CRSPR may have just cured Lukemia

Jeff Brown  | Jan 11, 2023  | Bleeding Edge | 12 min readPrint 

Dear Reader,

January 16 to 20 mark the days of the next confab of the World Economic Forum (WEF) in Davos, Switzerland. Every time a meeting takes place, I’m always wondering what shenanigans, or what evil, this group of unelected officials will get up to next.

I pay close attention because there are very powerful forces behind the WEF that have worked hard over the last couple of decades to reshape our world in their eyes – in ways that will ultimately benefit “them” and come at great costs to “us” and the things that are dear to our preferred way of life.

Scanning through the list of presentations, one caught my eye: “Why We Need Battery Passports,” scheduled for January 18. This isn’t a new topic for the WEF, as it’s been discussed and in the works for years.

The idea that’s being implemented now is to have digital “battery passports” for electric vehicles (EVs) to track their performance, track the battery value chain, benchmark batteries for sustainability, and track carbon emissions.

The WEF’s goal is to use this digital battery passport system to reduce overall carbon emissions from transportation by 30% by 2023, which is in line with the Paris Agreement.

According to the WEF, the battery passport: “Will strengthen indicators, including life-cycle information, governance, and environmental and social standards, aiming ultimately to change behavior toward sustainable and ethical practices and improve multiple ESG parameters.”

What does that even mean?

For those of us who have read WEF materials, it all sounds similar: fluffy, without substance, and superficially all for the greater good.

I’ve long maintained that I want nothing more than a peaceful planet that gets 100% of its energy from carbon-free power-generation sources. Ironically, the technology to accomplish that exists today in the form of nuclear fission. 

Third and now fourth-generation fission technology is extremely safe and effective. Why hasn’t the developed world adopted it?

For those who don’t care for fission, nuclear fusion – the power of the sun – is right around the corner. Just last month, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory had a breakthrough in demonstrating the first net energy output fusion-energy reaction. 

It was a fantastic proof of concept, a historical point in time, and a sign of incredible things to come later in this decade… Which is what makes the WEF’s battery passports so odd.

The WEF’s stated goal is to reduce the transportation emissions through the use of EVs, as if that will solve the “climate crisis” that it so often refers to. Yet the WEF says nothing about where the electricity comes from to “fuel” the EVs that it’s so keen for all of us to drive.

This position is particularly ironic considering that Western Europe relies heavily on oil, natural gas and, most recently, an increased use of coal to produce electricity. 

Worse yet, Europe has been cutting down ancient forests in order to produce wood pellets, which are burned to produce electricity. I know it’s kind of hard to believe, but that’s where the electricity is coming from.

Yes, we can reduce automobile emissions if we drive an EV. But we’re still burning fossil fuels at the power generation plant to produce the electricity for the EV. How in the hell does that make the world a better place?

The WEF talks of creating a “circular economy.” So instead of “take, make, waste,” society will “take, make; take make.” 

Make sense? I didn’t think so.

I’m a big proponent of recycling anything that I can. It makes sense to me. Why would I put something in a landfill that can be recycled and reused? And selfishly, I always feel good when I recycle.

Recycling is part of the idea of a circular economy.

That’s fine, but it ignores the basic fact that massive strip mines need to be built that are extremely damaging to the Earth to get resources to produce batteries for EVs. The mining equipment is all powered by fossil fuels, as the only way it gets done is with raw horsepower.

And the world hasn’t even mined a tiny fraction of what’s needed to achieve its goals for EV adoption over the next eight years. Not even close. My point is that there aren’t enough old EV batteries that we can recycle to produce enough new batteries. They’re only a drop in a bucket.

It pains me to see initiatives like this that are focused on the wrong thing. And they completely ignore these inconvenient truths.

One might argue that the effort may be foolish and misplaced, but it’s not evil. That’s an easy trap for us to fall into.

Plans like these provide cover for the “Great Reset” and the implementation of digital IDs that track everything we do. The battery passport is just one part of that, and an important part, as transportation is naturally a large driver for carbon emissions – both for EVs using electricity from fossil fuels and for internal combustion engine (ICE) vehicles.

