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.

Not all screening is equal. MRIs for low-back pain often lead to diagnoses of disease followed by unnecessary surgery with high risks. This has led to a reluctancy to prescribe MRIs or other imaging. However, with something like cancer, timing is everything. Months/weeks/days matter and catching a cancer early via a broad screen can be the difference between life and death.

In the case of the galleri test, risk is low and many of the errors can be caught with a re-testing or other non-invasive screen. If my test came back positive I wouldn't be jumping straight into chemo, but would probably get a bunch of bloodwork and some imaging.

At the end of the day, I would much much much rather go through some unnecessary scans due to a false positive than miss a easy to treat cancer because I was scared of the screening risk.

I am not going to avoid any reasonable treatment/screen because of it. It was intended to catch asymptomatic cancer. Additional invasive screenings are voluntary and like all treatments they carry risk. I weigh all treatments based on their risks at the time.

For everyday people increased screening of all types has risks, but overall the benefits massively outweigh the risks. If I was a frail 80yo, I might see the risk profile differently.

In my career I've encountered many people who "don't want to know" about medical tests of any kind. I'm not one of those people. Minimally invasive screens early and often please.

It's not perfect but it's easy/fast and a good way to screen for big problems.