This should be REALLY USEFUL - for gene therapy and stem cell therapy.

One of the big problems with such therapies is how to deliver the modified genes or regulators to the target cells, without converting them to something that would be rejected or otherwise have unintended markers or modifications.

One approach is to deliver genes or regulatory chemicals via a modified virius or using viral capsid proteins to construct an "injector". (A family of methods for turning harvested somatic cells into toti/pluri/multi/unipotent stem cells consists of inserting four regulatory proteins - by inserting about four GENES THAT CODE FOR THEM via a modified virus.)

Now here we have a a method, already used by the body, to transport RNA signalling snippets and other factors from one cell into another, by a sending cell creating virus-like carrier particles that destination cells readily accept and absorb.

THAT looks like an IDEAL basis for building a carrier for regulatory factors to switch cell modes on and off, or to tote new genetic material into a target cell for incorporation, to correct genetic errors or supply lost genes:

  1) Make fake exosomes carrying the message you want to deliver.
  2) Inject them into the tissue you want to affect.
  3) Rewrite the state or code of the target cells.
  4) Cure disease (or otherwise augment the patient's health).
  5) PROFIT!

To answer your question, see my essay: http://www.pdfernhout.net/basi...
"One may ask, why should millionaires support a basic income as depicted in Marshall Brain's Australia Project fictional example in "Manna", but, say, right now in the USA, of US$2000 a month per person (with some deducted for universal health insurance), or $24K per year? With about 300 million residents in the USA, this would require about seven trillion US dollars a year, or half the current US GDP. Surely such a proposal would be a disaster for millionaires in terms of crushing taxes? Or would it? ...
      Now, let's continue to look at this from a millionaire's point of view. The streets might be a lot happier. The families would not be struggling as much, and so the kids would be happier. Why should a millionaire care about other people's happiness? Well, there are obviously moral reasons. But ignoring them, in general, communities would be safer. There would be less resentment towards the rich, who after all, were making this all possible. Nobody would be so poor they had nothing to lose by committing an assault to steal a walled or break into a home. (Assuming drugs were legal, and regulated, there would be less addicts doing property crimes for habits.)
    There might be a much larger variety of goods and services for millionaires to choose from, given every unique person had some money so the market heard their needs and even whims. The money would keep flowing, especially because there would be no transaction taxes to slow it down. Entrepreneurial millionaires would be in a good position to benefit from all this demand, creating companies to satisfy all these needs that the market was now listening to.
      With all artists, writers, inventors, programmers, and so on freed from the need to worry about earning a daily living, the digital world would blossom with an endless array of free music, free images, free idea, and the physical world would be beautified with free artworks and the streets would be livened with free street productions and plays. So, the millionaire's remaining wealth would go farther, with less entertainment that needs to be paid for. Basically, millionaires would be benefiting, like everyone else, from a robust peer economy and gift economy.
    On a personal level, there would be a lot less desire for people to marry millionaires just for the money. For some ugly or nasty millionaires, this might be a hardship. But for most, this would actually be a blessing. They would be less likely to be taken advantage of by social climbers or fortune hunters. Millionaires would have to worry less about their kids being taken advantage of too. With a basic income, there would be a lot less desire by people to marry for money. So, a certain social problem would be greatly reduced in the lives of millionaires. There might still be some of this, but the overall situation would improve greatly.
    Similarly, there would likely be less kidnapping. For potential kidnappers or other criminals, when you get $2000 a month in income already, why risk being thrown in jail where your income goes to the upkeep of your prison and you lose your chance of making your own decisions as to how to spend it? While there would still be crimes of passion, total money-related crime might drop way down.
    Right now, a profit driven health care system has sized emergency rooms for average needs, and those emergency rooms are often full. With a basic income and more money going on a systematic basis to the health care system, the health care system emergency rooms will no longer be overrun with people there for reasons they could see a doctor for. So, emergency care would be better for millionaires. Millionaires with heart attacks won't be as likely to end up being diverted to far away hospitals because the local hospital emergency room is full. Likewise, emergency rooms might, with more money going to medicine, become sized for national emergencies, not personal emergencies, so they might become vast empty places, with physicians and other health care staff keeping their skills sharp always running simulations, learning more medical information, and/or doing basic medical research, with these people always ready for a pandemic or natural disaster or industrial accident which they had the resources in reserve to deal with. So, millionaires who got sick or injured in a disaster could be sure there was the facilities and expertise nearby to help them, even if most of the rest of the population needed help too at the same time too. In that way, some of this basic income could be funded by money that might otherwise go to the Defense department, because what is better civil defense then investing in a health care system able to to handle national disasters? So, any millionaires who are doctors (many are) would benefit by this plan, because their lives as doctors will become happier and less stressful, both with less paperwork and with more resources.
