4787-ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? | View Thread

Fyre Festival showed us our future, if we want it

By Eve Andrews and Annelise McGough on Jan 26, 2019

Look, we get it — trying to live with the environment in mind can be daunting. People need stuff to live, even if that stuff (like electricity and water and food and gas and oil and plastic and buildings and cars and clothes) contributes to climate change.

But there are some uses of that stuff that we can surely do without. Like, for example, dropping thousands of dollars to fly to a tiny, sparkling island just to take the perfect Instagram picture. That’s the kind of climate-warming narcissism that takes center stage in the Fyre Fest documentary, the new schadenfreude-filled Netflix documentary about a music festival-turned-metaphor for our time.

The Fyre Festival, the brainchild of con artist/entrepreneur Billy MacFarland, was meant to be a music festival for millennials with too much money and not enough designer drugs. It was supposed to have everything: Scantily clad Instagram models, gourmet chefs, luxury villas, Blink-182 (???), and the opportunity for nonstop, sunlit, tequila-fueled #content. As we now know, none of those amenities ever actually existed, to the horror of the 6,000 or so ticket-holders who arrived on the remote Bahamanian island of Exuma ready to rage.

Continuing our tradition of Grist staff bingeing Netflix shows (for journalism!), reporters Annelise and Eve took to the couch and found the climate message in Netflix’s latest documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened.

Note: Fyre spoilers below.

By Anne Gearan ,

Carol Morello and

Paul Sonne

February 1 at 12:28 PM

The United States will pull out of a nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, the Trump administration announced Friday, ending a cornerstone Cold War agreement on grounds that Russian violations render it moot.

The demise of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty raises fears of a new nuclear arms race, although U.S. officials discount the risk.

Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is suspending participation in the agreement, starting a six-month countdown to a final U.S. withdrawal. That leaves a slim chance that Russia could end missile programs widely seen as a violation, salvaging the treaty. The United States accuses Moscow of violating the agreement since 2014.

“For years Russia has violated the terms of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty without remorse,” Pompeo said, adding that the United States has continued to meet its obligations while seeking to get Moscow to come into compliance.

“When an agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security is so threatened, we must respond,” he added.

The United States did not announce plans for any new weapons or shifts in missile deployments, but Trump administration officials did not rule it out down the road.

The United States' plan to scrap this Cold War treaty raises fears of another nuclear arms buildup. (William Neff /The Washington Post)

[Trump administration gives Russia an ultimatum on Cold War-era arms treaty]

In a statement, President Trump said the onus is on Russia.

“The United States has fully adhered to the INF Treaty for more than 30 years, but we will not remain constrained by its terms while Russia misrepresents its actions,” Trump said. “We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other. We will move forward with developing our own military response options and will work with NATO and our other allies and partners to deny Russia any military advantage from its unlawful conduct.”

The U.S. decision is another sour note between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump has sought closer ties. Trump canceled a planned Dec. 1 meeting with Putin in protest of what the White House called Russian naval aggression against Ukraine.

Putin has sought a way out of the INF since at least 2007, a U.S. official told reporters. But Putin is likely to continue seeking new arms-control talks with Washington, in part because negotiating over nuclear arsenals puts Moscow on near-equal diplomatic footing with the much richer and better-armed Washington, analysts say.

[What the INF Treaty means for the U.S. and Europe]

The New START treaty, which limits Russian and American deployed strategic nuclear warheads, expires in two years. Russian diplomats have said they’re preparing for a scenario in which the New START treaty won’t be renewed and blame the United States for not seriously engaging in talks on how to proceed.

“I truly fear that the New START Treaty may have the same fate as the INF Treaty,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Russian television before Pompeo’s announcement. “It may just expire on February 5, 2021 and not be prolonged.”

Earlier Friday, the Kremlin said it expected official notification of the U.S. withdrawal. There was no immediate Kremlin comment after Pompeo’s announcement.

Reaction to the widely expected move was muted among lawmakers in Moscow, underscoring that Russia’s eventual response to the treaty’s demise will depend in part on how aggressively the United States shifts its military posture.

“I don’t think we need to take tough countermeasures right now,” Andrey Krasov, deputy head of the defense committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, told the Interfax news agency after Pompeo’s announcement. “We have a huge military potential anyway that can counter any threat.”

Russia has said it is not violating the treaty and that its 9M729 missile has a range of less than 500 kilometers (311 miles). NATO declared in December that the missile system does violate the INF and poses a risk to Europe.

Russia has warned that it would respond in kind if the United States were to deploy new intermediate-range missiles, potentially leading to a new nuclear buildup in Europe reminiscent of the Cold War.

Speaking at the State Department, Pompeo said the United States would continue diplomatic efforts.

“We’ll continue to have conversations with them. We hope they’ll come back into compliance,” Pompeo said. “We’ve had conversations at every level, at senior levels, at technical levels. We’ve had conversations about the nature of these systems. There’s no mistaking that the Russians have chosen not to comply with this treaty.”

The Trump administration has signaled for months that it wants to end the agreement covering ground-based, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.

Arms control specialists said that without the treaty, the United States may move to position missile systems in Europe or Asia, while Russia could use the opportunity to base missile systems elsewhere.

In Asia, the United States could deploy conventional midrange missiles near Chinese ships and militarized artificial islands during a conflict to defend parts of the East China Sea or South China Sea.

The rationale for deploying conventional midrange missiles in Europe theoretically would be to blunt any Russian attempt to prevent the U.S. military from resupplying European allies in a future conflict.

Both such moves would risk a response from Beijing and Moscow, risking a conventional arms race with missiles in Asia and Europe that has already shown signs of emerging with the development of hypersonic weapons that can move far faster than the speed of sound.

The senior Trump administration official said that the United States is so far looking only at nonnuclear missiles in terms of possible deployments and that any move to deploy them would likely be years away.

In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg offered alliance backing for the U.S. move, saying that it is Russia’s responsibility to start complying with the treaty again.

“Russia is in material breach of the #INFTreaty & must use next 6 months to return to full & verifiable compliance or bear sole responsibility for its demise. #NATO fully supports the US suspension & notification of withdrawal from the Treaty,” Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter.

Many NATO diplomats have greeted the U.S. moves with resignation, saying they would prefer to preserve the arms control treaty but that they are now focused on limiting a new arms race.

“Allies regret that Russia, as part of its broader pattern of behaviour, continues to deny its INF Treaty violation, refuses to provide any credible response, and has taken no demonstrable steps toward returning to full and verifiable compliance,” NATO’s North America Council said in a statement Friday.

Senior Trump administration officials tried to emphasize that Washington is on the same page as its European allies, even though the White House faced criticism for Trump’s decision to announce the U.S. withdrawal on the fly last fall, before European allies had formally agreed that Washington should pull out of the treaty.

The death of the INF Treaty raises questions about the future of other arms control agreements, including New START, which expires in February 2021.

