What’s on Weibo:

A recent article, in which two Chinese academics propose the implementation of some sort of ‘tax’ for people under 40 who have no second child, has sparked outrage on social media. “The same woman who had to undergo a forced abortion before, is now pressured to get pregnant,” some say. A controversial ‘no child tax’ measure proposed by two Chinese academics has set off a wave of criticism on Chinese social media this week. The proposal was published in Xinhua Daily, a newspaper controlled by the Jiangsu Communist Party branch, on August 14, and was authored by Nanjing University economics professors Liu Zhibiao (刘志彪) and Zhang Ye (张晔). In their proposal, Liu and Zhang suggest various measures to prevent a supposed demographic crisis in mainland China. Their idea of imposing taxes on those who do not have a second child particularly sparked anger online. The authors plead for a so-called ‘maternity fund system’ (生育基金制度) in which citizens under the age of 40, regardless of gender, have to pay a certain percentage of their income in some sort of ‘tax fund’ as long as they do not bear a second child. They write:

Tom Whipple on “Editing a Human”:

Doudna was in for a shock. “One attendee [at the conference] pulled me aside and said three manuscripts had been submitted to journals involving experiments on human embryos. He said, ‘You should know this is happening.’” The labs in China had destroyed the embryos they had developed, and the modification had been only partial. Far sooner than predicted, a threshold had been crossed.

The Francis Crick Institute in London is conducting its own experiments on creating fully edited human embryos, though as its goal is scientific discovery not designer babies, it destroys the embryos.

Terrency Jeffrey:

“The production of TKO-BLT mice to obtain healthy mice with high level reconstitution of human cells and tissues requires specialized methods that are presented in detail,” says the abstract at the top of the article.

“The methods in this manuscript will help prevent duplication of the empirical work done to optimize this humanization protocol and maximize the future success of others endeavoring to produce TKO-BLT mice,” the researchers say in their introduction.

The researchers stated that they “routinely produced cohorts of approximately 40 TKO-BLT mice from a single tissue donor.”

They indicated that the human tissue donors were at 17 to 22 weeks gestational age and that their tissue was provided to the researchers by Advanced Bioscience Resources, which is a non-profit organization located in Alameda, Calif.

This summary of recent newsfeed items reminds me of Bonnie Raitt’s “Nick of Time lyrics:

Life gets mighty precious when there’s less of it to waste.