    With a basic income, from a millionaire business owner's point of view, there would be no need for social security as a payroll tax. There would be no need for affirmative action or reparations for slavery. There would be no need for a family-leave policy. There would be no need for unions (though there might still be some, but they would no longer resist technological innovation that eliminated jobs, since that increased wealth for everyone). There would be no need for unemployment insurance. There would be no need for all sorts of employment laws we need now. There would be no need for a minimum wage to protect anybody from destitution.
    Essentially, with a break in the link between having a job and having a right to consume at a moderate level, workplaces could be organized however they wanted. And potential employees would just vote with their feet about where they wanted to work to make the most money, have the most fun during the day, or do the most good for society as they saw it. While it is true that many unpleasant jobs would no longer find low wage workers to do them, for those jobs, either wages would go up, or they would be automated or redesigned out of existence, for example, like with some towns that have garbage trucks with robot arms to pick up curbside standard garbage cans. So, overall, most of the jobs that remained would be ones that people really wanted to do. There would no longer be the threat of poverty and starvation to motivate workers, but that make for happier companies, and thus happier managers and CEOs, and so more happiness for most of the millionaires that are the managers and CEOs. Everything would just be a little less stressful.
    There still might be a need for pollution regulation (as a negative externality of the marketplace), but everyone would have more money to pay a premium for greener products. And there might be a lot more innovation going on to make compliance with low or zero emissions manufacturing easy.
    There would be no need for public schools or a public school tax, because families would have enough wealth per child to hire tutors or pay for private schools or to just stay home and teach their own through homeschooling/unschooling. Likely, towns would be more interesting places to be, with people of all ages having fun on the streets. Cities and town would come alive again with the laughter of children. And these would not be the mean dispirited hopeless children sometimes found on today's streets -- these would be compassionate, confident, hopeful children who were following a social example of generosity by the wealthy. These would be the kind of children who would say "Mr. you dropped your wallet!" instead of running off with it. With so much hope, the parents of these children would be more hopeful too, so they would vote for hopeful politicians and hopeful policies, the kind to build up the world instead of hunker down and build fortresses and prisons, the kind that might treat drug addiction as a medical illness and societal illness, not a personal crime. ...
      So, for all these reasons, millionaires and billionaires could sleep more soundly at night, especially those with social consciences. Those with social consciences would have recognized that while the market is great at creating wealth, it is also great at concentrating wealth which creates problems, since the market does not hear the needs of those without money to shout out for them. But, a basic income gives everyone in a society a voice with which to talk to the market, whether the market needs their labor or not. And with rising automation like AI and robotics, better design, and limited demand because the best things in life are free or cheap, more and more the market will not need humans to be involved in production, and so there will be less and less jobs for humans to do. So, this approach deals with a fundamental problem with divide-by-zero errors in mainstream economics, the kind of errors that cause unrest of various types.
    The fact is, the basic income is already about what most millionaires might be earning off their investments after inflation (assuming they have anything left after the recent market crash). So, in a way, this proposal makes everyone in the USA into effective millionaires (or close to it). So, that means that millionaires have a lot more potential friends in the local neighborhood with a millionaire-level of spare time to do fun things with during the day. So, being a millionaire will be a much less lonely thing in our society. And should a millionaire have children, the millionaire knows, no matter how irresponsible with money their kid might be, that child will always be a millionaire, in terms of a basic income. ..."

Viruses by definition contain genetic code from outside the host organism.

On the other hand, just as some organelles (i.e. mitochondria, chloroplasts) are apparently the remnant of a microbial infection or ancient symbiosis that became integrated, there are several cellular mechanisms that are apparently remnants of an ancient retrovirus infection, where the bulk of the viral genome was lost but one of its mechanisms was retained and adapted to perform some useful new function.

I'd be willing to bet this is another example of such an

No, you'd have to be inbred with the cancer 'donor' to not reject their cancer as readily as you'd reject an organ transplant from them.

Not necessarily.

These things aren't carrying the full-blown genome. They're carrying little bits of it - like regulatory switches (or something that functions like that). They ought to be able, occasionally, to covert another person's cells JUST FINE without also marking them as any more foreign than an equivalent cancer naturally arising in that person.

Not picking on you personally, but there sure are a lot of dumb ass conspiracy theories on a thread about critical thinking.

The purpose of the neurological changes that take place in a teenagers brain seems to be in part to inspire rebellion against their parents to the point where they flee the nest, once the rebellion succeeds grandchildren bring relative harmony for a decade or more.