Yes, the WEF’s plans for a digital ID are very real, and openly discussed. The plan is to monitor our telecommunications, our healthcare, our financial services, our food consumption, our travel, our buying decisions, our transportation, and even what we say on social media. 

This will be used to assign a carbon footprint score, and a social score that will either enable us to do certain things in life or prohibit us from doing the things we want.

By way of simple example, if our carbon footprint is too high one month, our digital wallet will prohibit us from purchasing any airline tickets or buying meat of any kind. We may or may not be given the option of buying carbon credits to offset our carbon score that would allow us to travel again.

This isn’t just a crazy idea. This is a plan that’s been in the works for more than a decade, and it’s nearing implementation in many countries. 

The WEF openly states that it’s inserted its graduates in powerful positions in countries around the world. Looking at the list of individuals who have been through the WEF reeducation program over the last 20 years should make anyone’s jaw drop.

I raise these issues for awareness of what the “master plan” looks like.

It’s not magnanimous; it’s nefarious. And it’s a world that would feel claustrophobic to most of us who relish not only our own freedom, but the freedom of others, and who feel strongly that freedom is worth both living and dying for.


The WEF Proposed Tracking the Carbon Footprint of EVs – But Will It Stop There?

Just tell AlphaCode what you want programmed…

Next, we have to talk about a heartwarming story.

Just a few weeks ago, a hospital in London used CRISPR base-editing technology to treat a 13-year-old girl with advanced leukemia. This was something of a last-ditch effort, as no other therapies had worked to slow the advance of her cancer.

As a reminder, CRISPR base-editing is a powerful technology that can swap out a particular DNA base pair for a different one. This tool can “fix” genetic mutations without cutting any DNA strands.

So, the clinicians in London used CRISPR base-editing to modify the girl’s T-cells. They were genetically enhanced to go out and destroy the cancerous cells in her body.

And sure enough, the girl was in remission just 28 days after receiving the CRISPR treatment. It appears that base-editing very well may have cured her leukemia.

This is absolutely remarkable. Leukemia has always been an incredibly difficult cancer to treat… yet CRISPR base-editing knocked it out almost immediately.

That shows just how powerful this technology is.

That said, it’s important to mention that this therapy was a one-off, personalized therapy conducted by a team at a medical institution. It wasn’t a clinical trial. Fortunately, the U.K. had approved these kinds of personalized genetic-editing therapies under the national health plan.

This application of CRISPR base-editing now needs to advance through the clinical trial process to treat a number of leukemia patients using a similar technique. The team in London showed that it can be done, and now it’s up to the biotech industry. 

This is very bullish for those companies that are advancing base-editing therapies into clinical trials. Beam Therapeutics and Verve Therapeutics are two of the most prominent biotech companies that come to mind.

So this is the year that we’ll finally see the power of CRISPR base-editing on display in the clinic. And I expect base editing therapies to have a very fast track to regulatory approval. 

For certain kinds of diseases, base-editing will be a better therapeutic approach than CRISPR-Cas9, prime editing, or other approaches built upon CRISPR. This is another groundbreaking trend for this year that I’m excited about.

Jeff Brown

Editor, The bleeding Edge

4 Jan

Google’s artificial intelligence (AI) division DeepMind just announced its latest development. What this group is doing is nothing short of remarkable.

If we remember, DeepMind released what I consider to be the greatest breakthrough in life sciences back in August. That’s when it published the protein structures of more than 200 million proteins, as predicted by its AlphaFold 2 AI.

And these predictions proved to be over 94% accurate. Incredible.

Well, DeepMind has recently shifted its focus to computer programming. And the division just released the first version of its AlphaCode AI.

As the name implies, AlphaCode learned how to write computer programs. Users simply give the AI instructions around what they want the software to do. The AI handles the rest.

Now, AIs writing software code isn’t new. As regular readers know, OpenAI’s GPT-3 has been able to write code based on user input for a couple of years.

In fact, OpenAI spun out that functionality into a separate AI called Codex. It trained Codex using a bunch of software code openly available on the GitHub repository.

But here’s the thing: Codex wasn’t particularly sophisticated. It was very good with simple programming tasks. But it couldn’t handle more complex programming problems.

