Last week I posted a list of some of the things that were good news during the last year.   Some were politically related, some were science related.

Right after I posted that story a couple of other stories came out that really jumped right to the top. 2022 has in many ways been a very good year. With their emphasis on pragmatism and an eye for uplifting people and democracies, I am fully expecting an even better year under Joe Biden and Kamala Harris next year.

Republicans will try to block any progress with their slight majority in the US House and who knows how many decades the Supreme Six will set us back. Still Biden and Harris are providing effective and progressive leadership this country needs today.

So here are the two stories that really jumped to the top of the heap at the end of the week last week. One you may have heard of, the other may be news to you since it happened in Britain.

Over in England a girl who had incurable T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukemia was treated with what is called base editing. Here is a bit of the story from the BBC:

A teenage girl’s incurable cancer has been cleared from her body in the first use of a revolutionary new type of medicine.

< skip>

So doctors at Great Ormond Street Hospital used “base editing” to perform a feat of biological engineering to build her a new living drug.

Six months later the cancer is undetectable, but Alyssa is still being monitored in case it comes back.

Alyssa, who is 13 and from Leicester, was diagnosed with T-cell acute lymphoblastic leukaemia in May last year.

This is truly incredible and a huge step forward. While the process is not brand new, it is only about 6 years old. Her very acute, uncurable cancer is now undetectable!

The other story has been blasted all over the US. Scientist at Lawrence Livermore Labs in California extracted more energy from a controlled fusion process than they entered in to the process to get the fusion going. I will turn the explanation over to the one and only Neil DeGrasse Tyson who explains things in a way that most of us can understand: (12 minutes)

And as a kicker, the laugh of the year from some overblown blowhard who was once our president. After teasing a “major announcement” on Wednesday Donald Trump floated a lead balloon on Thursday morning that he was selling “non fungible tokens” of himself in various cos-play poses set up as trading cards.

Many of his followers took it as evidence that he had finally gone round the bend. More likely the truth is that he is using this ploy as a way for some foreign bad guys to launder money. Trump is as sleazy as they come. Since the “cards” sold out within a day, one must be suspect of what the real purpose of these cards is.

I tend to agree with this poster on twitter:

adhdwonderwoman (my only acct here)

@adhdwonderwoman

He’s Not Selling Cards! 

The $100 digital cards that not even his most devout boomer followers will be buying for themselves or their grandkids is a front! He is funneling foreign money in through the decentralized, unregulated NFT market. Really stop and think about it.