[HN Gopher] One of a Kind (2014)
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       One of a Kind (2014)
        
       Author : EndXA
       Score  : 18 points
       Date   : 2023-11-10 18:18 UTC (1 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
        
       | user_7832 wrote:
       | I'm grateful to whoever posted this. Unfortunately it appears
       | that Bertrand passed away in 2020 from septic shock, but he was
       | able to develop much better after his diagnosis. There's more
       | information at https://bertrand.might.net/ for anyone curious.
        
         | EndXA wrote:
         | I had no idea about this when I posted. Thank you for sharing.
        
       | low_tech_love wrote:
       | Oh, wow, this is the son of Matt Might from The Illustrated Guide
       | to a Ph.D...! What a story.
       | 
       | https://matt.might.net/articles/phd-school-in-pictures/
        
         | herodoturtle wrote:
         | Thanks for this.
         | 
         | And I see in the page you linked he even references his son's
         | condition.
        
       | novia wrote:
       | > It helps that both the Mights and the Wilseys have family
       | money. (Matt Might's father is the president and C.E.O. of Cable
       | One, the cable-television division of the former Washington Post
       | Company.) Since 2012, the Mights have devoted more than a hundred
       | thousand dollars a year to NGLY1-related research in Hudson
       | Freeze's lab, while the Wilseys have spent two million dollars
       | funding researchers around the world.
       | 
       | My knee-jerk cold-hearted reaction to this was that, while it's
       | great that the parents of the children with the rare disease were
       | able to get some answers about their children's condition, this
       | sounds like a vanity project for some very rich people. Which
       | other secrets of the human genome might we have unlocked if the
       | money hadn't incentivized these specialists to spend time
       | investigating down this one alleyway? Like, there's a limited
       | amount of people in the world who study biology at this level and
       | incentivizing them to do research in one area necessarily means
       | that another area will be sacrificed while they do the work.
       | 
       | Then I self corrected. There's not a limit of people interested
       | in researching things like this. There's a limit of funding. Any
       | additional funding towards researching genetic diseases allows
       | more specialists to enter the field.
        
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       (page generated 2023-11-11 23:02 UTC)