If the White House and the Kremlin don’t agree to extend New START, the decision would turn the clock back to an era where Washington and Moscow possess nuclear arms with practically no agreed restrictions and risk the return of a full Cold War-style arms race.

A senior administration official raised questions on Friday about whether the United States could trust Russia enough to extend New START, given the violations of the INF Treaty.

“It’s important that we feel we can enter into agreements with countries and feel like they adhere to them and fully implement them,” the official said.

The Trump administration is in the middle of a policy process to determine whether the United States should extend New START. Because the reduction targets have already been met, an extension would only mean keeping the limits in place and continuing the inspections that are stipulated by the treaty.

The treaty includes an automatic extension clause should the leaders of both nations agree, eliminating the need for Washington and Moscow to engage in a lengthy new round of negotiations.

Lawmakers broke along party lines over the withdrawal announcement, although both parties called the pact flawed.

Republicans had effectively asked for the move in last year’s defense authorization, stating that the United States would be “legally entitled to suspend the operation of the INF Treaty in whole or in part for so long as the Russian Federation continues to be in material breach of the INF Treaty.”

“I completely support the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty due to Russian noncompliance,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement. “Russia has been in violation of the treaty for years and the Obama Administration refused to do anything about it. It’s a bad deal for America when Russia cheats and the United States complies.”

Democrats, however, warned that ripping up the treaty was the wrong way to steer Russia — or China — back into a treaty order more responsive to modern weapons and threats.

“The Trump Administration is risking an arms race and undermining international security and stability,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Russia’s brazen noncompliance with this treaty is deeply concerning, but discarding a key pillar of our nonproliferation security framework creates unacceptable risks. The Administration should exhaust every diplomatic effort and work closely with NATO allies over the next six months to avoid thrusting the United States into a dangerous arms competition.”

The stark partisan divisions in Congress are a sign of how the GOP has shifted on such issues. Just a few months ago, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, broke loudly with Trump over his announced intention to withdraw from the INF, warning that ripping up the arms control treaties that helped settle Cold War contests would be a “huge mistake.”

On Friday, it was only Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) who sounded the same warning bells.

“The Trump Administration lacks a coherent strategy to address the threat new Russian cruise missiles pose to the interests of the United States and those of our allies,” Menendez said in a statement, calling withdrawal from the treaty “yet another geostrategic gift to Vladimir Putin.”

“With the renewal of the New START agreement coming up next year, I strongly urge the administration try a new approach and develop a coherent strategy to stabilize our arms control regime,” he added.

Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), the chairman of the Foreign Relations panel, wholly disagreed.

“Russian actions represent a material breach of the treaty, and it is abundantly clear: the United States is the only country limited by the INF Treaty,” he said in a statement. “The time has come to set the treaty aside and develop alternative avenues toward the security the treaty once provided.”

Trump has also pulled the United States out of the international nuclear deal with Iran and announced a U.S. exit from the Paris climate accords. Neither was a full treaty confirmed by the Senate, as the INF Treaty was.

“Yes another withdrawal from an accord by the Trump administration,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter. “Seems this clique is allergic to anything w/ US signature on it. Message: Any deal with US govt is not worth the ink; even treaties ratified by Congress.”

The push to pull out of the INF Treaty by the Trump administration coincided with the arrival of John Bolton as White House national security adviser. Bolton oversaw the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002, paving the way for the erection of American missile defense systems that Russia long decried.

The INF Treaty has long been a bugbear for the former U.N. ambassador, who is a skeptic of international agreements and organizations he sees as constraining American power.

In a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal, Bolton and co-author Paula DeSutter contended that the INF had outlived its usefulness and cited a quote from the late French President Charles de Gaulle: “Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: They last while they last.”

Anton Troianovsky in Moscow, Michael Birnbaum in Brussels and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report.

New U.S. Experiments Aim To Create Gene-Edited Human Embryos

Dieter Egli, a developmental biologist at Columbia University, and Katherine Palmerola examine a newly fertilized egg injected with a CRISPR editing tool.

Rob Stein/NPR

A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases, NPR has learned.

For now, the work is confined to a laboratory. But the research, if successful, would mark another step toward turning CRISPR, a powerful form of gene editing, into a tool for medical treatment.

A Chinese scientist sparked international outrage in November when he announcedthat he had used the same technique to create the world's first gene-edited human babies. He said his goal was to protect them from infection with HIV, a claim that was criticized because there are safe, effective and far less controversial ways of achieving that goal.

In contrast, Dieter Egli, a developmental biologist at Columbia University, says he is conducting his experiments "for research purposes." He wants to determine whetherCRISPR can safely repair mutations in human embryos to prevent genetic diseases from being passed down for generations.

So far, Egli has stopped any modified embryos from developing beyond one day so he can study them.

"Right now we are not trying to make babies. None of these cells will go into the womb of a person," he says.

But if the approach is successful, Egli would likely allow edited embryos to develop further to continue his research.

Egli hopes doctors will someday be able edit embryonic human DNA to prevent many congenital illnesses, such as Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease.

In the lab, Egli is trying to fix one of the genetic defects that cause retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited form of blindness. If it works, the hope is that the approach could help blind people carrying the mutation have genetically related children whose vision is normal.

Egli is attempting to fix one of the genetic defects that cause retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited form of blindness.
Rob Stein/NPR

"Preventing inherited forms of blindness would be wonderful — very important for affected families," Egli says.

But that is likely to take years of additional research to demonstrate that the technique is both effective and safe.

Nevertheless, even this kind of basic research is controversial.

"This is really disturbing," says Fyodor Urnov, associate director of the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences in Seattle. He worries such experiments could encourage more irresponsible scientists to misuse gene-editing technologies.

"As we've learned from the events in China, it is no longer a hypothetical that somebody will just go ahead and go rogue and do something dangerous, reckless, unethical," Urnov says.

Egli's research is reviewed in advance and overseen by a panel of other scientists and bioethicists at Columbia.

While the debate over research like Egli's continues, the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the World Health Organization and others are trying to develop detailed standards for how scientists should safely and ethically edit human embryos.

Some bioethicists and scientists are calling for an explicit global moratorium on creating any more gene-edited babies. Others, like Urnov, would like to see a hiatus in even basic research.

The U.S. government prohibits the use of federal funding for research involving human embryos. But gene editing of human embryos can be done using private funding. The Food and Drug Administration is barred from considering any studies that would involve using genetically modified human embryos to create a pregnancy. But laws that govern the creation of genetically modified babies vary widely internationally.

Egli is well aware that his work may be controversial to some people. To try to be completely transparent about his experiments, Egli recently invited NPR to his laboratory for an exclusive look at his research.

"We can't just do the editing and then hope everything goes right and implant that into a womb. That's not responsible," Egli says. "We have to first do the basic research studies to see what happens. That's what we're doing here."

To show NPR what he is doing, early one morning Egli pushes open the door of a tiny windowless room on the sixth floor of one of Columbia's research towers in Upper Manhattan. The lab is jammed with scientific equipment, including two microscopes.

