a searchable database of genetic tests for clinicians, along with products providing information and transparency around genetic testing to hospitals and health insurers.
Last summer, Harris gave up the CEO title at the young company. Rob Metcalf, formerly president of white-hot Franklin-based cognitive computing company Digital Reasoning, took over the top executive spot a little more than seven months ago, around which time the name-change conversation began.
"We started more or less when I came on board," Metcalf said, explaining that he early on asked Harris if he'd consider a name that captured the "broader impact" of the company's work.
The name "NextGxDx" was meant to reflect the way the company represented "the next step in genomics and diagnostics," Harris said. But in the years since the company was founded, he continued, the market for precision medicine tools has grown and the company has broadened its customer base, most notably to include insurers, spurring the change.
Still, Metcalf said, the team "didn't really set out to change the name."
"We set out to figure out the strategy for growing the business," he said.
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This well-known health-tech company has a new name - Nashville Business Journal
Venkatraman Venki' Ramakrishnan, the Indian born structural biologist who shared the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009 with two other scientists, cautioned against the risks associated with recent developments in biotechnology. Ramakrishnan spoke about the issue at the annual meeting of the American Association for Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Boston.
Many of the genetic cells could be treated by removing cells from the body and modifying it, he said while addressing one of the major ethical concerns related to genetic engineering. Treating a well-known genetic disease is something that many people would agree with. It gets trickier when someone says, I consider being a brown guy in today's atmosphere a problem and don't want my children to go through that'.
Currently the President of the Royal Society of London, he said, I grew up in India where lot of people still don't have access to enough food, and cancer survival rates remain one of the lowest in the world. But in UK and US people have far greater access to healthcare. He added, When we decide what to do with the technology that we have, we need to consider not only what we can do, but also what we should do. He also said that the benefits of new technology should not be limited to a few rich countries.
Genetic engineering remains a debated topic among the scientists as well as the general people. We now have a much wider range of tools at our disposal. They are making genetic manipulation faster, easier and simpler, Ramakrishnan said referring to the easier production of insulin, vaccines and the availability of genetically modified crops that give a better yield.
The Nobel laureate was of the opinion that scientists need to address the concerns that the people have and that there must be public debate along with robust science.
If you were to say wipe out mosquitoes, many people won't complain. This may not necessarily be the right thing to do, he explained. There is a natural worry if you would be able to reverse it if there was some kind of problem, he said. Referring to the food shortage in many of the developing countries including India, he pointed out that technology like genetic engineering of crops could help us increase the yield.
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Since the discovery of the genome-editing tool CRISPR/Cas9, scientists have been looking to utilize the technology to make a significant impact on correcting genetic diseases. Technical challenges have made it difficult to use this method to correct disorders that are caused by single-nucleotide mutations, such as cystic fibrosis, sickle cell anemia, Huntington's disease, and phenylketonuria. However now, researchers from the Center for Genome Engineering, within the Institute for Basic Science (IBS) in Korea, have just used a variation of CRISPR/Cas9 to produce mice with single-nucleotide differences. The findings from this new study were published recently in Nature Biotechnology in an article entitled Highly Efficient RNA-Guided Base Editing in Mouse Embryos.
Although genome editing with programmable nucleases such as CRISPRCas9 or Cpf1 systems holds promise for gene correction to repair genetic defects that cause genetic diseases, it is technically challenging to induce single-nucleotide substitutions in a targeted manner, the authors wrote. This is because most DNA double-strand breaks (DSBs) produced by programmable nucleases are repaired by error-prone non-homologous end-joining (NHEJ) rather than homologous recombination (HR) using a template donor DNA. As a result, insertion/deletions (indels) are obtained much more frequently at a nuclease target site than are single-nucleotide substitutions.
The most frequently used CRISPR/Cas9 technique works by cutting around the faulty nucleotide in both strands of the DNA and cuts out a small part of DNA. In the current study, the investigators used a variation of the Cas9 protein (nickase Cas9, or nCas9) fused with an enzyme called cytidine deaminase, which can substitute one nucleotide into anothergenerating single-nucleotide substitutions without DNA deletions.
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An Efficient Single-Nucleotide-Editing CRISPR - Genetic Engineering & Biotechnology News
Many rely on blood transfusions
Joe Amon/The Denver Post via Getty
By Andy Coghlan
A TEENAGE boy with an inherited disease that affects millions worldwide seems to have been cured using gene therapy. The treatment appears to have stopped the painful symptoms of sickle cell disease, demonstrating the potential for gene therapy to treat common genetic diseases.
All the blood tests we performed show that the teenager has been cured of sickle cell disease
The idea of gene therapy using strands of DNA to compensate for a persons malfunctioning genes is almost three decades old. However, the approach has so far mostly been used to treat very rare diseases (see Long road to success). In contrast, sickle cell disease affects 100,000 people in the US alone. If the treatment proves successful in larger trials, it could bring gene therapy into widespread use.
It could be a game changer, says Deborah Gill at the University of Oxford. The fact the team has a patient with real clinical benefit, and biological markers to prove it, is a very big deal.
People with sickle cell disease make abnormal versions of haemoglobin, the blood protein that carries oxygen around the body. This can be caused by mutations in the gene that makes a subunit of haemoglobin, called beta-globin. The mutations cause haemoglobin to clump together, distorting red blood cells into a sickle-shape that can get stuck in blood vessels around the body.
People with the disorder are given blood transfusions to clear these painful blockages and prevent new ones. Bone marrow transplants can treat the disease, but matching donors can only be found for around 10 per cent of people with the condition.
Now a team in France seems to have developed a treatment that would work for everyone with the disorder. First, the team took bone marrow stem cells from the boy when he was 13, and gave them extra, mutated versions of the gene that codes for beta-globin. These were designed to make beta-globin that would interfere with the boys faulty proteins, stopping them from clumping together.
The researchers then put these stem cells back into the boys body. After around three months, he began producing large quantities of haemoglobin that behaves normally (New England Journal of Medicine, DOI: 10.1056/NEJMoa1609677). The patient is now 15 years old and free of all previous medication, says Marina Cavazzana at the Necker Childrens Hospital in Paris, who led the team. He has been free of pain from blood vessel blockages, and has given up taking opioid painkillers.
Cavazzana is confident these benefits will last. All the tests we performed on his blood show that hes been cured, but more certainty can only come from long-term follow-up. She says her team has treated seven other patients, who are showing promising progress.
We are all very excited by the work, and this success provides support for this and other genetic strategies targeting this horrible disease, says John Tisdale at the US National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute in Maryland.
David Williams, at Boston Childrens Hospital in Massachusetts, suggests that the boy may still occasionally experience blockages, because his own original genes are still able to produce faulty haemoglobin. Its important to see what happens over time, and how many other patients see similar benefits.