Nope, good grammar does that, he just failed to state he was paraphrasing.

The actual meaning of the quote was NOT lost. ie: it explicitly states they oppose CT because they believe it will lead children to doubt their parents or as they put it "undermining parental authority", the wording also strongly implies they don't want the "authority" of fixed beliefs "undermined". The subtext of the quote is that parents and fixed beliefs are infallible and should not be questioned.

In simpler words the policy as you have quoted it says - We don't want educated children, we want obedient children.

Yes, the very nature of large organisations drains initiative, males in particular evolved to work in small groups of 5-6 and live in tribes of ~150 people, anyone not in their tribe was by definition "sub-human" but not necessarily a mortal enemy. A wise organisation acknowledges this and will give small teams a great deal of autonomy to achieve a particular goal, eg: think how the military would tackle the goal of "keep the park tidy and well maintained", you may have to explain to them that anyone can use the park, but you get the idea.

Disclaimer: I spent seven years in the 90's as technical lead on an automated job dispatch system that handled thousand of workers and tens of thousands of jobs each day, it covered the continent of Australia, at that time it was by far the largest mobile dispatch system in the southern hemisphere in volume of work and geographical coverage. The backend used "linear programming" techniques (WW2 logistics), no human could beat the daily work plan it churned out. A bunch of execs would get up at 5am and paw all over the plan, add some "special constraints" and end up with a less efficient solution. Often the "special constraints" were accepted anyway, since - we can't have (say) the telecoms minister waiting 2 days for a new install in his office, it has to be done first thing today, and it has to be done by employee X who drinks at the same pub, who gives a flying fuck if 25 nobodys drop off the original work plan?

Can we throw everyone in the South in jail now? Oh wait, Canada. Darn.

Seriously, this is just nuts. Are people really this easily scared into giving ground on basic rights?

Or Microsoft found out they must cede the battle to avoid losing the war. That doesn't mean Valve should get complacent, once you make a threat like that it'd better stay credible. If they back down too far Microsoft might try for a blitzkrieg shoving the Microsoft Store down users' throat before Valve has time to rekindle the SteamOS project. At the same time they don't want Steam to go mainstream to avoid making it a real enemy to Windows.

I'm 55, the phrase has been around for a long time, Carl Sagan was fond of it (unfortunately my HS never mentioned it) so it wasn't until I dropped out and saw Sagan and Randi talking about it on TV that I became personally aware that it was a skill that can be taught. Perhaps it's been hijacked lately in the US to mean something else but I haven't noticed. To me it has always meant 'skepticism', in particular self-skepticism. Sagan also referred to it as his "bullshit detection kit". As for TFA, memorising facts* is essential but insufficient, ie: you can't even start to think about things that you don't remember, which is what Newton was getting at with his "shoulders of giants" comment.

*Facts as in - "two bodies attract each other with a force proportional to their combined mass and the distance between them", that the force is ~9.8m/s on Earth's surface is trivia, handy to know but not essential to the concept that's being memorised since it can easily be looked up or measured. A physics teacher who sets up a gravity problem and expects students to know the value of 'g' from memory, is doing it wrong. Of course there are exceptions where memorising numbers is a useful "short-cut" for the student, multiplication tables being the most obvious

There's tonnes of evidence to back him up. You know, unless you believe in magic every effect _does_ in fact have a cause...

all you have to do is keep redefining "Middle Class". How's that old Steinbeck quote about temporarily inconvenienced millionaires go again?

is to tax the owners of the kiosks and give the money (in the form of "Basic Income") to the people put out of work. There's all sorts of justifications for this ( The intrinsic worth of humanity, the fact that earths natural resources existed before your granddad came along and claimed them, etc). But it mostly boils down to one simple question: Do you have the cojones to let people die miserable deaths from starvation and the elements? If you do, fine. Welcome to psychopathy.

Now, as for the hard stuff (e.g. controlling prices and inflation) there are plenty of ways to do that. They're hard, and require effort. You can't wave a magic wand of +1 Ayn Rand's magic laissez faire and have it work out. It requires active participation in the economic well being of an entire populace. It also requires abandoning economic principles (not "moral principles") that aren't working. It means continuously striving to improve and control powerful trends and forces. It's not the sorta thing you figure out with a stupid /. post like mine (or yours, for that matter).

It's a good thing this is the only time in recorded history labor practices have ever been abused. Whoo. Dodged that bullet.

Jokes aside, the assumption is that there are many, many more of these abuses going on, and that their aggregation is what depresses wages. I suppose the argument could be made that these are few and far between, but then there's no real harm in harsh punishments, is there?