Viewpoints: H-1B Visa Fee Unfairly Targets Critical Indian-Born Doctors; Autistic People Don’t Need To Be Cured
Opinion writers tackle these public health issues.
Last Friday, President Trump announced that every new H-1B visa application will carry a $100,000 fee. In practice, this will end the H-1B program and with it, a critical pipeline of health care workers the U.S. cannot afford to lose. (Geeta Minocha, 9/25)
[Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.] has painted autistic people's existence as a plague. In their news conference, he and [President Donald] Trump reaffirmed that the administration's goal is to end autism. (Colin Killick, 9/23)
The reality is that there鈥檚 no 鈥渆pidemic鈥 of autism. As pointed out time and time again by the autistic community, the increase in the number of people being diagnosed can be largely聽explained聽by better screening and more awareness. (David Rivera, 9/25)
Nearly six years after the coronavirus first appeared in Wuhan, sparking a pandemic, Chinese authorities are still acting as though they have something to hide 鈥 and fear. Last Friday, a brave journalist who helped expose the impact of the coronavirus鈥檚 early days in Wuhan was once again sentenced to four years in prison, apparently for continuing to rattle authorities by speaking truth and refusing to be silenced. (9/24)
In a remarkable paper released this month, scientists at Stanford University showed that computers can design new viruses that can then be created in the lab. How is that possible? Think of ChatGPT, which learned to write by studying patterns in English. The Stanford team used the same idea on the fundamental building block of life, training 鈥済enomic language models鈥 on the DNA of bacteriophages 鈥 viruses that infect bacteria but not humans 鈥 to see whether a computer could learn their genetic grammar well enough to write something new. (Tal Feldman and Jonathan Feldman, 9/25)