Egli snaps on blue rubber gloves and opens a frosty metal cylinder holding frozen human eggs.

"I'm going to wear gloves because we want to keep things clean," he tells me.

To begin his experiment, Egli starts the long, slow process of thawing the frozen human eggs that were donated for research. After several hours of careful work and waiting, Egli has readied 15 eggs for his experiment.

After setting up a large microscope, Egli slides a round glass dish under the lens. The dish contains sperm from a blind man who carries the mutation that Egli is trying to fix. It also holds the CRISPR gene-editing tool.

"I'm starting with just one egg," he says as he gently places the first thawed egg into the dish.

"It's a beautiful cell," Egli says, pointing to a magnified image of the egg on a computer monitor. "I would say it's one of the most beautiful cells."

Egli maneuvers a tiny glass needle protruding into the side of the microscope dish toward one of the sperm. "So you can see a moving sperm over here," he says. "Now I'm picking it up. The sperm is in the needle. Now I'm dipping it in the CRISPR tool."

Once the sperm is inside the needle with the CRISPR gene-editing tool, Egli points the needle's tip at the egg. "Oh no!" he exclaims with a sigh. "The sperm is swimming away."

He searches the dish for the errant sperm.

"Oh, here it is," he says as he pulls the sperm back into the needle.

Next, Egli gently pierces the egg with the needle. "The membrane is broken — breached. There we go," Egli says as he injects the sperm and CRISPR tool into the egg. He breathes a sigh of relief.

Egli injects a human egg with a sperm carrying a genetic mutation that causes blindness and a CRISPR tool he hopes will fix the mutation.
Rob Stein/NPR

The idea is that CRISPR will slice out the mutation in the sperm, and the healthy DNA in the egg will serve as a template to repair the genetic mutation.

"Hopefully the CRISPR tool will cut the mutation and then the egg will replace that with a version that no longer causes disease," Egli says. "The genome from the mother would be rescuing the mutant genome from the father."

The approach was developed by scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland.

Egli was initially skeptical of the Oregon group's claims that they had used CRISPR for the first time to repair a mutation in human embryos this way. Egli's research is aimed at trying to confirm that it works and how.

Mitalipov's group is also continuing to study the technique to see whether it can safely fix several genetic mutations in human embryos, including one of the breast cancer genes.

For the next two hours, Egli painstakingly fertilizes and edits one egg after another. He has to overcome a variety of technical complications. At one point, the tip of the fragile needle unexpectedly breaks off at a crucial moment.

"There we go," he says later, after the needle is replaced. "That one definitely worked. Beautiful."

This work may be beautiful to Egli, but it makes critics very nervous.

"Anyone with a connection to the Internet will be able to download the recipe to make a designer baby," Urnov says. "And then the question becomes: 'What's to prevent them from using it?' As we learned in the past year: apparently nothing."

So Urnov worries about any such research proceeding.

"We need to hit the pause button and keep it pressed until we understand how do we proceed in a way that minimizes the risk of people going rogue," Urnov says.

Urnov and others argue society needs a much broader debate about whether there is a truly a compelling reason to ever try to make any more gene-edited babies. There are many other ways to prevent genetic diseases, they note.

"If we've learned anything from what's happened in China, it's that the urge to race ahead pushes science to shoot first and ask questions later," says J. Benjamin Hurlbut, an associate professor of biology and society at Arizona State University. "But this is a domain where we should be asking questions first. And maybe never shooting. What's the rush?"

That's especially true when the prospect of creating gene-edited babies raises so many fraught ethical questions, including fears that it could eventually lead to the creation of "designer babies," critics say.

"We don't need to be mucking around with the genes of future children," says Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a watchdog group. "This could open the door to a world where people who were born genetically modified are thought to be superior to others, and we would have a society of people who are considered to be genetic haves and genetic have-nots."

But many other scientists and bioethicists disagree.

"This is valid research, and I think it's important research," says R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "It has value not only for the possible use in the future for some number of conditions that would involve a live birth, but it has value for basic understanding of embryology, basic understanding of development," Charo says. "Of course I think we should be doing that research. Why wouldn't you be doing that research?"

Many leading scientists agree.

"Is there value in doing that kind of research? I think there is," agrees Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped invent CRISPR. "Does it have to be carried out carefully and under the right regulatory guidelines? Of course. But I think there's value in doing research like that."

"I'd like to see the U.S. be involved and show leadership on how to do that responsibly rather than say we're not going to have a seat at the table," Doudna says.

Back in Egli's lab, it's now nearly 3 p.m., and he is wrapping up the day's experiments.

"OK, that's it. That's the last one," he says as he places back into storage the last of 14 eggs he managed to fertilize and hopefully edit. He will stop their development the next morning to see whether it worked.

(npr.org)