That’s where AlphaCode comes in.

From the start, DeepMind wanted its programming AI to tackle challenging issues. It trained AlphaCode on a dataset from GitHub. And then it entered the AI into coding competitions to further its training.

And get this: AlphaCode successfully solved about 34% of the most challenging programming tasks in these competitions. By comparison, Codex’s success rate was in the single digits.

I know a 34% success rate may not sound very good. But AlphaCode outperformed 46% of the human competition in these tasks. So it was more successful than nearly half of the field.

And here’s the thing: This is just version one of the AI. It’s only going to get better.

We saw the same dynamic play out with AlphaFold. The first version was impressive, but not incredibly accurate with its predictions. Then AlphaFold 2 demonstrated over 94% accuracy. It was a huge leap.

We’re going to see the same thing happen with AlphaCode 2. It’s going to be materially better. I expect we’ll be blown away at its success rate. And I expect the second version will probably be released within the next six to nine months – that’s how quickly things are moving with AI right now.

So what we’re talking about here is something that will be absolutely transformational in terms of software development.

Once it’s optimized, AlphaCode 2 will enable people without any programming experience to develop software for specific tasks. This is huge considering that there’s a worldwide shortage of software engineers right now.

So AlphaCode 2 is going to solve a massive labor shortage by turning anybody into a skilled computer programmer. I can’t wait to see what comes from this.

Jeff Brown

Editor

The Bleeding Edge

13Dec2022

This Nuclear Fusion Breakthrough Brings Us Closer to Clean, Limitless Energy

Dear Reader,

Turn up the power.

That’s exactly what the team did at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) in order to achieve fusion ignition and a net-energy production fusion reaction.

This morning was a big day in the world of nuclear fusion, as the formal announcement was made by the team at LLNL that they had achieved this multi-decade goal.

I remember writing about a prior experiment back in August in The Bleeding Edge.

It was a big deal in that the experiment produced 1.3 megajoules of energy, putting it right on the cusp of fusion ignition – the point at which a fusion reaction is self-sustaining because net energy is produced from the fusion reaction.

What struck me at the time wasn’t the energy output of the experiment. It was the fact that the experiment produced an eight times improvement over a prior experiment that Spring, and a 25 times improvement over a prior record in 2018.

It’s the pace of technological advancement that’s more critical in understanding how quickly breakthroughs will happen. They don’t happen in a linear fashion. Advancements speed up and improve exponentially – and that’s exactly what we’ve just seen with this latest experiment.

The Target Chamber of LLNL’s National Ignition Facility

Source: LLNL

On December 5, the National Ignition Facility (NIF) achieved fusion ignition by producing 3.15 megajoules of output from just 2.05 megajoules of energy required to achieve fusion ignition. Remarkable. 

That’s more energy out than what was required as an input. At the highest level, this is the future of 100% clean, limitless energy – and, ultimately, the end of the use of fossil fuels.

But as exciting as this announcement is, there’s some important context.

The NIF is designed to employ an approach to nuclear fusion known as inertial fusion energy. It uses 192 individual lasers focused on a target capsule the size of a pea, which contains the “fuel” – hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium. The whole facility takes up an area about the size of three football fields.

The plasma that the experiment created was only a tenth of a millimeter in diameter. It was about 10 times hotter than the sun and only lasted for a few billionths of a second.

In order to achieve that, it required an extraordinary level of precision engineering. The lasers were configured to specifications down to five-trillionths of a meter, the timing of the lasers was measured in the billionths of a second, and the fuel capsule had to be a near-perfect circle that was a hundred times smoother than a mirror.

There was no one thing that made this experiment a success. It was the fine-tuning of parameters and equipment to levels of precision that are difficult to comprehend. Without doing so, the reaction would have never been possible.

And then there was the power. 

Previous experiments were well below the 2 megajoule level, and the team had been systematically “turning up the dial” on the experiments.

After all, recreating the conditions similar to our Sun here on Earth – no matter how tiny – takes an immense amount of initial power to get the fusion reaction started.

It’s a remarkable achievement, but not one that’s practical for commercial nuclear fusion. Inertial confinement technology was natural for the LLNL to use, as it’s a key facility for the research and development of nuclear weapons.