However, should the gene therapy prove to be effective in larger trials, its expense may limit its use to richer nations. We should be realistic in remembering that there are hundreds of thousands of sickle cell patients in less developed countries, and that the therapy is not easily exportable or adaptable to countries with less well-developed health systems, says Stuart Orkin at Harvard Medical School.
Twenty years ago, gene therapy was touted as a cure for everything from cancer to cystic fibrosis. Now it is finally starting to fulfil its promise.
In 2012, Glybera became the first gene therapy to be approved, for people with a rare disorder that makes them unable to process dietary fat. Last year, the first commercial gene therapy that alters a persons DNA was approved for children with a severe immune disorder. Gene therapies for rare forms of blindness are also showing promise.
But these conditions all affect very small numbers of people. Research into sickle cell disease (see main story), beta thalassaemia, haemophilia and cystic fibrosis mean gene therapy may not be too far from becoming mainstream medicine for the most common genetic diseases.
This article appeared in print under the headline Gene therapy breakthrough
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Gene therapy 'cures' boy of blood disease that affects millions - New Scientist
A 13-year-old boy with sickle cell disease showed no signs of the disease and resumed normal activities 15 months after an infusion of LentiGlobin BB305, according to a study conducted in France and published in The New England Journal of Medicine.
Outcomes in this patient provide further supportive evidence to our previously reported results of patients who underwent a similar ex-vivo gene therapy procedure for beta thalassemia with the same BB305 vector or the previous HPV569 vector, Jean-Antoine Ribeil, MD, PhD, of the department of biotherapy at Necker Childrens Hospital in Paris, and colleagues wrote. In addition to the patient with sickle cell disease described here, under this same clinical protocol, four patients with transfusion-dependent beta thalassemia have received LentiGlobin BB305 [Bluebird Bio] and had no clinically significant complications and no longer require regular transfusions.
Approximately 90,000 people in the United States have sickle cell disease, and more than 275,000 infants worldwide are born with the disease each year.
Granted breakthrough therapy designation by the FDA in 2015, LentiGlobin BB305, is a self-inactivating lentiviral vector that encodes the human HBB variant BetaA-T87Q. This lentiviral vector mediates the addition of an antisickling beta-globin gene into autologous hematopoietic stem cells.
Ribeil and colleagues obtained bone marrow twice from the patient to collect sufficient stem cells for gene transfer and backup. Anemia was the only grade 3 adverse event reported during these procedures.
Researchers then transduced bone marrowenriched CD34positive cells with the LentiGlobin BB305 vector. The mean vector copy numbers for the two batches of transduced cells were 1 and 1.2 copies per cell.
The patient underwent myeloablation with IV busulfan (total busulfan area under the curve, 19,363 mol/minute). After a 2-day washout period, transduced CD34positive cells were infused and red-cell transfusions continued after transplantation until a large proportion of beta-globin chain of adult hemoglobin (HbA)T87Q was detected.
Neutrophil engraftment was achieved on day 38 after transplantation, and platelet engraftment was achieved on day 91 after transplantation. Within 3 months, gene markings in whole blood, CD15 cells, B cells and monocytes had stabilized. Researchers observed more gradual increases in levels of vector-bearing T cells.
HbAT87Q cells increased steadily to 5.5g/dL at month 9 and 5.7 g/dL at month 15 and red-cell transfusions were discontinued on day 88.
The patient was discharged on day 50. By more than 15 months after transplantation, no sickle cell diseaserelated clinical events or hospitalization had occurred, and all medications, including for pain management, were discontinued.
The patient experienced expected grade 3 to grade 4 adverse events of neutropenia, anemia, thrombocytopenia and infection with Staphylococcus epidermidis.
The patient reported full participation in normal academic and physical activities, Ribeil and colleagues wrote.
Researchers noted their finding were consistent with early results reported with 18 other patients with thalassemia who received LentiGlobin BB305 and that longer follow-up is required to confirm the efficacy, durability and safety observed in the study.
In an accompanying perspective, Keith Wailoo, PhD, Townsend Martin professor of history and public affairs at Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in Princeton, New Jersey, wrote that findings on the benefits of crizanlizumab (SEG101, Novartis) and gene therapy represent new chapters in treating sickle cell disease.
Patients with sickle cell disease have come a long way from their clinical obscurity 100 years ago, Wailoo wrote. The search for a magic bullet continues, though most clinicians acknowledge that therapies wont cure the disease but merely enhance long-term management. by Chuck Gormley
Disclosure: Bluebird Bio funded the study. Ribeil reports personal fees from Bluebird Bio during the conduct of the study, grant support from AddMedica, and nonfinancial support from Novartis and Vitalaire outside the submitted work. The researchers report no relevant financial disclosures. Wailoo reports no relevant financial disclosures.
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Gene therapy product shows early promise in sickle cell disease - Healio
Infants born with a type of the devastating immune disorder SCID, or bubble boy disease, may have the option of a novel gene therapy treatment, thanks to a clinical trial at UCSF Benioff Childrens Hospital San Francisco.
The trial is funded by a five-year, $11.9-million grant from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine (CIRM) to test technology developed by St. Jude Childrens Research Hospital that delivers a functional gene into the patients blood-producing stem cells. If successful, the gene therapy could provide an alternative to stem cell transplants using donor cells, which can result in serious infection.
The trial expects to treat up to 15 children over the next five years and is open to patients with X-linked severe combined immunodeficiency disease (X-linked SCID), which affects only males. This is the most common form of SCID, which occurs in 1 in every 60,000 newborns, and is caused by defects in the functioning of lymphocytes the white blood cells that are the advanced fighting forces of the immune system. Babies born with SCID appear normal at birth but become sick from infections, skin rashes and failure to gain weight at 3-to-6 months of age. Without a stem cell transplant, they may die before their first birthday.
What is unique about this trial is that the patients own bone marrow stem cells are collected and corrected with the gene therapy, and the corrected cells are then reinfused into the patient, said Morton Cowan, M.D., of the UCSF Division of Allergy, Immunology, and Blood and Marrow Transplant, and principal investigator of the trial at UCSF.
In stem cell transplants from a donor other than the patient, up to 20 percent of patients with SCID will develop graft-versus-host disease, in which the donor cells attack the recipients tissues. In addition, there is always a risk of the recipient rejecting the donor cells, Cowan said. Using the patients own stem cells means no rejection and no graft-versus-host disease.
The bone marrow transplant program at UCSF is among the largest SCID transplant centers in North America. UCSF pediatric immunologist Jennifer Puck, M.D., is known for pioneering the SCID screening method and for nominating SCID to a federal advisory committee for inclusion in the newborn screening panel. Since the screen became available in California in 2010, UCSF has treated more than 30 infants diagnosed with SCID by newborn screening.