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 1/31/2019 11:23:02 AM
	Grist / Netflix FYRE TIRED Fyre Festival showed us our future, if we want it By Eve Andrews and Annelise McGough on Jan 26, 2019 Look, we get it — trying to live with the environment in mind can be daunting. People need stuff to live, even if that stuff (like electricity and water and food and gas and oil and plastic and buildings and cars and clothes) contributes to climate change. But there are some uses of that stuff that we can surely do without. Like, for example, dropping thousands of dollars to fly to a tiny, sparkling island just to take the perfect Instagram picture. That’s the kind of climate-warming narcissism that takes center stage in the Fyre Fest documentary, the new schadenfreude-filled Netflix documentary about a music festival-turned-metaphor for our time. The Fyre Festival, the brainchild of con artist/entrepreneur Billy MacFarland, was meant to be a music festival for millennials with too much money and not enough designer drugs. It was supposed to have everything: Scantily clad Instagram models, gourmet chefs, luxury villas, Blink-182 (???), and the opportunity for nonstop, sunlit, tequila-fueled #content. As we now know, none of those amenities ever actually existed, to the horror of the 6,000 or so ticket-holders who arrived on the remote Bahamanian island of Exuma ready to rage. Continuing our tradition of Grist staff bingeing Netflix shows (for journalism!), reporters Annelise and Eve took to the couch and found the climate message in Netflix’s latest documentary Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Note: Fyre spoilers below.
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 1/31/2019 7:15:09 PM
	Polar vortex death toll rises as record-shattering Arctic blast keeps the Midwest in a deep freeze Wintry weather hit parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and beyond durning the polar vortex in January 2019. (The Washington Post) By Katie Mettler , Amy B Wang , Angela Fritz , Alex Horton and Cleve R. Wootson Jr. January 31 at 1:26 PM MADISON, Wis. — Millions of people across the Midwest are enduring a freeze normally reserved for the Arctic Circle as temperatures in some areas dropped below minus-50 degrees Thursday. The second day of frightful cold, bottoming out to record lows, was blamed for several deaths across the region, and fears grew for the most vulnerable populations. In Mt. Carroll, Ill., a trained weather observer reported that temperatures plunged to minus-38 degrees Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service. If certified, it would be the state’s lowest temperature on record, supplanting a minus-36 degree day in Congerville on Jan. 5, 1999. In northeast Minnesota, the unincorporated community of Cotton sank to minus-56 degrees — four shy of that state’s coldest temperature. The frigid temperatures across the Midwest taxed the infrastructure that was keeping the coldest parts of America warm. Electrical grids collapsed, airline gas lines froze, and authorities encouraged the largely home-bound population of the hardest-hit states to turn thermostats down to ease the burden on utility systems. Even that wasn’t always enough. Power outages roiled swaths of Wisconsin and Iowa, plunging thousands into a brief, unheated darkness. The dry, frigid air caused frostbite within minutes, led to spontaneous nosebleeds and turned even a brief foray outdoors into a potentially deadly activity. Officials across multiple states have linked at least six deaths to the weather, including several people who may have frozen to death in Milwaukee,Detroit and Rochester, Minn. Authorities said a reported death in Peoria, Ill., may have also been weather-related. University of Iowa officials said an “unresponsive” student had been discovered behind an academic hall and later died at the hospital. Authorities haven’t released a cause of death, but police told a local TV station they believe the extreme weather was a factor; the Press Citizen reported that the air temperature at the time the student was found was minus-22, with a wind chill of minus-51. Classes at the university were canceled from Tuesday evening through midday Thursday because of the weather. “We urge students, faculty, and staff to use good judgment and avoid serious risks during these extreme weather conditions,” the school said in a campus alert. [Some of the coldest air in the world is descending on the Midwest] Governors in Wisconsin and Michigan declared states of emergency and ordered all state government offices closed; some state agencies in Illinois were closed, as well. “I am urging people to prepare for this severe weather and to exercise caution when traveling or going outdoors,” Wisconsin Gov. Tony Evers said. Cotton, Minn., had a record low of minus-56 on Thursday. Thermometers in Moline, Ill., dropped to minus-33, five degrees lower than the old record of minus-28, set in 1996. Rockford, Ill., hit minus-30 degrees at 6:45 a.m. Central time, which broke the old record of minus-27 set on Jan. 20, 1982. The capitol building in Madison, where people sought shelter during business hours, remained open as the temperatures outside plunged to minus-24; the estimated wind chill made it feel like minus-48 degrees. A harbor light is covered with snow and ice on Lake Michigan in Chicago. (Nam Y. Huh/AP) It was colder than Alaska’s North Slope in many places. Norris Camp, Minn., where temperatures dropped to minus-48 degrees Wednesday, with the wind chill pegged at minus-65, was the coldest reporting location in the United States as of Wednesday evening and one of the coldest spots on Earth. Even Hell, Mich., froze over: The community outside of Ann Arbor was expected to see temperatures drop to minus-26 overnight into Thursday. The nearby University of Michigan took the rare step of canceling classes through Thursday. From Minnesota to Michigan, the polar vortex prompted school closures, mail service interruptions and thousands of flight cancellations, most of them in and out of Chicago. Eighteen factories run by General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Ford shut down on Thursday because of the brutal weather and a fire at a natural gas compressor station. Scores of restaurants, grocery stores and coffee shops shut their doors because of the cold or shortened business hours. In Chicago, many performances went dark, including the musical “Hamilton” and “Disney on Ice.” For the region’s most vulnerable — even those hardened to the Upper Midwest’s long winters — this polar vortex has been especially perilous. Karen Andro, director of Hope’s Home Ministries at First United Methodist Church in Madison, has spent much of the past few days coordinating with other nonprofits and government agencies to arrange transportation, hot meals and warming centers for the city’s homeless residents. She reflected on past winters, when one person froze to death on the steps of a church and another had a heart attack walking between shelters, and said that services here have improved. “The cold exacerbates everything,” Andro said, noting that homeless people with mental illness, disabilities and health problems are at extreme risk. [Minus-56 degrees and more: Brutal cold-air outbreak is smashing records in the Midwest] Early Wednesday morning, there remained a small but dangerous gap in service. An hour before sunrise, dozens of men, bundled up and carrying their belongings in grocery bags and suitcases, ventured into the frigid morning air. It was minus-24 degrees, and winds made it feel like minus-48. “They should take a bus and pull it right here,” said Randy George Friesen, 66, who carried two bags six blocks from the auxiliary shelter where he slept Tuesday night to the headquarters of Porchlight, an organization that assists homeless people. The man’s glasses were frosted over, his snow white beard was frozen and he had used scarves to tie a blue blanket around his wide shoulders. Friesen said he didn’t understand why there wasn’t a shuttle between the two warm buildings. “That will never happen,” said Murrel Swift, 48, who also made the journey between shelters. Tiny white crystals had accumulated on his thick eyelashes. Murrel Swift in downtown Madison, Wis. (Lauren Justice for The Washington Post) Inside the shelter, night manager Maurice Robinson was rattled. One guest had attacked another with a bike lock, prompting the police, fire department and EMS to descend upon Porchlight. On nights like Tuesday, when the temperature is life-threatening, the city’s shelters do not turn away anyone — even if an individual has been previously banned for bad behavior or intoxication. Porchlight was more crowded than usual, and Robinson had to place