History, Politics And Current Affairs

One friend and one acquaintance of mine have died from MND, in their 40s. Luckily for this little girl they did some DNA diddling in uterus and she doesn't seem to have the genetic problem any more. Great stuff. https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00534-0

Hmm, my friend's mum also died of it, I wonder if this little girl will pass the problem on to her children, well that's the glum side of it.

Awesome.

And of course my friend's two daughters are sitting on a time bomb. They are both smashing kids (irrelevant), one is a nurse, the other is specifically doing Musk type bio-brain-engineering (sorry I don't know what it is called -Neura Net?).

Really exciting stuff.

This was the 21st Century we were promised.

I saw a documentary about a pediatric surgeon who can perform surgery in the womb. The case they showed was of a baby that they were worried had a narrow trachea that could seriously impact his breathing after birth. The doc performed a Fetoscopic endotracheal occlusion where a probe with a camera, light, and balloon was inserted into the womb and amniotic sac. He maneuvered into the baby's trachea, inflated the balloon, and released it. Weeks later, went back in and removed it. Baby was born totally healthy.

It was unbelievable. You could see the baby looking at the light like it was trying figure out where there this came from. I know it probably not possible I wonder if deep, deep down in their brain there was a hint of this memory. I shocked my mum when I described the temporary crib I was in when they brought me home. I got a different one a few weeks later.

The science museum in Bismarck has an exhibit on laryngoscopical surgery, where you have to try to do really basic maneuvers with a really crude set of hands to manipulate some rubber bands. It was extremely difficult, and gives you just an inkling of how difficult actual surgery is.

My nephew and I gave up and decided to go play with the biowarfare simulators instead

In all seriousness, medicine continues to make extraordinary gains, though perhaps not as incredible as in our parents, grandparents and great-grandparents day.