UCSF also played an instrumental role in the St. Jude treatment protocol by including a targeted chemotherapy agent, busulfan, along with the gene therapy, which is expected to optimize immune correction. While previous trials have tested gene therapy for this condition, they did not combine it with chemotherapy and had only partial immune correction. Since a low dose of the medication is used, short- and long-term effects are expected to be minimized.
Three patients already have been treated with this lentiviral gene therapy vector two at St. Jude and one at UCSF. The transduction process, in which genetic material is transferred via vector, currently takes place at St. Jude, which freezes the transduced cells and returns them to UCSF for infusion into the patient. The CIRM funding will enable UCSF to begin doing transductions using the St. Jude vector at the UCSF Pediatric Cell Therapy Laboratory, as well as covering the cost of treating patients in the trial.
We believe this trial will not only help us understand more about how lentiviral gene therapy works, but how the use of low-dose busulfan potentially will be effective in treating other non-malignant diseases like sickle-cell anemia, chronic granulomatous disease, marrow failure syndromes and even some cancers in which the patient is too ill to undergo the more toxic traditional treatments, said Cowan.
It will also give us a better idea of what toxicities may be associated with the use of these new vectors, in particular whether they are indeed safer than the older, gamma-retroviral vectors that were associated with a high risk of leukemia, seen in early gene therapy trials for X-linked SCID and other primary immune deficiencies.
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Gene Therapy Offers Hope for Newborns with Severe Immune Disorder - Bioscience Technology
Demographer Bernard Salt found himself at the centre of a storm late last year when millennials failed to see the irony in his remarks about their tendency to spend money on smashed avocado instead of saving for a house.
If anything, avogate underscored his serious point about the growing chasm between the generations, and the haves and the have-nots in our society.
Here the KPMG futurist shares his thoughts on what lies ahead.
HOME OWNERSHIP & HIPSTERS
I do see a divided community those who have bought into the property market and those who havent, for whatever reason.
I dont think Melbourne is any different from Manhattan Island, London or Paris.
Not everyone working in New York under the age of 35 has an expectation that they will be able to buy an apartment on Manhattan Island.
In Tokyo, in London, you accept the fact you rent.
On one hand we proudly say Melbourne is a global city, but that means the price of property rises because you are competing with people with global incomes. That then relegates locals further out.
The goats cheese curtain is moving. Bentleigh now has one of Melbournes hippest cafes. I mean Centre Road, Bentleigh, thats like east of Brighton. It might be that by 2025 the hipster zone extends to Burwood.
CHANGING OF THE GUARD
It might be that 2017 is a year of consolidation, but it strikes me there is a mood for change, whether that is political, which would come in 2018-19, or whether it is social or generational.
The avocado row simply triggered the festering resentment in a generation. I think a large proportion of the population, baby boomers and me included, was not aware of the extent of the sentiment.
I am concerned we are creating a double society. The old way, the old regime, the old logic is not meeting expectations. That was evident in 2016 with Trumpism and in Brexit. We would be foolhardy to say it does not affect us here.
BREAK POINT
There is a break point coming, when baby boomers will cede authority to a new generation, whether it is X or Y. The oldest baby boomers were born in 1946, so this year they are 71. The midpoint of the generation is pushing into their 60s.
It is time for this generation to move on and we are seeing that in budgets, in calls for higher superannuation and houses to be included in taxable assets for pension allocation. Baby boomers have circled the wagons.
At some point they must give way, youth must win out and I think what lies beyond 2017 is an Xand Y world.
E-CHANGE
Photo: iStock
Sea change morphed into tree change and the next iteration is e-change, where you take your job from the CBD and relocate to Daylesford or Torquay and do your job from there for at least part of the week.
Location is vital; you cant e-change in Nhill or Dimboola, you need to be within a reasonable distanceof Melbourne, but not necessarily on a dailycommute.
Those cute towns in the goldfields will be talking about Melbourne e-changers into the future.
ENTREPRENEURS RULE
More people will go to regional centres and start their own businesses. One of the strongest themes of the past two years has been small business development.
Its a combination of intellectual capacity being released into the market after the mining boom, and people in their late 50s and early 60s saying they are not ready to retire, and going into business for themselves.
MY TIME NOW
Photo: iStock
Bucket list thinking is driving a group I call MYTNs My Time Now. They have paid off the mortgage, the kids have left home and they are doing Rhine River and Alaskan cruises and having their kitchens made over.
At the extreme edge of MYTN philosophy, people are re-evaluating their relationships.
I think we will see a spate of de-partnering. Increasingly that decision will be made by women who have their own superannuation and income.
It might mean travelling or bushwalking with friends, because it is more engaging than sitting at home with someone who doesnt want to do anything.
The Next Five Years with Bernard Salt premieres onSky News Business on February 2 at9pm.
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Trends this year & beyond with smashed avo futurist Bernard Salt - The Weekly Review
Individualisation is the future of marketing. I write this just after the holiday season when I have been eating too much, and not long after looking up a gym membership.
My inbox is now awash with pop-up ads sprouting weight-loss remedies. This is what I would call personalisation sending an email to a group of people (those who look for gym memberships for example) targeting similar products that might be of interest. Unfortunately, we are all becoming immune to this type of targeting.
The future of marketing, therefore, should be more about targeting on a more individual level. In the online age, many marketers seem to have forgotten about the consumer experience offline and this is what we need to focus on more in the future.
Big data is wonderful because it can tell us so much about our customers, but it is what we do with that data once we have it and how we use our creativity to bring it to life in the real world that will shape the future success of our marketing efforts.
For example, we might know that a certain guest likes a memory foam pillow, drinks espressos with soy milk, regularly orders a club sandwich and a red wine for dinner and always has a crime novel by their bedside. We could greet them with a soy milk espresso or send up a bottle of red wine to their room. This would be what you might call personalisation.
But what about if we went the next step and sent them a hand-written list of nearby wineries or the latest crime novel thats just been released. If we wanted to take it one step further, we could ask them to meet the executive chef to design their own club sandwich and add it to the menu or have their name sewn onto a memory pillow to take home with them. This is individualisation and is the perfect way to use our marketing skills to create magic for our guests.
We must all adapt our approach to individualisation. This is what todays demanding consumer expects. Millennials, especially, want to feel that you understand them and are speaking to them personally. They have a highly developed sense of self and want you to see them as an individual.
We must remember the average person receives over 5000 communication messages per day. It is increasingly difficult, then, to reach todays consumer so it is vital that you are targeting your messages to the individual and not just to a blanket group of like-minded people.
Technology allows us to drive more meaningful marketing, but it is how we use the data to target the individual that will make our marketing efforts stand out.
At AccorHotels, we use Local Measure to gain insights into their preferences and predict their future patterns. Local Measure uses local content, social media and mobile technology to provide live data to operationalise service at a local level.