people on mats along a hallway wall. At least eight men streamed in hours after the scheduled check-in time — at 1:09 a.m., 2:22 a.m., 2:37 a.m. “The cold brings a lot of people in,” Robinson said. Even some Midwestern homes were not cold-proofed refuges for hardened residents. Brian Wallheimer, a science writer for Purdue University, corralled his three young children at home in Rockford, Ill., after schools closed their doors Wednesday. The freezing air infiltrated his two-story home northwest of Chicago, he said, and frost has accumulated on the window sills and door hinges. “I’ve never seen that happen,” Wallheimer, 39, said, as his children — 9, 6 and 4 years old — hatched plans to build a blanket fort in the basement. [It’s so hot in Australia that snakes are seeking refuge in people’s toilets] In addition to grade school and university closures throughout the Midwest, districts and colleges from Pittsburgh to Buffalo also canceled classes because of extreme weather. Wind chill estimates plummeted to minus-50 in the Dakotas and northern Minnesota on Wednesday. The Arctic air will loosen its grip on the Midwest by Thursday afternoon; temperatures might even approach zero degrees in Chicago and Milwaukee. By the weekend, daytime temperatures will be above freezing across most of the Midwest. As Chicago neared record lows ahead of the expected thaw, the Chicago area’s Metra commuter rail suspended some train service after extreme temperatures caused wiring problems. Some Chicago Transit Authority buses were being turned into mobile warming shelters for the homeless, the Associated Press reported, while Lyft said it would offer free rides to warming centers in the city, as well as in the Twin Cities, Madison, Milwaukee and Detroit. In Rochester, Minn., where temperatures dropped to minus-27 degrees Wednesday, all municipal transit services were suspended after buses began experiencing mechanical difficulties. Xcel Energy asked Minnesota customers to lower their thermostats to 63 degrees until Thursday morning, “if possible,” to help “ensure that all of our customers continue to have gas service during this bitterly cold weather.” Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer made a similar request Wednesday night, urging Michiganders in the Lower Peninsula to turn their thermostats down to 65 degrees or lower until Friday at noon, citing “extremely high demand for natural gas and a facility incident.” A snowplow clears West Washington Avenue in Madison, Wis. (Lauren Justice for The Washington Post) As many as 13,500 customers experienced power outages in Wisconsin and Iowa by midday Wednesday, according to utility company outage maps. Workers scrambled to restore electricity in a race to keep homes and businesses warm in the dangerous cold. Most outages were resolved in a matter of hours. [Lake Michigan is a frozen wonderland and the photos are perfection] About 900 We Energies customers were without power for about an hour and a half on Wednesday afternoon in West Allis, Wis., after neighbors on a residential street heard a transformer bang and saw a spark immediately before the lights went out. They closed their curtains to keep cold air from leaking in around window panes and opened cabinet doors to prevent pipes from freezing. “I was amazed how fast they got it back,” said Dan Bark, whose house sits diagonally across from the damaged power lines. “We were trying to figure out contingency plans.” He pondered taking his family and cats to his mother’s home nearby. Bark has a generator, but it was in the garage — and frozen. He conceded that was not ideal, but he also had never seen the temperatures dip quite so low. “This is the coldest it’s ever been,” Bark said. Wang, Fritz, Horton and Wootson reported from Washington. (The Washington Post)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 2/1/2019 11:10:52 AM
	Record-shattering Arctic blast keeps the Midwest in a deep freeze Calves endure the deep freeze on Thursday at Vision Aire, a family farm in Eldorado, Wis. (Lauren Justice for The Washington Post) By Katie Mettler , Cleve R. Wootson Jr. and Angela Fritz January 31 at 8:06 PM RIPON, Wis. — On the coldest day in two decades on his fifth-generation dairy farm, Chris Pollack grabbed a thick, black hose from the barn and ventured into the subzero cold, where his beef cattle were chomping cud and waiting for water. The power had briefly gone out the previous morning, long enough to freeze the line that automatically fills the animals’ heated water trough. Pollack was here to replace it. “Are you serious?” Pollack said, peering inside the hose. “There’s water frozen in the end already.” He lifted it up to a small space heater and waited for it to thaw. Such is life in the Deep Freeze of 2019. Chris Pollack, 38, at a farm in Ripon, Wis. on Thursday. (Lauren Justice for The Washington Post) The past 48 hours in the American Midwest have been about endurance, as a breathtaking cold settled in over a massive stretch of the country. The record-setting frigid temperatures — some of the coldest on the planet Thursday — have frozen the Great Lakes, taxed electrical and natural gas infrastructure, endangered livestock and tested the mettle of millions who are used to the cold but had never experienced anything like this. [Lake Michigan is a frozen wonderland and the photos are perfection] In some areas Thursday, temperatures dropped below minus-50 degrees, and the extreme weather was blamed for several deaths across the region, including people who appear to have frozen to death in Milwaukee, Detroit and Rochester, Minn. From Minnesota to New York, the polar vortex again prompted school closures, mail service interruptions and thousands of flight cancellations, many of them in and out of Chicago, which appeared otherworldly in a coating of frost and ice. Eighteen factories run by General Motors, Fiat Chrysler and Ford shut down Thursday because of the brutal weather and a fire at a natural gas compressor station. A record-shattering Arctic blast hit parts of Wisconsin, Michigan, Illinois and beyond durning the polar vortex in January 2019. (The Washington Post) Governors declared statewide emergencies and government offices temporarily shuttered. More than 680 temperature records were broken or tied this week, according to the Midwestern Regional Climate Center. In Mount Carroll, Ill., a trained weather observer reported that temperatures plunged to minus-38 degrees Thursday morning, according to the National Weather Service. If certified, it would be the state’s lowest temperature on record, supplanting a minus-36 degree day in Congerville on Jan. 5, 1999. In northeast Minnesota, the unincorporated community of Cotton sank to minus-56 degrees — four degrees shy of that state’s coldest temperature. The partially frozen Allegheny River in Pittsburgh on Thursday, where daily record lows were recorded two days in a row. Ice builds up along the shore of Lake Michigan as temperatures during the past week have dipped to lows near -20 degrees. (Scott Olson/Getty Images) Wednesday was the second-coldest day in Chicago’s history. The maximum temperature, minus-10, was set just after midnight, and then the mercury dropped to minus-24 later in the morning. The combination of those extremes resulted in a daily average of minus-17, just short of Dec. 24, 1983, when the average temperature was minus-18 in the Windy City. Tom Skilling, a longtime meteorologist at Chicago’s WGN-TV, said that describing the weather as brutal is an understatement. “Lake Michigan took on the appearance of a boiling cauldron as air of minus-20 degrees and colder made contact with water sitting just above the freezing level,” Skilling said in his report. “I’ve lived here 40 years and never until today have ever seen a more spectacular display of ‘sea smoke.’” Extreme weather, like the polar vortex, is becoming more common as the Arctic continues to be disrupted by climate change. (Adriana Usero/The Washington Post) The widely received message, clear to anyone with a thermometer, was to stay home and hunker down. But certain jobs, like Pollack’s, don’t have that option. Police officers and firefighters have to reach emergencies. Heaters and stoves need to function. And the cows need water. Throughout the Midwest, farmers have are waking up up in the middle of the night to check on their livestock and fashioned makeshift shelters to keep their animals safe as temperatures fell to 20 below zero, and then 30 below zero. [Minus-56 degrees and more: Brutal cold-air outbreak is smashing records in the Midwest] Tommy Enright, a small farmer in Amherst, Wis., houses his rabbits in a carport. But the animals aren’t particularly resilient in the extreme cold, so to trap in the heat he draped