u/HedonicEscalator

Moderna is up something like 150% today.

Here's an excellent article from Owl Posting, "How to build a cancer vaccine, and whether they will work this time", and here's the article I wrote on personalized mRNA vaccines and AI a while back.

"Mei" had Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome due to a single nucleotide variant in CHD3, a protein that manages the structure of DNA. Mei's parents contacted the neuroscientist Zilong Qiu seeking a cure. She was eventually given an AAV-based therapy which caused a severe immune reaction and led to her death. While the severity of Snijders Blok-Campeau syndrome can vary, it seems that Mei only suffered from mild intellectual disability.

AAV vectors are widely used for gene therapy, with both notable success stories (Zolgensma is an effective treatment for an often-fatal degenerative disease) and failures (Elevidys has unclear clinical benefit and caused patient deaths). The complications Mei suffered were a known risk of AAV therapy amplified by experimental conditions. There were some obvious safeguarding failures here, to say the least - I recommend reading the linked article. Personalized gene therapy is here to stay, and I'm as interested in accelerating progress in this space as anyone, but I think high-risk experimental treatments like this one should be restricted to conditions much more severe than what Mei had, or to individuals capable of consenting to their own treatments.

Fidji Simo didn't disclose what condition she suffers from. In 2025, she co-founded ChronicleBio, which aims to accelerate progress on POTS, ME/CFS, Long COVID, and other neuroimmune disorders.

Lots of people suffer from unexplained chronic illnesses - hopefully Simo is right that AI will enable better treatments.

In 1931, Claude Mythos visited Lovecraft in a dream.

The LLM shoggoth meme satirizes the alien nature of LLM chatbots by comparing them to the shoggoth, a Lovecraftian horror beyond human comprehension. But there's far more to this story than you're aware of.

I have read every short story and novel that Lovecraft wrote, and some of his poetry, and, as research for this post, hundreds of his personal letters. I now know his favorite authors, and how much sugar he liked in his coffee, and what he thought of the Japanese, and the fact that he once said Cthulhu might've ridden a dinosaur (Selected Letters III, page 119). I also know a lot about At the Mountains of Madness, the novella that properly introduced the iconic shoggoth, and what it can tell us about AI alignment.

If you're interested in the life and works of H.P. Lovecraft, and why self-proclaimed AI successionists should still care about safety, consider reading my post.

“Potential autofertility in true hermaphrodites” by Istanbul urologist Zeki Bayraktar is among the most bizarre articles I have encountered in a peer-reviewed medical journal. Though the abstract and first few pages contain a secular discussion of intersex conditions, the paper abruptly pivots to an explanation for the birth of Jesus Christ. This theological tangent concludes, “According to Qur’an, it can be said that Mother Mary was a true hermaphrodite, who did not have ambiguous genitalia, with a normal female phenotype, became pregnant through self-fertilization, and gave birth to a healthy baby boy (Jesus).”

As an atheist, “Mary was a true hermaphrodite” sounds a little heretical, as does the cited opposing theory that Mary became pregnant through parthenogenesis and Jesus was chromosomally female. But what do I know.

Theology aside, is Bayraktar right? Is autofertility possible in humans?

The answer is yes (kind of), and if you're curious, you should read my article. I will refrain from copying the full contents of the article, not because I intend to clickbait people, but because I am too lazy to reformat the images and footnotes. Honestly.

Biology is weird.

Dynomight makes the claim that "various kinds of cancer are going up in later generations."

I think this broad statement is misleading. Dynomight included the graph of specifically obesity-related cancers from Sung et al. (2019) without mentioning that the study also found "incidence in young adults increased in successively younger generations for only two cancers (gastric non-cardia cancer and leukaemia), and decreased for eight of the 18 additional [non-obesity-related] cancers," and does not investigate the hypothesis that factors like increased screening could account for increases in incidence rates of cancers other than CRC, which results in an article that is unjustifiably alarmist.

Still, the article is worth reading. I also recommend this interactive page by Hank Green.

Recently, the FDA blocked the publication of multiple vaccine studies, including two that had already been accepted by journals, one of which is available online.

In the Pipeline coverage

New York Times coverage

The FDA claims "the studies were withdrawn because drew broad conclusions that were not supported by the underlying data," without further detail available. I am not aware of any evidence of serious scientific issues with the available studies.