This is the height of individualisation, because we can quickly learn that a certain guest is celebrating a birthday, for example, and then surprise them with a cake or gift. We can see if they are having issues with their rooms and immediately send someone to rectify them and we can start to understand the kind of activities they enjoy during their stay to individually suggest new services to them.
Again, it comes down to bringing the online data into an offline experience that is individually targeted. We also recently invested in John Paul, a concierge and CRM business, to better target our guests through individualisation.
Todays consumer demands you speak to them directly. For myself, if those companies sending me pop-up ads suggesting diets had targeted me individually, they would know I would be more interested in a triathlon in an inspiring destination than in a weight-loss solution and perhaps they would stop making me feel like I am fat! This is where individualisation will always win.
The author of the article is Michael Parsons, vice president of marketing and strategic relationships, Asia Pacific, AccorHotels.
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The Futurist: Individualisation is the future of marketing - Marketing Interactive
3,770,000,000 Years Ago
The origin of life has long been contentiously debated, often because researchers are trying to understandevents that occurredbillions of years ago. Adding to the debate is a recent discovery from deep in the exotic landscape of the Nuvvuagittuq (nuh-vu-ah-gi-took) belt in Canada where scientists have uncovered fossils they believe to be 3.77 billion years old. If theyre right, that would make their discovery the oldest fossil evidence on record.
Claims that speculate the age of ancient fossils always set the science world ablaze, mainly because very old rocks often undergogeological deformations. Everything from erosion to weatheringcan remove signs of life, making it highly unlikely wed find anything thousands, let alone billions, of years later. However, lead researcherMatthew Doddis confident that his teams Canadian discovery will hold up to the scrutiny.
The straw-shaped microfossils uncovered by the team were found in a part of Canada that once was a hydrothermal vent on the ocean floor. The microscopic microbes that created these fossils would have germinated around thevents to take advantage of their volatile chemistry to create fuel. When themicrobes died, iron in the water would latch onto their decaying bodies, eventually replacing their organic structures with stone that the researchers can now study.
After proper analysis, the youngest estimate of the microbes isaround 3.77 billion years. However, the microbes may be as old as 4.28 billion yearsthats only about260 million years after the Earth was formed.The research is published in the journalNature.
Our current understanding of the origin of life on Earth is that it dates back to 3.4 to 3.5 billion years ago. The present findings suggest that the first incidence of life occurred300 million years sooner than that, so if the age of the microbe fossils is verified, the implications would be tremendous.
In addition to the findings by Dodds team, the discovery of reportedly 3.7 billion year old fossils in Issua, Greenlandis awaiting verification as well. Those fossils indicated the existence of a photosynthetic bacteria, while Dodds team is suggesting their discovery is of a chemosynthetic bacterias fossil. The age and apparent diversity of these organisms suggests a much more profound outlook on the origin of life in the universe.
These fossils would challenge our fundamental understanding of the origin of life. We would have to revisit what we thought we knew about the potential for organic matter to flourish during a time when the Earth wasbombarded by asteroids, the environment was changing radically every hundred years, and the planets surface was sodden with molten lava. If life was able to develop under those conditions, were left with more questions than answers.
What we believed to be a steady process that required time and caution might just be something more sporadic, which would in turn suggest that life might be more of a cosmic phenomenon than just an Earth-based one. This could change how we think about the potential for life on other planets, or evenMars, which was teeming with oceansand warm 3.77 billion years ago.Not finding life on the Red Planet would tell us a lot, too, namely that life on Earth is due to some fluke or a phenomenon unique to our planet.
Now, all thats left to do is wait to find out if these ancient fossils are as ancient as their discoverers hope.
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Scientists Just Found Fossils Containing the Oldest Evidence of Life on Earth - Futurism
In Brief
Our access to information in todays digital world is unprecedented in human history. The internet is the hub of everything, and its already changed the way weconsume information, including how we watch video content. In fact,according to a Nielsen study, people now watch YouTube more than traditional television, and on-demand services are more popular than ever.
Given the enormous amount of available content on YouTube, subscription-based sites like Netflix, and innumerable other sources online, the process of finding something you really want to watch can take a long time. According to one study, the average Americanwill end up spending fullyearsworth of time during their life just in the pursuit of something to watch.
Much of that time is wasted on listless browsing in the hopes of stumbling across something interesting especially if youve just finished binge-watching the latest season of your favorite Netflix series. Wouldnt it be nice to have a site that curates the videos that best match your interests? Wouldnt it be even nicer if that site could generate new content based on what you like, so you can just sit back, relax, and not bother with browsing at all?
Thats precisely what Neverthink.TVoffers.
Neverthink.TV doesnt just compile videos into one site; it collects videos from the internet in real time and groups them into different channels, everything from gaming and artto fashion and food.
For example, if you like technology, Neverthink.TV collects tech news videos from the internet and collates them into one channel for youto watch. It plays the latest videos one by one, so essentially, the site is bringing back the experience of watching TV, except this time, youll only see videos that youre likely to find interesting.
Neverthink.TV will change the way you consume video content, but it will do so in a manner familiar. It combines the best part of the past with the best part of thepresent to create the viewing experience of the future.
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This Company is Disrupting the Way We Consume Videos - Futurism
Could This Treatment Cure Cancer?
Despite the many advances in medicine over the last century, a cure for one of the most prevalent and devastating diseases in the world todaycontinues to evade us. But thanks to new research, that could soon change.
Kite Pharma, a US pharmaceutical company, just released the groundbreaking results of their six-month gene therapy trial: terminal cancer patients incomplete remission after just a single round.
The treatment filters a patients blood to remove T-cells, immune system cells that can be genetically engineered in a lab to identify cancer cells. Cancer cells thrive because of their ability to evade the immune system.This new therapy boosts immune cells so that they are able to eliminate cancer cells more effectively.
Patients who participated in the trial had one of three types of non-Hodgkin lymphoma. The advanced stageof their conditions meant all of them were given only a few months to live. However, following the first round of gene therapy, which took place nine months after the trial began, half the patients are not only still alive, but a third of themappear to be cured.
Among them is a 43- year-old named Dimas Padilla from Orlando, Florida whose cancer had stopped responding to chemotherapy. He completed the first round of the trials treatment last August, and his cancer is now in remission.
These results are promising and suggest that one day CAR-T cells could become a treatment option for some patients with certain types of lymphoma, said head cancer information nurse, Martin Ledwick from the Cancer Research UK, in an interview with The Telegraph.
While the results are promising and could prove to be life- changing for patients with terminal cancer, the treatment is not without risks.
Because the therapy essentially puts the human immune system to go into overdrive by radically altering human cells, complications are certainly possible some of which could be fatal. In fact, during the trial, two people diedas a resultof the therapy not because of the cancer. Some patientsimmune systems overreacted in its effort to kill the cancer cells, while others developed blood-count related issues such as anemia. Reports of patients suffering from neurological problems were also cited, but these side effectsapparently only lasted a few days.