an additional tarp across their individual cages. It’s not pretty, he said, but it gets the job done. “It’s been brutal out here,” Enright said. “Yesterday neither of our vehicles would start, so it’s been pretty interesting.” In Indiana, cattle farmer Matt Schafer said one of his greatest challenges has been keeping the animals dry and the water thawed. Water for their older cows comes from a ditch creek behind the farm. Usually, there’s enough water movement to keep the creek from freezing. Not this week. Schafer instead has had to chop a hole in the ice and suck out the water with a pump warmed with a propane heater. Everyday chores like this that usually take 45 minutes are now occupying up to two and a half hours of Schafer’s day. “You just got to allow yourself more time to do everything,” Schafer said, “because everything seems to take a little longer.” The cows, though, are tough. They keep a body temperature of 101 degrees and develop a thick coat in the harsh winters. Calves born this time of year arrive with fuller fur. [It’s so hot in Australia that snakes are seeking refuge in people’s toilets] Carl Schindler, who runs a dairy and beef cattle operation in rural Red Lake County, Minn., said earlier this week that his animals weren’t particularly bothered by the cold. “This is nothing too crazy,” he said. In Schindler’s dairy barn, the air hung thick with steam from the animals’ bodies, keeping the temperature in the unheated structure about 60 degrees warmer than the air outside, where beef cows fed on hay and silage, their backs coated in a layer of frost. “They get acclimated to the weather,” he said, noting that the cows typically do better under the extreme conditions than at temperatures right at freezing, as there is little danger of the animals getting wet. “You get that 20 below, even 30 below with no wind, they actually do pretty well.” Janet Clark at her family's farm, Vision Aire, in Eldorado, Wis., on Thursday. (Lauren Justice for The Washington Post) Cows drink from an iced-over water trough at the Vision Aire family farm in Eldorado, Wis. on Thursday. (Lauren Justice for The Washington Post) Janet Clark and her husband, Travis, help her family maintain a dairy cow and calving operation in Eldorado, Wis. Their water troughs are rigged with heat lamps to keep the liquid from freezing, and they purchased thick, vertical plastic sheets from a freezer company to help keep the heat in and the cold out. Despite the heated floors in their milking operation, thick frost has invaded the interior of its windows and door frames. And the extreme temperatures have made their equipment sluggish, threatening the farm’s milk yield. In an unfortunate twist, a compressor that cools the cows’ milk from body temperature to 40 degrees — at which point companies can pick it up and use it to make cheese — was frozen and sluggish. On a normal day, the cooling process takes minutes. In the extreme cold, it takes the better part of an hour. “If it doesn’t cool down, they can’t pick up our milk,” Janet Clark said. Concerned for the safety of their animals, the Clarks haven’t left the cows alone for longer than a few hours. They leave the farm each night around 8 p.m., and Travis returns around midnight to check on them. Another employee comes in at 3:30 a.m. to begin the morning milking rotation. With temperatures expected to begin rising Friday and into the weekend, farmers are concerned that the dramatic temperature shift could cause secondary challenges, such as livestock illnesses. So far, Pollack said his farm has been able to prevent sickness. The cows seem happy, even though their whiskers Thursday had become clumped with frost and snow. “A lot of these cold snaps like this, how you survive it is a lot in the preparation,” Pollack said. But there’s only so much you can do. When it’s this cold, he said, “everything freezes.” Wootson and Fritz reported from Washington. Michael Brice-Saddler in Washington contributed to this report. (The Washington Post)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 2/1/2019 6:26:18 PM
	U.S. to withdraw from nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, says Russian violations render the Cold War agreement moot Secretary of State Mike Pompeo announced Feb. 1 the U.S. will suspend its participation in the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces treaty. (Reuters) By Anne Gearan , Carol Morello and Paul Sonne February 1 at 12:28 PM The United States will pull out of a nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, the Trump administration announced Friday, ending a cornerstone Cold War agreement on grounds that Russian violations render it moot. The demise of the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) treaty raises fears of a new nuclear arms race, although U.S. officials discount the risk. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo said the United States is suspending participation in the agreement, starting a six-month countdown to a final U.S. withdrawal. That leaves a slim chance that Russia could end missile programs widely seen as a violation, salvaging the treaty. The United States accuses Moscow of violating the agreement since 2014. “For years Russia has violated the terms of the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty without remorse,” Pompeo said, adding that the United States has continued to meet its obligations while seeking to get Moscow to come into compliance. “When an agreement is so brazenly disregarded and our security is so threatened, we must respond,” he added. The United States did not announce plans for any new weapons or shifts in missile deployments, but Trump administration officials did not rule it out down the road. The United States' plan to scrap this Cold War treaty raises fears of another nuclear arms buildup. (William Neff /The Washington Post) [Trump administration gives Russia an ultimatum on Cold War-era arms treaty] In a statement, President Trump said the onus is on Russia. “The United States has fully adhered to the INF Treaty for more than 30 years, but we will not remain constrained by its terms while Russia misrepresents its actions,” Trump said. “We cannot be the only country in the world unilaterally bound by this treaty, or any other. We will move forward with developing our own military response options and will work with NATO and our other allies and partners to deny Russia any military advantage from its unlawful conduct.” The U.S. decision is another sour note between Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, with whom Trump has sought closer ties. Trump canceled a planned Dec. 1 meeting with Putin in protest of what the White House called Russian naval aggression against Ukraine. Putin has sought a way out of the INF since at least 2007, a U.S. official told reporters. But Putin is likely to continue seeking new arms-control talks with Washington, in part because negotiating over nuclear arsenals puts Moscow on near-equal diplomatic footing with the much richer and better-armed Washington, analysts say. [What the INF Treaty means for the U.S. and Europe] The New START treaty, which limits Russian and American deployed strategic nuclear warheads, expires in two years. Russian diplomats have said they’re preparing for a scenario in which the New START treaty won’t be renewed and blame the United States for not seriously engaging in talks on how to proceed. “I truly fear that the New START Treaty may have the same fate as the INF Treaty,” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergey Ryabkov said on Russian television before Pompeo’s announcement. “It may just expire on February 5, 2021 and not be prolonged.” Earlier Friday, the Kremlin said it expected official notification of the U.S. withdrawal. There was no immediate Kremlin comment after Pompeo’s announcement. Reaction to the widely expected move was muted among lawmakers in Moscow, underscoring that Russia’s eventual response to the treaty’s demise will depend in part on how aggressively the United States shifts its military posture. “I don’t think we need to take tough countermeasures right now,” Andrey Krasov, deputy head of the defense committee in Russia’s lower house of parliament, told the Interfax news agency after Pompeo’s announcement. “We have a huge military potential anyway that can counter any threat.” Russia has said it is not violating the treaty and that its 9M729 missile has a range of less than 500 kilometers (311 miles). NATO declared in December that the missile system does violate the INF and poses a risk to Europe. Russia has warned that it would respond in kind if the United States were to deploy new intermediate-range missiles, potentially leading to a new nuclear buildup in Europe