A DNA Sequencing Revolution Helped Us Fight Covid. What Else Can It Do?: from NYTimes. “Once the [SARS-CoV-2] sequence was in the public realm, Moderna, an obscure biotech company in Cambridge, Mass., immediately began working with the National Institutes of Health on a plan. “They never had the virus on site at all; they really just used the sequence, and they viewed it as a software problem,” Francis deSouza, the chief executive of Illumina, which makes the sequencer that Zhang used, told me with some amazement last summer, six months before the Moderna vaccine received an emergency-use authorization by the Food and Drug Administration.
China Creates Its Own Digital Currency, a First for Major Economy: from WSJ. “A cyber yuan stands to give Beijing power to track spending in real time, plus money that isn’t linked to the dollar-dominated global financial system.”
How I Became a Libertarian: by Meir Kohn. “I did not become a libertarian because I was persuaded by philosophical arguments — those of Ayn Rand or F. A. Hayek, for example. Rather, I became a libertarian because I was persuaded by my own experiences and observations of reality…The consequences of intervention are rarely what we expect or desire.”