More studies are needed tounderstand the therapys side effects, potential complications, and long-term benefits.
The trials full results wont be presented until April, and the pharmaceutical company still has to get approval from the European regulatory boards which means it will be a while yet before the therapy becomes available. Given the possible risks, it might give them enough time to study the therapy further and refine the process hopefully eliminating any adverse effects.
Although, as the Cancer Institutes Dr. Steven Rosenberg points out: Its a safe treatment, certainly a lot safer than having progressive lymphoma.
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A New Cancer Treatment Has Given Terminal Patients a Second Chance at Life - Futurism
An Astounding Discovery
In February, scientists from theEuropean Southern Observatory and NASAannounced the discovery of a new solar system TRAPPIST-1. It has seven Earth-sized planets orbiting a dwarf star, three of which are in the stars habitable zone.
Although TRAPPIST-1 is 40 light-years away, itsremarkable similarities to our own solar system make thediscovery very exciting to scientists. Of allthe solar systems we know of, weve never found one withseven planets let alone multiple Earth-sized planets. TRAPPIST-1sthree habitable planets have density measurements that make them appear to beEarth-like worlds.
Given what TRAPPIST-1s current configuration looks like, the planets located in the habitable zone or goldilocks zonecouldhave water at least theoretically. However, since itssolar systemssun is smaller than ours, theplanets would require a tighter orbitin order to support surface water.
Armed withinsights weve gathered about ourown solar system in recent decades, we have the knowledge and resources to study TRAPPIST-1 and possibly find life beyond our own planet.
Scientists also believe that some of the planets in TRAPPIST-1 are tidally locked to their star. That meansone side of the planet constantly faces their sun, bathing it inperpetual daylight, while the other side is always in the dark. While that doesnt sound much like the life we know on our planet, experts believe it wouldntcompletely negate the possibility of life: what reallymatters is the atmosphere.
We wont have to wait too long to gain further insight into kind of atmosphere these planets have: once the James Webb Space Telescope launches in October of next year, scientists will be able to study the planetsmore in-depth. Our knowledge of how tidally locked planets in our own solar system manage such extreme temperatures based on what weve already learned from Neptune and Jupiter will alsolend itself to a better understanding of how the TRAPPIST-1 planets work.
Granted, everything that we know about life stems from our understanding of life on Earthwhere we experience both day and night. Its wholly possibly that in planets where a diurnal cycle isnt the norm, lifedevelops very differently.
But as Dr. Jessie Christiansen, an astronomer at the NASA Exoplanet Science Institute at the California Institute of Technology, notes while speaking to theChristian Science Monitor, we could liken this to conditions some creatures on our planet know well: the life aquatic. If you think about life in the deep ocean, Dr. Christiansen says, it has evolved without a true diurnal cycle.
Here on our own planet, we are still constantly surprised by life discovered in sea floors, icy climates, deep caves, and other extreme settings. So, that being said,the idea that life could exist in TRAPPIST-1 shouldnt be too hard to fathom.
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Soon, We'll Know if There's Life on TRAPPIST-1's Exoplanets - Futurism
In Brief
We have come far in our pursuit of the perfect computer companion. From mastering gamestorunning our homes, artificial intelligence (AI)has been steadily improving.
However,Microsoft co-founder and richest person in the world Bill Gates isnt that impressed. While he does note that we have made some advancements, he stated in his redditAMAthat he believes that the big milestone is when computers can read and understand information like humans do.
Moreover, he stated that right now computers dont know how to represent knowledge so they cant read a text book and pass a test.
While Gates doesnt highlight this as a particular failure of AI, he does insinuate that we have much fartherto go in terms of the new technology. With that said, many companies have developed systems that are racing to the top, such as Alphabets DeepMind andGoogleBrain, Microsofts many projects, FAIR (Facebook Artificial Intelligence Research), and IBMs Watson, to just name a few.
But of the technologies and companies mentioned, the AIsystems lack the ability to represent knowledge. Essentially, knowledge representation is the ability of AI to glean information about the world that it can then use to solve complicated problems. It would mean artificial intelligence could reason about the world rather than just solely taking action within it, similar to how humans problem solve. This is what Bill Gates believes our current AI systems are lacking.
While we have programs that dont just best professional players in their games of choice but dominate them, our current AI is not capable of representing knowledge, a difficult task but an important one. However, the companies mentioned above are putting significant time and money into developing their technologies and are getting closer to this important milestone in AI. Perhaps we wont have to wait too much longer for thatperfect computer companion.
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Bill Gates: This Will Be the Biggest Technological Breakthrough of ... - Futurism
EW.com | The Freedom to Marry: EW review EW.com Focused primarily on activist Evan Wolfson and attorney Mary Bonauto, both of whom have devoted their lives to marriage equality, Freedom provides a boots-on-the-ground account of the state-by-state battles that ultimately led all the way to the U.S. ... |
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VATICAN CITY (CNS) -- Like the people of Israel freed from the bondage of slavery, Christians are called to experience the path toward hope and new life during the Lenten season, Pope Francis said.
Through his passion, death and resurrection, Jesus "has opened up for us a way that leads to a full, eternal and blessed life," the pope said at his weekly general audience March 1, Ash Wednesday and the beginning of Lent for Latin-rite Catholics.
"Lent lives within this dynamic: Christ precedes us with his exodus and we cross the desert, thanks to him and behind him," he said.
On a warm and sunny morning, the pope held his audience in St. Peter's Square. Arriving in the popemobile, he immediately spotted a group of children and signaled several of them to come aboard for a ride. One by one, the three girls and one boy climbed into the popemobile and warmly embraced the pope.
In his main audience talk, the pope said that while Lent is a time of "penance and even mortification," it is also "a time of hope" for Christians awaiting Christ's resurrection to "renew our baptismal identity."
The story of the Israelites' journey toward the Promised Land and God's faithfulness during times of trial and suffering helps Christians "better understand" the Lenten experience, he said.
"This whole path is fulfilled in hope, the hope of reaching the (Promised) Land and precisely in this sense it is an 'exodus,' a way out from slavery to freedom," the pope said. "Every step, every effort, every trial, every fall and every renewal has meaning only within the saving plan of God, who wants for his people life and not death, joy and not sorrow."
To open this path toward the freedom of eternal life, he continued, Jesus gave up the trappings of his glory, choosing humility and obedience.
However, the pope said that Christ's sacrifice on the cross doesn't mean "he has done everything" and "we go to heaven in a carriage."
"It isn't like that. Our salvation is surely his gift, but because it is a love story, it requires our 'yes' and our participation, as shown to us by our mother Mary and after her, all the saints," he said.
Lent, he added, is lived through the dynamic that "Christ precedes us through his exodus," and that through his victory Christians are called to "nourish this small flame that was entrusted to us on the day of our baptism."