reminiscent of the Cold War. Speaking at the State Department, Pompeo said the United States would continue diplomatic efforts. “We’ll continue to have conversations with them. We hope they’ll come back into compliance,” Pompeo said. “We’ve had conversations at every level, at senior levels, at technical levels. We’ve had conversations about the nature of these systems. There’s no mistaking that the Russians have chosen not to comply with this treaty.” The Trump administration has signaled for months that it wants to end the agreement covering ground-based, nuclear-tipped cruise missiles with ranges between 500 and 5,500 kilometers. Arms control specialists said that without the treaty, the United States may move to position missile systems in Europe or Asia, while Russia could use the opportunity to base missile systems elsewhere. In Asia, the United States could deploy conventional midrange missiles near Chinese ships and militarized artificial islands during a conflict to defend parts of the East China Sea or South China Sea. The rationale for deploying conventional midrange missiles in Europe theoretically would be to blunt any Russian attempt to prevent the U.S. military from resupplying European allies in a future conflict. Both such moves would risk a response from Beijing and Moscow, risking a conventional arms race with missiles in Asia and Europe that has already shown signs of emerging with the development of hypersonic weapons that can move far faster than the speed of sound. The senior Trump administration official said that the United States is so far looking only at nonnuclear missiles in terms of possible deployments and that any move to deploy them would likely be years away. In Brussels, NATO Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg offered alliance backing for the U.S. move, saying that it is Russia’s responsibility to start complying with the treaty again. “Russia is in material breach of the #INFTreaty & must use next 6 months to return to full & verifiable compliance or bear sole responsibility for its demise. #NATO fully supports the US suspension & notification of withdrawal from the Treaty,” Stoltenberg wrote on Twitter. Many NATO diplomats have greeted the U.S. moves with resignation, saying they would prefer to preserve the arms control treaty but that they are now focused on limiting a new arms race. “Allies regret that Russia, as part of its broader pattern of behaviour, continues to deny its INF Treaty violation, refuses to provide any credible response, and has taken no demonstrable steps toward returning to full and verifiable compliance,” NATO’s North America Council said in a statement Friday. Senior Trump administration officials tried to emphasize that Washington is on the same page as its European allies, even though the White House faced criticism for Trump’s decision to announce the U.S. withdrawal on the fly last fall, before European allies had formally agreed that Washington should pull out of the treaty. The death of the INF Treaty raises questions about the future of other arms control agreements, including New START, which expires in February 2021. If the White House and the Kremlin don’t agree to extend New START, the decision would turn the clock back to an era where Washington and Moscow possess nuclear arms with practically no agreed restrictions and risk the return of a full Cold War-style arms race. A senior administration official raised questions on Friday about whether the United States could trust Russia enough to extend New START, given the violations of the INF Treaty. “It’s important that we feel we can enter into agreements with countries and feel like they adhere to them and fully implement them,” the official said. The Trump administration is in the middle of a policy process to determine whether the United States should extend New START. Because the reduction targets have already been met, an extension would only mean keeping the limits in place and continuing the inspections that are stipulated by the treaty. The treaty includes an automatic extension clause should the leaders of both nations agree, eliminating the need for Washington and Moscow to engage in a lengthy new round of negotiations. Lawmakers broke along party lines over the withdrawal announcement, although both parties called the pact flawed. Republicans had effectively asked for the move in last year’s defense authorization, stating that the United States would be “legally entitled to suspend the operation of the INF Treaty in whole or in part for so long as the Russian Federation continues to be in material breach of the INF Treaty.” “I completely support the Trump Administration’s decision to withdraw from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty due to Russian noncompliance,” Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (R-S.C.) said in a statement. “Russia has been in violation of the treaty for years and the Obama Administration refused to do anything about it. It’s a bad deal for America when Russia cheats and the United States complies.” Democrats, however, warned that ripping up the treaty was the wrong way to steer Russia — or China — back into a treaty order more responsive to modern weapons and threats. “The Trump Administration is risking an arms race and undermining international security and stability,” House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said in a statement. “Russia’s brazen noncompliance with this treaty is deeply concerning, but discarding a key pillar of our nonproliferation security framework creates unacceptable risks. The Administration should exhaust every diplomatic effort and work closely with NATO allies over the next six months to avoid thrusting the United States into a dangerous arms competition.” The stark partisan divisions in Congress are a sign of how the GOP has shifted on such issues. Just a few months ago, Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.), then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, broke loudly with Trump over his announced intention to withdraw from the INF, warning that ripping up the arms control treaties that helped settle Cold War contests would be a “huge mistake.” On Friday, it was only Senate Foreign Relations Committee ranking member Sen. Robert Menendez (D-N.J.) who sounded the same warning bells. “The Trump Administration lacks a coherent strategy to address the threat new Russian cruise missiles pose to the interests of the United States and those of our allies,” Menendez said in a statement, calling withdrawal from the treaty “yet another geostrategic gift to Vladimir Putin.” “With the renewal of the New START agreement coming up next year, I strongly urge the administration try a new approach and develop a coherent strategy to stabilize our arms control regime,” he added. Sen. James E. Risch (R-Idaho), the chairman of the Foreign Relations panel, wholly disagreed. “Russian actions represent a material breach of the treaty, and it is abundantly clear: the United States is the only country limited by the INF Treaty,” he said in a statement. “The time has come to set the treaty aside and develop alternative avenues toward the security the treaty once provided.” Trump has also pulled the United States out of the international nuclear deal with Iran and announced a U.S. exit from the Paris climate accords. Neither was a full treaty confirmed by the Senate, as the INF Treaty was. “Yes another withdrawal from an accord by the Trump administration,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammed Javad Zarif wrote on Twitter. “Seems this clique is allergic to anything w/ US signature on it. Message: Any deal with US govt is not worth the ink; even treaties ratified by Congress.” The push to pull out of the INF Treaty by the Trump administration coincided with the arrival of John Bolton as White House national security adviser. Bolton oversaw the Bush administration’s withdrawal from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty with Russia in 2002, paving the way for the erection of American missile defense systems that Russia long decried. The INF Treaty has long been a bugbear for the former U.N. ambassador, who is a skeptic of international agreements and organizations he sees as constraining American power. In a 2011 article in the Wall Street Journal, Bolton and co-author Paula DeSutter contended that the INF had outlived its usefulness and cited a quote from the late French President Charles de Gaulle: “Treaties, you see, are like girls and roses: They last while they last.” Anton Troianovsky in Moscow, Michael Birnbaum in Brussels and Karoun Demirjian in Washington contributed to this report. (The Washington Post)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