Far more interesting to me are the advancements that are taking place in the private industry that largely focus on the magnetic confinement approach to nuclear fusion.

I see this as a far more practical approach to commercialization – and one that will lead to compact nuclear fusion reactors capable of powering our power grids will limitless clean energy.

While the engineering is real, and the accomplishment is awesome, there’s a much bigger game at play behind the announcement – money. 

With hundreds of billions of dollars being thrown around to the electric vehicle (EV) industry, LLNL wants some – and the team made it very clear in its release:

Congress and the Administration need to fully fund and properly implement the fusion research provisions in the recent CHIPS and Science Act, and likely more. During World War II, we crafted the Manhattan Project for a timely result.

The challenges facing the world today are even greater than at that time. We must double down and accelerate the research to explore new pathways for the clean, limitless energy that fusion promises.

I completely agree. The government has been throwing away money on “clean energy” projects that don’t address how our electricity is produced. 

Solar and wind will not be able to power the world’s baseload power requirements 24/7/365. Nuclear fusion will. The world should be “all in” on advancing nuclear fusion, specifically the kind that has a path toward commercialization through compact fusion reactors.

There’s no need to be distracted by anything else. If anything, I hope today’s announcement will ignite the industry to a series of breakthroughs next year. 

But one thing is certain: We can expect record levels of private investments into nuclear fusion companies next year on the back of this news.

With an announcement like this, it doesn’t take much to figure out that we’re right on the cusp of solving the grand challenge of clean, limitless, and almost free energy.

Jeff Brown

The bleeding Edge

13December 2022

Google continues its push into healthcare…

Google Health just made a first-of-its-kind announcement. It just inked a licensing deal with medical technology (MedTech) company iCAD for its artificial intelligence (AI) software.

What we’re seeing here is Google’s ambitions in the healthcare industry coming to fruition.

Regular readers may remember how Google has been striking deals with large healthcare systems over the last two years or so. These deals gave Google access to millions of patient medical records.

Well, Google has been using that data to train its AI software. And it’s starting with an AI that specializes in identifying breast cancer in mammograms.

At the time, Google’s AI demonstrated that it could reduce false negatives by 9.4%. And it reduced false positives by almost 6%.

So Google’s AI outperformed board-certified radiologists at the time. And it’s only gotten better. The AI has been training on larger data sets of mammograms, and that’s led to improvements in the AI’s accuracy.

And this is why iCAD just stepped up to license this technology. The company is going to turn around and use Google’s AI at more than 7,500 mammography sites in operation today.

That’s huge. This is Google’s plan playing out perfectly.

And get this: Google’s AI will continue to get better with every mammogram it analyzes through this deal with iCAD. Having access to so many new sites and imaging will only help the AI improve.

That’s certainly good for patients. It will improve patient outcomes by catching cancer that might be missed and can help to avoid giving some patients a false “scare.”

Of course, this is great for Google as well. Licensing deals like this will drive more revenue for Google’s Cloud division. Running a powerful AI requires computing power, and that means additional revenues for Google Cloud.

Right now, Google Cloud is a relatively small part of Google’s overall business. It only makes up about 7.5% of Google’s revenues. The other 92.5% is almost exclusively advertising revenue.

This is an area of focus for Google. There’s a lot of regulatory scrutiny over its practices around data collection for the purposes of generating advertising revenues. That’s not the case with Google’s cloud-based business.

Plus, Google will still collect all the patient data from the mammograms its AI assesses. This will help it build even more robust profiles of individuals. And that, in turn, will drive more advertising revenues.

So Google’s foray into healthcare is working out exactly as planned. And Google’s tech will certainly lead to better patient outcomes. 

It’s a bit of a double-edged sword, but that’s the point of Google’s strategy. Google uses the “good” that it’s doing to get away with its data surveillance and capture practices for advertising purposes.

Jeff Brown 1 Dec2022

Editor of the Bleeding Edge


Editor’s Note:

 Today, we’re sharing a special insight from Peter Zeihan. Peter is a geopolitical strategist that advises investors, businesses, and even government officials on how to prepare for the macro events right around the corner.