"It is certainly a challenging path as it should be, because love is challenging, but it is a path full of hope," Pope Francis said.
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Follow Arocho on Twitter: @arochoju.
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Lent is time to relive exodus from slavery to freedom, pope says - Catholic News Service
Ona Judge, a runaway slave who evaded George Washington himself, lived most of her on New Hampshires Seacoast after gaining her freedom. Her story isn't well known, but there are many who are working to keep Judges history and the history of the black community in Portsmouth alive.
While Judge isnt a household name, in 18th-century Portsmouth, she was infamous. She was a slave of Martha Washingtons the first ladys personal handmaid. So when Judge escaped from Philadelphia one May night, it didnt take long for word to reach her masters. The presidents slave had been spotted in New Hampshire.
Ona Judge gave a couple of interviews, and left some correspondences behind, but theres a lot of conjecture in her story. Historian Erica Dunbar spent years researching the runaway for her book, Never Caught. She says that Judges decision provides insight into her conviction.
"When she made the decision to flee to New England," explains Dunbar, "she gave up the knowledge that she would ever see her family again. That was a huge thing to let go of as a 22 year-old woman. And what she traded that in for was a life of uncertainty."
New Hampshire was a strategic choice, but it wasnt Judges choice. Once she decided to flee, she put her life in the hands of a well-connected black community. They would have known that Boston and New York City were out of the question for a slave from the most prominent household in the country. But Portsmouth was small and easily accessible Judge could take a ship straight from Philadelphia. And the port city had abolitionist leanings and a large free black community. There, Judge could be protected.
"We can find in correspondence that she lodged and stayed with free blacks who helped her find employment, who gave her a roof over her head, and allowed her to try and put together a life for herself in Portsmouth," Dunbar says.
That life wasnt easy. Judge was a fugitive slave. Local newspapers ran daily ads for runaways and bounty hunters were always on the lookout. That, and the President himself was searching for her. She spent most of her self-emancipation looking over her shoulder. She did domestic work for white families in Portsmouth, and eked out a living. It was in stark contrast to the life she would have lived in Martha Washingtons company, according to JerriAnne Boggis, director of the Black Heritage Trail in Portsmouth.
"She would rather die a free woman than live in the lap of luxury. And thats the other thing, its the presidents house!" Boggis emphasizes, "She didnt leave Mr. Who-Knows-What in Who-Knows-Where, she left the house of the presidency. The prestige of that."
Driving around the city one cold February morning, JerriAnne imagines the Portsmouth of 200 years ago.
Pulling up to the Strawberry Banke museum, Boggis gestures to the frozen, gravelly ground. Buried a few feet below us is the original dock, where Judge would have disembarked after a five day journey from Philly. From there, she would have been secretly welcomed into Portsmouths black community.
"They had slave auctions, actually, right on docks sometimes," Boggis says, "So its part of this uncovering of the black history here."
We drive past buildings that were once the homes of free blacks, and on to the massive John Langdon House. Langdon was Governor when Judge lived in Portsmouth and hes often credited with warning her of Washingtons hot pursuit. But Boggis has another idea.
"You just cant imagine that he would run out to find Ona wherever she is to say, Hey, theyre coming from you. Its more likely," Boggisguesses, "that the servants are hearing this and saying, Well, weve got to go and warn Ona that, Hey, hes in town. Better keep a low profile.
At the end of the day, standing by the African Burial Ground Memorial, Boggis says that stories like Judges are a window into an unseen Portsmouth history.
"Mostly what I do," says Boggis, "is really connect the history to whats going on now and how this information really changes how we see New Hampshire, how we see New England, how we see America."
Valerie Cunningham - the founder of the Black Heritage Trail and author of Black Portsmouth explains that their goal is to incorporate the black perspective into the history of Portsmouth.
"Its not true to say that there is so little documentation of the black past," Cunningham explains, "Its just been overlooked because it has not been considered relevant, or important. Once you start looking, you find little clues and big clues all around - as they say, hidden in plain sight."
Being hidden in plain sight is a metaphor for Ona Judges own life maintaining her anonymity while trying to lead a normal existence. But that life is getting a different treatment in modern Portsmouth. On March 5th the Temple Israel Social Hall, the Black Heritage Trail will be hosting an Ona Judge living history event and talk with author Erica Dunbar.
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The President's Slave Who Found Freedom on the NH Seacoast - New Hampshire Public Radio
NEW DELHI: Amid a raging controversy over free speech, Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar today said he supports freedom of expression, but within the legal framework.
"I believe in freedom of expression but it has to be within reasonable legal framework," he said.
On the sidelines of a DRDO event, Parrikar was asked to comment on the controversy surrounding Delhi University student Gurmehar Kaur who had launched a campaign against RSS-backed ABVP.
The defence minister, however, clarified that his comments were not related to any particular incident.
The 20-year-old Kaur became the centre of a controversy after she launched a social media campaign against the ABVP which has been under attack after some of its members were allegedly involved in violence at Ramjas College on February 22.
She allegedly received rape threats following the campaign and drew criticism from a Union minister and a BJP MP.
On the issue of the alleged leak of question papers of an army recruitment examination, Parrikar said the defence ministry has recommended a CBI inquiry as the case has inter-state ramifications.
On Monday, the army had ordered a high-level court of inquiry (CoI) into the alleged question paper leak.
Referring to the Kabul blasts and possible use of chemical weapons, he said that the army should be well-prepared to tackle any challenge.
"As per the reports which are coming from the southern and northern parts of Afghanistan, I have seen photographs of the local population having suffered from blisters.... (due to possible use of some chemical weapons). At this moment, I don't have a confirmation on this matter but the photos are quite distressing," he said.
The minister said India will have to be prepared for any kind of nuclear or chemical attack, adding the armed forces must remain alert and prepared for any challenge.
More than a dozen people were killed in two terror attacks in Kabul yesterday.
The near-simultaneous attacks struck the Afghan capital around noon on Wednesday. First, a suicide car bomber targeted a police station in western Kabul. The explosion was followed by a gun battle between the police and several attackers.
In the second attack, a bomber detonated explosives outside offices of the intelligence service in eastern Kabul.
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I believe in freedom of expression within legal limits: Manohar Parrikar - Economic Times
Early morning on February 17, word was getting around that Michael Novak had passed away in his sleep, and email klatsches were forming. In mine, one of his close friends wrote that "the generosity of Michael's friendship allowed him to obscure the fact that he was among the few truly great men that any of us have known." We all piled on with fervent assents. That a man of such towering achievements should also be a down-home, kindly friend (even "cuddly," discerning women would attest) was so unusual that we had pretended he was just one of the guys.