Luis Miguel 1162 61587 Lima	RE: ARE WE NOW IN THE END TIMES? 2/3/2019 5:55:51 PM
	New U.S. Experiments Aim To Create Gene-Edited Human Embryos February 1, 20195:00 AM ET Heard on Morning Edition ROB STEIN Twitter Facebook Dieter Egli, a developmental biologist at Columbia University, and Katherine Palmerola examine a newly fertilized egg injected with a CRISPR editing tool. Rob Stein/NPR A scientist in New York is conducting experiments designed to modify DNA in human embryos as a step toward someday preventing inherited diseases, NPR has learned. For now, the work is confined to a laboratory. But the research, if successful, would mark another step toward turning CRISPR, a powerful form of gene editing, into a tool for medical treatment. A Chinese scientist sparked international outrage in November when he announcedthat he had used the same technique to create the world's first gene-edited human babies. He said his goal was to protect them from infection with HIV, a claim that was criticized because there are safe, effective and far less controversial ways of achieving that goal. In contrast, Dieter Egli, a developmental biologist at Columbia University, says he is conducting his experiments "for research purposes." He wants to determine whetherCRISPR can safely repair mutations in human embryos to prevent genetic diseases from being passed down for generations. So far, Egli has stopped any modified embryos from developing beyond one day so he can study them. "Right now we are not trying to make babies. None of these cells will go into the womb of a person," he says. But if the approach is successful, Egli would likely allow edited embryos to develop further to continue his research. Egli hopes doctors will someday be able edit embryonic human DNA to prevent many congenital illnesses, such as Tay-Sachs disease, cystic fibrosis and Huntington's disease. In the lab, Egli is trying to fix one of the genetic defects that cause retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited form of blindness. If it works, the hope is that the approach could help blind people carrying the mutation have genetically related children whose vision is normal. Egli is attempting to fix one of the genetic defects that cause retinitis pigmentosa, an inherited form of blindness. Rob Stein/NPR "Preventing inherited forms of blindness would be wonderful — very important for affected families," Egli says. But that is likely to take years of additional research to demonstrate that the technique is both effective and safe. Nevertheless, even this kind of basic research is controversial. "This is really disturbing," says Fyodor Urnov, associate director of the Altius Institute for Biomedical Sciences in Seattle. He worries such experiments could encourage more irresponsible scientists to misuse gene-editing technologies. "As we've learned from the events in China, it is no longer a hypothetical that somebody will just go ahead and go rogue and do something dangerous, reckless, unethical," Urnov says. Egli's research is reviewed in advance and overseen by a panel of other scientists and bioethicists at Columbia. While the debate over research like Egli's continues, the U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine, the World Health Organization and others are trying to develop detailed standards for how scientists should safely and ethically edit human embryos. Some bioethicists and scientists are calling for an explicit global moratorium on creating any more gene-edited babies. Others, like Urnov, would like to see a hiatus in even basic research. The U.S. government prohibits the use of federal funding for research involving human embryos. But gene editing of human embryos can be done using private funding. The Food and Drug Administration is barred from considering any studies that would involve using genetically modified human embryos to create a pregnancy. But laws that govern the creation of genetically modified babies vary widely internationally. Egli is well aware that his work may be controversial to some people. To try to be completely transparent about his experiments, Egli recently invited NPR to his laboratory for an exclusive look at his research. "We can't just do the editing and then hope everything goes right and implant that into a womb. That's not responsible," Egli says. "We have to first do the basic research studies to see what happens. That's what we're doing here." To show NPR what he is doing, early one morning Egli pushes open the door of a tiny windowless room on the sixth floor of one of Columbia's research towers in Upper Manhattan. The lab is jammed with scientific equipment, including two microscopes. Egli snaps on blue rubber gloves and opens a frosty metal cylinder holding frozen human eggs. "I'm going to wear gloves because we want to keep things clean," he tells me. To begin his experiment, Egli starts the long, slow process of thawing the frozen human eggs that were donated for research. After several hours of careful work and waiting, Egli has readied 15 eggs for his experiment. After setting up a large microscope, Egli slides a round glass dish under the lens. The dish contains sperm from a blind man who carries the mutation that Egli is trying to fix. It also holds the CRISPR gene-editing tool. "I'm starting with just one egg," he says as he gently places the first thawed egg into the dish. "It's a beautiful cell," Egli says, pointing to a magnified image of the egg on a computer monitor. "I would say it's one of the most beautiful cells." Egli maneuvers a tiny glass needle protruding into the side of the microscope dish toward one of the sperm. "So you can see a moving sperm over here," he says. "Now I'm picking it up. The sperm is in the needle. Now I'm dipping it in the CRISPR tool." Once the sperm is inside the needle with the CRISPR gene-editing tool, Egli points the needle's tip at the egg. "Oh no!" he exclaims with a sigh. "The sperm is swimming away." He searches the dish for the errant sperm. "Oh, here it is," he says as he pulls the sperm back into the needle. Next, Egli gently pierces the egg with the needle. "The membrane is broken — breached. There we go," Egli says as he injects the sperm and CRISPR tool into the egg. He breathes a sigh of relief. Egli injects a human egg with a sperm carrying a genetic mutation that causes blindness and a CRISPR tool he hopes will fix the mutation. Rob Stein/NPR The idea is that CRISPR will slice out the mutation in the sperm, and the healthy DNA in the egg will serve as a template to repair the genetic mutation. "Hopefully the CRISPR tool will cut the mutation and then the egg will replace that with a version that no longer causes disease," Egli says. "The genome from the mother would be rescuing the mutant genome from the father." The approach was developed by scientists led by Shoukhrat Mitalipov of the Oregon Health & Science University in Portland. Egli was initially skeptical of the Oregon group's claims that they had used CRISPR for the first time to repair a mutation in human embryos this way. Egli's research is aimed at trying to confirm that it works and how. Mitalipov's group is also continuing to study the technique to see whether it can safely fix several genetic mutations in human embryos, including one of the breast cancer genes. For the next two hours, Egli painstakingly fertilizes and edits one egg after another. He has to overcome a variety of technical complications. At one point, the tip of the fragile needle unexpectedly breaks off at a crucial moment. "There we go," he says later, after the needle is replaced. "That one definitely worked. Beautiful." This work may be beautiful to Egli, but it makes critics very nervous. "Anyone with a connection to the Internet will be able to download the recipe to make a designer baby," Urnov says. "And then the question becomes: 'What's to prevent them from using it?' As we learned in the past year: apparently nothing." So Urnov worries about any such research proceeding. "We need to hit the pause button and keep it pressed until we understand how do we proceed in a way that minimizes the risk of people going rogue," Urnov says. Urnov and others argue society needs a much broader debate about whether there is a truly a compelling reason to ever try to make any more gene-edited babies. There are many other ways to prevent genetic diseases, they note. "If we've learned anything from what's happened in China, it's that the urge to race ahead pushes science to shoot first and ask questions later," says J. Benjamin Hurlbut, an associate professor of biology and society at Arizona State University. "But this is a domain where we should be asking questions first. And maybe never shooting. What's the rush?" That's especially true when the prospect of creating gene-edited babies raises so many fraught ethical questions, including fears that it could eventually lead to the creation of "designer babies," critics say. "We don't need to be mucking around with the genes of future children," says Marcy Darnovsky, director of the Center for Genetics and Society, a watchdog group. "This could open the door to a world where people who were born genetically modified are thought to be superior to others, and we would have a society of people who are considered to be genetic haves and genetic have-nots." But many other scientists and bioethicists disagree. "This is valid research, and I think it's important research," says R. Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. "It has value not only for the possible use in the future for some number of conditions that would involve a live birth, but it has value for basic understanding of embryology, basic understanding of development," Charo says. "Of course I think we should be doing that research. Why wouldn't you be doing that research?" Many leading scientists agree. "Is there value in doing that kind of research? I think there is," agrees Jennifer Doudna, a biochemist at the University of California, Berkeley, who helped invent CRISPR. "Does it have to be carried out carefully and under the right regulatory guidelines? Of course. But I think there's value in doing research like that." "I'd like to see the U.S. be involved and show leadership on how to do that responsibly rather than say we're not going to have a seat at the table," Doudna says. Back in Egli's lab, it's now nearly 3 p.m., and he is wrapping up the day's experiments. "OK, that's it. That's the last one," he says as he places back into storage the last of 14 eggs he managed to fertilize and hopefully edit. He will stop their development the next morning to see whether it worked. (npr.org)
	"Choose a job you love and you will not have to work a day in your life" (Confucius)
	+1

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