The Download: gene-edited pig liver transplants, and AI to combat apartheid

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The Download: gene-edited pig liver transplants, and AI to combat apartheid


Just just a few miles away in Limpopo, white households lived in massive, enticing homes, with quick access to all this stuff. The older Sefala grew to become, the extra she peppered her father with questions in regards to the seen racial segregation of their neighborhood: “Why is it like this?”

Now, at 28, she helps do one thing about it. Alongside pc scientists Nyalleng Moorosi and Timnit Gebru on the nonprofit Distributed AI Research Institute (DAIR), which Gebru arrange in 2021, she is deploying pc imaginative and prescient instruments and satellite tv for pc photos to research the impacts of racial segregation in housing, with the last word hope that their work will assist to reverse it. Read the complete story.

—Abdullahi Tsanni

The first gene-editing remedy: 10 Breakthrough Technologies 2024

It was solely 11 years in the past that scientists first developed the potent DNA-snipping expertise referred to as CRISPR. Now they’ve introduced CRISPR out of the lab and into actual medication with a remedy that cures the signs of sickle-cell illness.

Sickle-cell is brought on by inheriting two unhealthy copies of one of many genes that make hemoglobin. Symptoms embody bouts of intense ache, and life expectancy with the illness is simply 53 years. It impacts 1 in 4,000 individuals within the US, almost all of them African-American. 

The information is undoubtedly good. But the anticipated price ticket of the gene-editing remedy is $2 to $3 million. And Vertex has no instant plans to supply it in Africa—the place sickle-cell illness is most typical, and the place it nonetheless kills kids. Read the complete story.

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