The Post-Partisan Emporium

  ‘Expresso Vaccines’ and Lessons from the American Chestnut Tree Why a vaccine designed in two days faced less regulatory scrutiny than a venerable nut tree that sustained life for centuries Dr. Mathew Maavak A tree that once fed multitudes now faces a decade of federal red tape before a single seed can touch wild soil, while a brand-new genetic vaccine, cooked up in 48 hours and injected into billions, sailed through approval in under a year. One restores a vanished forest, the other rewrote human cells on a planetary scale. Both are genetic modifications, yet one is treated as a potential ecological threat while the other is hailed as a modern miracle. Welcome to the “expresso lane” of modern biotechnology, where speed, risk, and scrutiny depend entirely on whose veins are on the line. Reign of the Chestnut King In the ancient forests of Appalachia, the American Chestnut (Castanea dentata) once towered as the unmatched monarch. Stretching from the southern ridges to southern Can...

  Cognitive Collapse: A First Reconnaissance As most of my readers know by now, when there are five Wednesdays in a month, it’s up to the readers to suggest and then vote on the theme for the post I put up on the final Wednesday. Sometimes most of my readers vote for a single theme, sometimes there’s a quiet little contest among an assortment of themes. Then there was this month, where three topics broke from the pack early on, a lot of people who rarely or never vote in these contests flung themselves into the fray, and all three of the leading topics got more votes than most winning topics do. Since I have the best as well as the most eccentric commentariat on the internet, I decided promptly enough that the only sensible thing to do was to do posts on all three. This week’s post, accordingly, is on the topic that nosed ahead in the final days of the contest and won the contest. Some weeks ago, in the course of the ongoing discussion of Situationism on this blog, I noted that the...