That's cool, but
this is cooler. This guy is engineering mosquitoes that cannot transmit malaria. Because these mosquitoes have a higher fitness than their wild type counterparts, they essentially outcompete malaria transmitting mosquitoes. Maybe it's a little technical, but still very cool.

What's interesting about this (I think) is that they're trying to open up research data that usually gets discarded or hidden. They're not necessarily talking about clinical trials of drugs in the FDA approval process. There's lots to be learned from the effects of drugs on various cell or tissue types at various stages of disease or age or any other variable of interest.

If a research group is studying the effects of compound A on some disease (atherosclerosis, for example), they might use a microarray study the effects of the changes in gene expression on endothelium. Maybe that compound turns out to be useless in this context, but they have data that might be meaningful on some other pathway like cell adhesion which is often implicated in cancer. That data would have been tossed because it was uninteresting to original question but could be meaningful to someone looking at something else.

But now you have two bits of information. Compound A doesn't effect atherosclerosis but it effects cell adhesion. And that tells us something about the wiring of the cell type in question. In their view, the interaction of genes forms a network and hitting one part of the network has an effect on cell adhesion but not atherosclerosis. So those pathways must not be directly linked. But compound A hits something in the cell adhesion subnetwork.

With a lot of little stories like this, you could build yourself a detailed idea of how different aspects of cellular machinery interact. And what targets are good to hit and what aren't.

The problem is because they will be changing payroll amounts for 200,000+ people at once. How do you identify which workers are affected? Schwarzenegger isn't even sure how many people's wages he's cutting. If you can't identify them, changing their pay isn't going to be any easier.

And you really don't want to make a mistake with payroll. LA Unified "upgraded" their payroll system recently and many teachers ended up paid twice or never paid at all, wreaking havoc across the school district. The University of California's payroll system is so byzantine that payroll administrators have a job for life.

Yeah this is politics, but doing things the right way (for once) or not at all is a good idea.