While it's certainly true that science does eventually root out falsifiers and unethical actors, universities are generally hoping they don't have to do any such thing. Many public universities (in the US, anyway) have research grants written in such a way that they include a considerable overhead -- at my last university job a few years ago, it was around 51%, although it notched up a percent or so every year while I was around -- to go toward operations throughout the university. One physics prof would say that he had to modify his grant budgets to pay for the English department, and he wasn't really all that wrong. It's just an amorphous Facilities and Administration (F&A) bracket in the budget narrative, and it largely goes toward administrative staff and... yep, other departments, at least in some measure.

It's in the university's best (short-term!) interest to bury possible issues with grant-funded projects, lest the sponsoring agency stop sending funds, including that sweet, sweet F&A. My university job ended after I pointed out some fraud/waste/abuse going on with a grant I was supposed to help administer, since allowing the fraud to continue while I was trained in what to spot was supposed to mean my head on the block. (Pointing it out, of course, didn't do me many favors, but I'm in a far better place now.) Ultimately, when these kinds of issues are pointed out from within, universities will frequently try to whistle their way out of seeing problems; whereas if the issues are pointed out extramurally, as they are with peer reviewed scientific research subject to wider criticism by the overall scientific community, university Research Integrity and Compliance officers spring into action to make sure they don't get sitebanned overall from future funding from that sponsoring agency.

Type O is the absence of A or B antigens. There are plenty of other types/antigens in the catalog, and labeling as O doesn't denote presence or absence of those.

That would be because, for most people in the "middle class" as it currently exists in the US, those "dreams" really are fantasies. When those people are something like a major injury or a cancer diagnosis away from being in that "poor" bracket, there are bigger things to worry about than vacationing in Dubai (to pull a "status and power dream" example). Employment certainly isn't secure these days.

At least, not for the "middle class." When you've inherited millions or billions (or even hundreds of thousands) of dollars, a lot of those problems are a lot less problematic, and there's time to cultivate those "power and status dreams."

Maybe keeping people in their homes would be a good way to start. Homeless shelters are a failsafe, a safety net. What you're saying would be the same as telling the tightrope walker not to worry about the performance, but just to dive off the the cable as soon as they got on it.

Nice proximate, quarantinable safety net, but solving the ultimate problems (like, say, medically induced bankruptcies and eventual foreclosures) might be a more effective role for the society.

Not coincidentally, that line gets spoken by people whose research really, truly does suck. Even if it doesn't, semifinalists don't exactly drop off the planet. The kid can grow his heart a few sizes that day.

I like how you have two settings on this -- no place to live vs. Trump Tower. Bullshit. No one's asking for these people to have the world given to them -- not the GP, anyway -- but that's how it's been framed all these years, because if it became more mainstream exactly how those people are getting blocked from getting enough to get on their own two feet, Occupy would've happened decades ago, to say the very least.

It is, indeed, very expensive to be poor.

Darwin actually never said anything about "survival of the fittest." That language was applied in interpretation later on. (Erroneously, actually. It tends to miss the point.)

Since you're likening inherited wealth to reproduction, let's call the family inheritance what it would be -- inbreeding. The long-term consequences of inbreeding have certainly been documented.

Which might be a fine point of discussion, up until the point where people use the notion of not absolutely ending homelessness as an excuse not to dedicate time and effort (not necessarily money) to reducing homelessness.

You might not be able to save everybody, but are you saving everyone that you reasonably could? By and large, we aren't.

Question of the age, I'd say.

That would be because the "brainwashed" people have literally been paying into Social Security directly -- as an itemized paycheck deduction -- for as long as they've been employed. The date that it starts paying out doesn't have anything to do with it, at least not in the terms you're describing.

Amtrak has been at least as expensive as air flight for a sometime, and it hadn't provided much of a benefit to general public, much less the poor population, for a while now.

Citation needed. I'm guessing you haven't travelled by Amtrak over this span of time. I was traveling to western PA from FL last December for the holidays, and the round trip cost me $250. Flights would've easily cost me considerably more, because connections end up being cheaper through Amtrak than through United Airlines, which is the sole carrier at my hometown's airport. (This is even before we get into baggage fees!)

Last December's Snowpocalypse sent a considerable number of travelers to Amtrak -- I can attest to this, because the train south was packed to the gills with people who were stranded in New York and Philadelphia. This influx was in addition to that which already crowded trains -- often people who can't afford round trips by air, or for whom the length of the trip (maybe across the state) would make air travel impractical. I can remember making the trip across PA to NYC several times... and never, over all the trips I made over the years, did I travel on a train that didn't have a fairly significant number of people in each car. Amtrak gets a lot more use than most people give it credit for, which I imagine is part of the reason it doesn't do as well as it can, and its national route system is terribly sparse when you get beyond the NE corridor. Still, with what it has, it does fairly well.

Someone who is more into biotech could probably do better than I could with this, but here goes...

1) You could. The problem is that the person wouldn't necessarily have been previously exposed to the antibody that would cause the reaction. Sensitization is a lot more likely once your body's been in contact with the stuff for a while. If someone had some sensitivity to the antibodies[1] before gene therapy even began, it's entirely possible that they've got bigger problems in front of them than getting vaccinated against HIV, and I have to ask why they're in this trial/program. (The sensitivity also could've cropped up a lot earlier than this procedure in such a case, to boot.)

2) Not necessarily a good idea at this stage of research and understanding. If gene therapy consists of pasting a gene somewhere into a chromosome, you've got to define (as best you can) where you're going to do the pasting, just so you can get your material (of variable length, depending on what you're trying to do) incorporated. Wherever it ends up and however you can narrow that down, you hope it works. Going in and messing with all of that to get rid of or change what you did in the first place is a little bit like blindfolding someone, spinning them three times, then holding them over a patient to make a surgical incision, leaving them blindfolded, spinning them three times again, and expecting them to both find and suture the original incision. Granted, there are markers and other means of identifying where genes are, but I don't think we're near the point that "turn off the original gene therapy" is considered any better than something way, way easier said than done.

[1] Antibodies are generally like screwdrivers with interchangeable bits. The handle and shaft don't change much, so a sensitivity to them seems very unlikely. As for the bits themselves? Hard to say. I don't know enough immunology to say one way or the other, but I'd think that the antibody itself wouldn't tend to be treated like an antigen. Of course, it probably depends quite a bit on the antibody in question.