Which is not to say that Michael was modest. He wrote more than 40 books and countless essays on everything under the sun and many things beyond the sun. He promoted his ideas assiduously, through 50 years of nonstop lecturing, debating, and classroom teaching and in everyday small-talk that never stayed small when he was around. He was driven by a firm conviction that he was in possession of singular talents for educating and improving mankind. Early in my time as president of the American Enterprise Institute, I told Michael that he had exactly 12 minutes, not a minute more, to summarize his current work for a gathering of trustees and donors. He cheerfully agreed and then, as he warmed up at the podium, spoke for 50 minutes (on baseball and American democracy) to a rapt and appreciative audience.
And Michael was ardent for recognition and honorswhich, among friends, he never bothered to conceal, treating praise simply as evidence that his labors were indeed moving the world. As he lay dying, a visitor noticed that his daughter, Jana, was reading him the numerous emails she was receiving attesting to his great works and influence. Enough testimonials, the visitor interjected, it is time to turn to larger matters. Michael mustered a smile and said: No, no, read them all! Which was his way of telling everyone assembled that the Novakian spirit they knew and loved was still burning strong.
Michael's combination of ambition and friendliness was more than personal disposition. His thinking and writing, too, were at once aggressive and gentle, tough-minded and irenic. This was an expression of his intellectual position and Catholic faithas I tried to explain in remarks at a dinner in honor of Michael on his retirement from AEI in 2010, printed below. Here let me elaborate with words of his own.
Michael was a Reagan Democrat, proud of his ethnic (Slovak-American) roots and upbringing in working-class Johnstown, Pennsylvania. In the 1970s, his intellectual migration from left to right was inspired by the left's (and the Democratic party's) abandonment of working-class sentiments and aspirations for a new-age progressivism that he regarded as utopian and effete. Accordingly, his conservatism was sinewy, and distinctly non-libertarian. Human freedom, for Michael, was not an abstract good but rather a social artifactthe fruit of lived experience, grounded in family and community, and demanding continuous struggle against the forces of moral entropy. Democratic capitalism is the preferred political system for more than its palpable material benefits: It is the most auspicious arena for the incarnate struggles among groups and nations and within the human heart. Economic prosperity is evidence that the struggles are going well for the time being. "Free to choose," when we gain it, is an obligation.
I thought of Novak the Reagan Democrat last election night, November 8, 2016, when the early returns from western Pennsylvania were beginning to upset expectations of a Hillary Clinton triumph. (Johnstown's Cambria County, heavily Democratic in party registration, went 66 percent for Donald Trump.) In my political set, sharply divided between Trump supporters and opponents, we had learned to be circumspect about election preferencesbut when I reached Michael he was bluntly at the barricades. "If America is going to come apart into those who went to college and those who did not," he said, "I want to be with the folks who did not go to college."
I did not question Michael in any detail, but am certain that he was not rooting for the Trumpsters as if they were the Steelers. I think he regarded the Trump revolt as the rough-hewn, extravagantly flawed, internally conflicted agency of freedom in its latest struggle. But in Michael's conception the struggle is a noble one, because freedom is at once contingent and divine, and it can succeed only by attaching itself to human goodness. That is the teaching of the stem-winding conclusion of his address at Westminster Abbey on receiving the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion in 1994:
No one ever promised us that free societies will endure forever. Indeed, a cold view of history shows that submission to tyranny is the more frequent condition of the human race, and that free societies have been few in number and not often long-lived. Free societies such as our own, which have arisen rather late in the long evolution of the human race, may pass across the darkness of time like splendid little comets, burn into ashes, disappear.
Yet nothing in the entire universe, vast as it is, is as beautiful as the human person. The human person alone is shaped to the image of God. This God loves humans with a love most powerful. It is this God who draws us, erect and free, toward Himself, this God Who, in Dante's words, is the Love that moves the sun / and all the stars.
Michael was one of the last remaining (a few are still with us) of those giants who collaborated directly with Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and Pope John Paul II on the great liberal achievements of the 1980sthe defeat of Soviet communism and the expansion of economic freedom and prosperity in much of the West and beyond. Today we are once again beset by violent totalitarianism, economic stagnation, angry social divisions, and an abundance of unpleasant options. Many conservatives, and many young people, seem to think we have lost our grip and fallen away from a halcyon past. In the face of such despair, Michael Novak's legacy is that the struggle for freedom is ever present, ever changing, and ever in need of active, tough-minded idealism.
Christopher DeMuth Sr. is a distinguished fellow at Hudson Institute.
'The Total Novak Phenomenon'
Michael Novak and his work during the past 35 years have been abundantly feted. Celebrants have expounded on his brilliance, his prolificacy, and his influence. But brilliance and industriousness, although highly important virtues, are not nearly as rare as the total Novak phenomenon. And influence, although highly admired, is not a virtue at allit puts Michael in the company of Eliot Spitzer and Peter Singer. So I would like to take a different tack and remark on Michael's character, in particular his ambition and his bravery.
He spent the first 20 years of his professional life in academics. To the brilliant and industrious, university life offers wonderful opportunities for achievement and fulfillment. Michael could have continued to hold the best chairs at the best schools and to win all the teaching awards. But the academy favors work on discrete, manageable problems "in the literature" and can punish departures from certain orthodoxies. At some point in the 1970s, Michael decided that he would go after bigger game.
I have often marveled that in the midst of the Jimmy Carter administration, the hardheaded businessmen on the American Enterprise Institute's Board of Trustees would countenance the appointment of a theologian, and moreover a theologian with a colorful paper trail in left-wing politics and Democratic party electioneering. But it was Michael who took by far the greater risk in accepting the offerthrowing away tenure and respectability for God knew what (but He wasn't talking, not even to Michael).
Since then Michael's vocation has been the conquest of momentous, difficult, contentious problems. Problems with large practical and political components, where his philosophical learning provided a foundation but everything else was left to his own wits and experience. Today we recognize the moral architecture of democratic capitalism because Michael built it for useven the terms were unknown before he and Irving Kristol started their work.
And, since publication of The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism in 1982, he has provided many elaborations and applications: on the moral architectures of economic development, of escape from the welfare trap, of nuclear deterrence, of the corporation and business-as-a-calling, and of the income tax, intellectual property, mediating structures, ethnic politics, and even sports (the last however limited to Notre Dame football). If you listen in on Michael debating the progressive income tax with a professional economist, you will get an idea of the moral clarity he has brought to questions that everyone knew to be terribly complicated and endlessly nuanced.
Along the way he has dispatched many cherished liberal shibboleths and theological wrong-turns. In his 2001 book, On Two Wings, he grafted back the second wing of faith onto the long-prevailing narrative (even at AEI) of the American founding as a secular exercise in institutional ingenuity. Bravest of all, he has provided religious instruction to Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
What Michael's greatest projects have had in common is audacity. In taking them on, he was committing himself to originality, which risked failure, and to unflinching truth-telling, which risked elite derision if he succeeded. His brilliance may have given him the confidence to take the big risks; his industriousness may have been inspired by fear of failure. But they alone cannot explain what Michael achieved. They had to be coupled with gutssheer obstinate confrontational Johnstown guts.
