Meanwhile DOGE has cancelled more than $2 billion in federal research grants. The US is shooting itself in the foot when it should be competing at its best.
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-med...
https://www.cbsnews.com/amp/news/nih-layoffs-budget-cuts-med...
https://www.science.org/content/article/nsf-director-resign-...
I mean China has been modernizing their academics for a long time. See "Double First-Class Construction" [0]. But it's worth remembering that they did a lot of damage during the Cultural Revolution.
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Double_First-Class_Constructio...
I would have suggested that they create a high-quality course for introducing westerners to their language instead. It’s the sort of thing that everyone takes for granted that it exists but often doesn’t (where is the Wheelock’s for Spanish these days?) Tonality, pictography, and a highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners, let alone all three at once.
In terms of government-sponsored resources, the Chinese government has created the Hanyu Shuiping Kaoshi (HSK) tests, and has written standard textbooks for them that are pretty decent. All sorts of third parties have written their own textbooks oriented towards the HSK tests as well.
> highly analytic morphology are all high barriers for any language learners
Analytic morphology is what makes spoken Chinese so easy to learn, in my opinion. There's almost none of the complexity found in Indo-European languages, like number, case, gender and tense. The main barriers to learning Chinese for Westerners are:
* It's not Indo-European, so the vocabulary is almost entirely new.
* Tonality, though this is about the same level of difficulty as memorizing noun genders in Indo-European languages.
* The writing system. Memorizing a few thousand relatively arbitrary characters is difficult.
(European countries killed off 1000 years of Christianity in a single generation at the same time Mao did his giant leap experiment).
Are you talking about the two world wars or something that occurred in the 1960's & 70's?
This is actually a pretty interesting point. Most of the semi-religious customs that were killed off still live on in Malaysia - to the point where I was surprised at how un-chinese China was when I visited.
With all of this coming together, we should be accelerating both public and private investment in biotechnology because we're getting closer and closer to transformative therapies. But...we're failing to rise to the occasion and meet the moment.
- CAR-T
- CRISPR
- PRIME editing
- Base editing
- Modified mRNA
- PD-1 inhibitors
- On the cusp of personalized cancer vaccines
- ADCs
- Structure correctors
- Targeted protein degraders
- siRNAs
These have all really hit their stride in the past 15 years. Guess where all of them initially came from? Random ass government-funded academic research. Sure, you can split hairs with me on the 15 years and NIH/NSF etc funding, but it’s basically true. We are killing the golden goose…
Edit. My impression of bio tech is that upfront costs are high and timeline for commercialization is long, and the only real biotech firm that I am aware of is Theranos. So I am probably coming from a place of ignorance.
We’re so unbelievably fucked.
This administration has shown that it absolutely isn't incompetent. It's getting stuff done. Which means it's malice. Guaranteed. We're watching a self made disaster where few will profit, but will profit ENORMOUSLY.