A few interesting announcements for this round and once again, it feels that the really cool developments are going on in the life sciences.

• By far the most significant bit of news, and one that I’d hoped would be shouted from the rooftops, is the successful use of the CRISPR gene-editing technique to treat a child’s unique mutation. The patient in question was born with a rare disease known as carbamoyl-phosphate synthetase 1 (CPS1) deficiency which usually kills in infancy. In this case, doctors were able to devise a targeted fix to edit DNA in the liver cells, test the treatment in mice, get approval from the FDA and administering the treatment all in a matter of months. They still don’t know if the effect is permanent but for now the patient is well enough to be able to leave the hospital since being born. The key here is the incredible speed of this achievement and the fact that this is a treatment personalized for that specific patient. We should all hope that this is only the first of many such achievements.
• Next up is a medical development that feels like something out of science-fiction. An American man, Tim Friede, had for personal reasons exposed him to the venom of a large variety of snakes in escalating doses over the course of 18 years. As a result, he has generated antibodies that are effective against multiple types of neurotoxins. By isolating the antibodies in his blood, researchers have devised a broad spectrum antivenom that should now be almost universally effective against snakebites. If the project comes to fruition, this would be a radical improvement from the current practice of needing to manufacture and stock multiple types of antivenoms in case of emergencies.
• The last paper was released a couple of months earlier but I hadn’t noticed it then. It’s about a study conducted on the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer tribe in Tanzania whose nomadic lifestyle is thought to have been unchanged for thousands of years. This makes them an ideal subject to interrogate about human nature before the advent of civilization. In this instance, researchers were interested in whether such peoples are inherently disposed to be egalitarian as some anthropologists contend. They gave the Hadza participants food endowments to be shared with others and studied how fairly they carried out the redistribution. They found that like just about everyone else, the Hadza mostly did not seek perfectly equitable distributions. They tolerated inequality when it benefited but complained about it when they thought it was unfair. As usual, it’s unwise to generalize too broadly from such studies but I’d always thought that stories of pre-civilization peoples being inherently more noble to be too fanciful to be true.