Michael's toughness is often masked by his sweet, magnanimous disposition. Don't be fooled. If you have watched him make a big concession in a debate, or respond sympathetically to a hostile questioner, or provide a generous account of an opposing view in a book or essay, then you know that his kindliness is often the sign that serious intellectual vivisection is about to commence.
And then there's his vast philosophical mastery: He already knows Argument 27 better than the other guy, and he also knows that it is conventionally trumped by Argument 8but he also knows that it is completely annihilated by Argument 131 C, which he derived himself 15 years ago.
But most of all, Michael's sweet magnanimity is genuine and in fact reflects the ambition and bravery of his intellectual position. For it expresses his certainty that there is good in human naturegood that calls for earnest entreaty on its own terms. Among career pundits and haut thinkers, nothing could be more politically incorrect, more embarrassingly nave. Yet in Michael's choices of projects, and in the particulars of his arguments, one sees three overarching propositions constantly at work:
First, that man for all his failings is ardently concerned to know what is right and just.
Second, that politics for all its flaws is capable of pursuing social betterment and sometimes finding it.
Third, that reason for all its frailties can help us find our way.
To dedicate a lifetime to such propositions in late-20th-century America one had to be not only brave but downright reckless. That the endeavor has proven so astoundingly fruitful is reason to doubt the cynicism of the age and to work, as diligently as he has, for a return of the better angels.
Christopher DeMuth, July 2010
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The Spirit of Michael Novak, a Friend of Freedom - The Weekly Standard
However well-intentioned, NPRs latest foray into religious freedom falls victim to several false equivalencies and ends up leaving the reader/listener vulnerable to the problematic arguments of those pushing for the right to discriminate againstLGBTQ people.
CorrespondentTom Gjeltenmakes what appears to be an honest, good-faith effort to offer a general backgrounder on the state of religious liberty, but several key omissions and questionable language undercut his effort to providebalance.
First, the good. Gjelten does include a dissenting religious voice, Episcopal Bishop Michael Curry,which challengesthepreferred conservative framing that this issue is being waged betweenreligious individuals andnon-religious individuals.Its true that its almost solelyreligiousinstitutions that have taken up the mantle of opposing LGBTQ equality or womens access to contraception, but there aremany otherswhodisagree.
AndGjelten is, of course, correct in framing both freedom of religion and the pursuit of equality as central tenets of American culture. But as we have documented here atRD, todays religious freedom fighters are waging a very different battle than did this nations Founders when theyconsidered the concept of freedom of religion important enough tobe included in the very first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But the confusion begins to mount when Gjelten begins to discuss real-world examples. He writes:
If a football coach is not allowed to lead his team in a public prayer, or a high school valedictorian is not given permission to read a Bible passage for her graduation speech, or the owner of a private chapel is told he cannot refuse to accommodate a same-sex wedding, they might claim their religious freedom has been infringed.
This lack of specificity undermines the whole project to illuminate the reader. Is the football coach at a public or private institution? Is the valedictorian? And the private chapel is a phrasethat may well warrant its ownarticle, as chapel clearly evokesa religious entity or space, though in the eyes of the lawits simply a business like any other.
But even these vague hypotheticals offer a more concrete illustration of potential harms done to those who claim religious freedom than Gjeltens piece provides about the concrete harms done to same-sex couples who are denied service because of someones sincerely held religious belief. The article makes no mention of real-life cases of religiously justified anti-LGBT discrimination,like the 2014 case in Michigan where a pediatrician refused to treat a six-day-old infantbecause the child had two moms. SinceMichigan does not include LGBT people in its nondiscrimination law, the refusal of service, which the doctor reached after much prayer, was entirely legal.
To fairly illustrate the competing claims of discrimination at the heart of this issue, its necessary to illuminate the practical impact of whats at stake for parties on each side of the issue. Its not just about wedding cakes and church services.
Illustrating that point, Gjelten thenfocuses on the 2004 Massachusetts Supreme Court decision that embraced marriage equality (using the preferred term of equality opponents, claiming the court redefined marriage), which prompted Catholic Charities to voluntarilycease providing adoption services in the state,citing a sincerely held religious belief that barred the organization from placing foster or adoptive childrenwith same-sex parents.
But here, as in the earlier examples, Gjelten omits a key detail regarding the public/private divide:the reason Catholic Charities (in Massachusetts and other states, like Illinois) was subject to the states nondiscrimination law in the first place is because the agency maintained contracts with the state to provide child welfare services. Adoption isno doubt a worthy cause for a faith community and thestate to engage in, but those two entities have vastly different constitutional responsibilities when it comes to how theytreat citizens hoping to provide loving homes to children.
Catholic Charities has what it perceives to be a divine order to serve and protect the vulnerable, including childrenwhose families of origin cannot care for them. But Catholic doctrine formally denounces same-sex parents, and despite some disagreement among Catholic Charities leadership, the agency determined that such doctrine must dictate policy.
The state, on the other hand, is constitutionally barred from denying access to services (including adoption) based on a persons faithor, in Massachusetts and Illinois, on a persons perceived or actual sexual orientation. By extension, the state cannot formally endorse a particular faith practices understanding of morality or appropriate parental qualities, unless those characteristics happen to align directly with a compelling state interest. (This is precisely the reason why, as Gjelten notes, Mississippis sweeping 2016 religious freedom law earned itself afederalinjunction.)
Buttheres a fairly simpleand reasonablesolution to this wholeconundrum, though it requires the very distinctions between the public and private spaces Gjelten fails delineate. The First Amendments prohibition on state establishment of religion can reasonably be read to mean that government agenciesand, crucially, publicly funded entitiesshould create policy based on the public interest, not on any particular religiousdoctrine.
Look, if Catholic Charities wants to deny me, a queer woman, the opportunity to adopt a child, that is their right. As a religious entity founded on and adherent to Catholic doctrine, I understand that, even if I disagree with the decision, this nations promise of free exercise of religion protects faith-based entities from engaging with those who dont share their beliefs.
Simultaneously, however, as a citizen I enjoy equal protection under the law, which includes access to state-funded agencies that provide social services, including adoption. Im OK with Catholic Charities refusing to serve me because of my identity, but I cannot justify my tax dollars funding an agency that actively discriminates against me.
Yet the reader of this NPR piece might leave with only the vague sense that the government is telling a religious institution what it can and cant believe in or act on. Without mention of the finer distinctions the reader is clearly being done a disservicewhich in this case happens to benefit religious freedom advocates. Or, for those who balk at the use of scare quotes in that phrase, lets call them discriminationists.
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NPR Largely Misses Critical Distinction on Religious Freedom vs. LGBTQ Rights - Religion Dispatches