Reading Things- Nothing.
Today, I read absolutely nothing. Well, nothing to write a blog about. I made some progress on 1984.
This blog will now serve as a potentially ill-informed continuation of the last one. Feel absolutely free to correct me on anything I get wrong.
The Jiankui He paper isn't published anywhere, as far as I can find. All journals cited ethical issues with publishing his work. He also had to essentially cheat his way into the one conference he presented at--which is also where any basis of criticism comes from (based on my very cursory reading).
The general denouncing of his research makes a lot of sense, the lack of its availability does not. While I agree to some degree that publishing provides credibility, I think the mass shunning also led people to not have access to the results--and therefore have very weak critique of the research as well. This isn't a problem with just research that is...controversial. It's apparently quite the issue with rare disease research as well, where the addition of demographic data to the database makes you essentially identifiable (there's quite a few 27 year old females with, say, diabetes, but not many with EDS or something, idk rare diseases). While it makes sense to thus obscure this data, it is pretty important for general research to further. The slander article I read yesterday talks of He's work as if it is a paper where a lot of information is obscured. While I have no doubts about the fact that important data was obscured/misinterpreted, it was a presentation, and it would never be as verbose as a full paper would. Not having that context also means I inherently doubt the article critiquing the original.
In other news, I've been learning at multiple points in my daily life that the brain is a muscle. I'm teaching(?) a mate organic chemistry, and things I could explain half asleep now seem foreign. I miss back when I knew things and learnt something daily :(
It's a feeling I'm now trying to chase, once again.