This is ridiculous on TWO fronts.

1. The "situation" of a human being having a severely disabling and life threatening condition should be treated like any other medical "situation". Would you propose type I diabetics go without insulin and die, or children with leukemia go without care because there is a genetic component to these diseases? Their offspring may be more likely to have these same diseases, but they will also be in the same or better situations to receive treatment than their afflicted parents.

2. If muscular dystrophy is capable of being treated successfully at the genetic level by CRISPR in adults across somatic muscle cells, then why would the same treatment not work on germ or embryonic cells? Said treatment would necessarily be capable of preventing the condition from being passed on in the future.

Take your cynicism and ignorance somewhere else.

Please. I didn't say legislate. This is about having a policy which can be implemented by Congress. The Congress which is controlled by Republicans in the House and Senate. The Republicans who are led by Trump. Any major legislation which gets passed will be, at a minimum, strongly influenced by the President.

Trump announced his presidential campaign in June of 2015 and came into office with the established policy of putting American workers first. He and his team have had over a year to "craft a reasonable update to the policy". Trump was elected on the promise that he would get to work for America on day one, not get elected then figure out how things work. The administration should have started action on H1B in January.

There is nothing vague about it.

The NSA have high confidence in the culprit, and moderate confidence in the motive.

Your comment incorrectly portrays the information in the report.

The CIA, FBI, and NSA all have high confidence that it was the Russians.

The NSA has moderate confidence the Russians did it to help elect Trump.

Please see page 7 of the report - https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.dni.gov%2Ffiles%2Fdocu...

"We assess Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in 2016 aimed at the US
presidential election. Russia’s goals were to undermine public faith in the US democratic process,
denigrate Secretary Clinton, and harm her electability and potential presidency. We further assess
Putin and the Russian Government developed a clear preference for President-elect Trump. We
have high confidence in these judgments.

- We also assess Putin and the Russian Government aspired to help President-elect Trump’s
election chances when possible by discrediting Secretary Clinton and publicly contrasting her
unfavorably to him. All three agencies agree with this judgment. CIA and FBI have high confidence
in this judgment; NSA has moderate confidence."

The compilers are the ribosomes, and they are in every cell in your body (not to mention every living thing on the planet).

Gene editing is not the future. Every day thousands of scientists across the globe splice antibiotic resistance genes attached to targeted genes into template bacteria. The bacteria is grown on antibiotic media which kills all the bacteria which do not have antibiotic resistance. Those with the antibiotic resistance also have the target gene, since it was attached to the resistance gene. An enemy does not need to know 99.9% of the code works. They just need to identify the code which "compiles" into antibiotic resistance, and this has already been done in many cases.

I was at the presentation ceremony myself, and judging from what I heard, Dr Watson (and most in the medical and scientific community) believe that the most important thing which will come from these advances is the ability to make better informed decisions. In sequencing patients genomes: -An employer could blacklist you for being prone to mental illness. -A doctor can be swayed from one drug to another based previously noted reactions in persons with a particular genotype. -You may find out you have an incurable and soon to be debilitating genetic disease. -People can be advised to modify their sun exposure if they have genetic risk factors for skin cancer. -Novel medicines could be developed, tailor made to fit your particular needs. -Parents who don't want to raise a disabled, albino, gay, Downs, hemophiliac or whatever can choose to have their child aborted. Whether this new information will have a positive or negative effect on society is not yet clear, but the blade of knowledge is oft double edged.