Below, he shares his thoughts on Xi Jinping and the challenge posed by Chinese leadership. As Peter says, the biggest threat to China could be from within.

And if you enjoy Peter’s work, we encourage you to get a copy of his newest book, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning, at a steeply discounted price. 

By Peter Zeihan

Today, I’d like to talk about leadership.

Specifically, I’d like to talk about the leadership of Xi Jinping, Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Xi was recently elected to a third term for that position.

For the China-watching world, this was never in doubt. The only question was if he would make himself president for a third term or just dictator for life.

But the trappings of how he justifies his position are irrelevant. He is a dictator for life.

But what is relevant is for us to look at China and see how Xi fits into that.

The Emperor is Far Away

China is a tough place to govern…

It’s a huge country with a massive amount of geographic diversity.

And even though the Han supermajority is over 90% of the population, the regions are so distinct that there’s a lot of diversity even within the ethnicity.

North—on the Yellow River—you’ve got the North China Plain, which is where about half of China’s population lives. And it has always been tight in the grip of Beijing.

In the south, you have the cities from Shanghai going down to Hong Kong which have always been a little more secessionist and integrated with foreign zones, especially when it comes to their food supply. They’ve always had their own identity.

And in the middle you have the Yangtze River from Shanghai to Sichuan, which has always been the most sophisticated and functional part of the Chinese economic system. They have usually resisted Beijing’s rule, but they are still quintessentially Chinese.

Ruling this is difficult because each region has its own ideas, its own vision of what should happen or not happen, and how to put it all together.

And in Beijing, you have the emperor who has to manage all of this. And it means China tends to oscillate wildly between two conflicting visions.

On the one hand, you’ve got local autonomy. The locals are determining what happens. They have a saying in China: “The emperor is far away.” And so, China tends to spin apart into dozens of competing systems.

On the other hand, you’ve got the emperor who tries to hold it all together and tends to overcentralize as a result.

And combining those two themes means China has the most war-torn and conflicting history of all the major cultures in all the world.

So, what does this mean for Xi and China?

The Most Isolated Leader in the World

In the leadership years before Xi, there was this idea that there had to be an idea of balance between these regions. But by the time we got to Xi, the decision was made that there should be someone to represent all the regions. And Xi was brought in as something of a compromise candidate.

And then he took over…

In his first five years, there was what he called a massive “anti-corruption” campaign. But it was really a purge of all the competing power centers throughout the party and throughout the system.

If you had a different vision of how China should operate, you were kicked out. And if you were a local or regional boss, you were brought to heel.

In the second five-year term, Xi went after everybody who agreed with him. He made sure nobody was capable of independent thought in his area.

That has made him the most isolated leader on the world stage right now. He’s arguably the most isolated Chinese leader in history. He’s more shutoff than even the Kim dynasty of North Korea.

And we are seeing catastrophic policy decisions being made as a result…

Information Lockdown

Terrible decisions are being made on everything from economics and trade to Covid and security. And if you’re in the bureaucracy, you can go one of two ways.

Option number one is you can be a true believer. When Xi says something, you snap to it and try to implement it in the most extreme way possible.

This is one of the reasons why the lockdowns in Hong Kong have become so intense. And it’s why you’ve got idiots out there disinfecting airport runways. They think that’s what Xi wants them to do to fight Covid.

But the vast majority of the bureaucracy knows that if they get brought to Xi’s attention—good or bad—it could be a disaster. So, they just don’t do anything unless they are specifically told.

Because of this, we’re seeing a “seizing up” through the entire system because we have a leader that is so disconnected from everything. He’s making decisions with no information at all because everybody is afraid to bring it to him.

We think we have problems in the United States—jumping from W. to Obama to Trump to Biden and all the inefficiencies that come with that.

But it is nothing compared to the complete information lockdown that now exists at the very top of the Chinese system.

What this means is that the biggest threat to the Chinese system is not a foreign power.

The thing that could bring down the Chinese government in the foreseeable future is its own leadership…

Regards, Peter Zeihan

  • It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

  • It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.

  • It all begins with an idea. Maybe you want to launch a business. Maybe you want to turn a hobby into something more.