The gist was, can existing variation provide enough context to infer impact of variation? The answer seemed to be no.

Kind of like how frontier LLMs need to ingest larger and large amounts of text to advance. We are going to need to leverage comparative data from other species, and likely tremendous amounts of laboratory mutagenesis experiments to actually make headway on variant prediction. Nature, as it stands, just doesn't have enough human variation.

Science is heavily international, and if people feel like they won't get funding/wont be safe here, they won't come.

As a useful genome? Marginal. ONT will need a couple runs to get complete human genome coverage and the substitution error rate is still high compared to short reads. For a fraction of the price and effort you can get your DNA resequenced at 10 times the quality.

I guess if you are super-ultra paranoid you can do it all yourself at home, but honestly. You're not that special, and if someone really actually wanted your genome that bad they'd just take it from a used coffee cup.

The government is actually really really good at funding the right things. The grant process has been extremely successful in directing funding efficiently towards cutting edge ideas. It does this by handing off the decision making to experts who review proposals rather than having political/profit driven kingmakers.

In contrast corporate/VC money mostly only funds the latest shiny bauble that may result in exit liquidity in a few years. The minority investments in things like fusion are still only applied work and are built on decades of unprofitable basic science.

In other words. Government funding has basically funded every science/tech breakthrough of the last 80 years.

If it is your field, you don't need an intro, and don't want to hear whatever yarn they are spinning in the abstract/discussion. You jump straight to the figures / table to review the data yourself.

"It's used for car theft!" except the intended use is obviously target government buyers for tracking citizens.

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/02/27/nyregion/secret-marijuana...

There's been vector based tweening and animation software for a bit an it always comes out looking strange.