Soon your Internet will look just like cable

The new FCC chairman, Ajit Pai, formerly worked as a lawyer for Verizon. His plan to eliminate net neutrality is a bigger gift to Verizon than anything he's ever done before.

In just a few weeks, the FCC will vote to eliminate net neutrality. The vote isn't in doubt: with Pai in charge, the anti-neutrality votes have a 3-2 edge. Without net neutrality, Internet service providers will be able to charge web companies for "fast lanes," which they can't do now. Smaller companies and individual's websites may be slowed down so much as to render them unusable. The biggest service providers (Netflix, Google, Amazon, and others) will have to cough up extra money, but the consumers won't see any of that–all the benefits will go to the ISPs. Consumers will see their rates go up.

Higher fees for lousier service. Does this sound familiar? That's how cable companies have operated for years.

Not surprisingly, virtually everyone hates this idea except the cable companies themselves. The telecommunications industry, though, is very excited about the prospect of all the money they're going to make. When previous FCC commissioner Tom Wheeler proposed to weaken net neutrality just a couple of years ago, the ensuing public outcry convinced him to reverse himself, resulting in a strong ruling in 2015 preserving neutrality. This week, Wheeler blasted Pai's new rules, saying that "this proposal raises hypocrisy to new heights."

But don't take my word for it. Check out this terrific and entertaining explainer from John Oliver, earlier this year:

If Ajit Pai and his telecom buddies get their way, here's what your Internet service might look like next year–I altered the first line, just to convey the idea; the rest is from a list of Comcast's current cable TV services:

That's right: your Internet service provider (ISP) will be allowed to bundle websites just like they bundle television channels. Of course, ISPs claim they will do no such thing, but why should we trust them?

If net neutrality goes away, no longer will anyone be able to set up a website and turn it into a thriving business by offering popular content. They'll first need to raise money to pay the ISPs, or else face being throttled back before their business even has a chance..

No one wants this change except a few large telecom companies. Interviewed by The Nation, former FCC Commissioner Michael Copps said

"There can be no truly open internet without net neutrality. To believe otherwise is to be captive to special interest power brokers or to an old and discredited ideology that thinks monopoly and not government oversight best serves the nation."

Ajit Pai, our new FCC chairman, clearly belongs to the former. Verizon is now in charge of the FCC.

Transgenic stem cells lead to a miraculous cure

Sometimes I read a science paper and I just say "Holy cow, this is amazing." I don't have that reaction very often, but I did last week.

Amidst all the hype, the hope, and the controversy about gene therapy and stem cell research, some very real progress is being made. Scientists can create working versions of human genes, package them into a virus, and then use the virus to deliver the genes to a real person. This approach creates "transgenic" cells that have bits of virus DNA within them, but the virus can be engineered to be harmless.

Last week, scientists reported in the journal Nature how they saved the life of a 7-year-old boy using transgenic stem cells. Twenty years ago, this would have been science fiction. Even today it is nothing short of astonishing.

Here's the story, summarized from the paper by Tobias Hirsch, Michele de Luca, and their colleagues. In June 2015, a 7-year-old boy was admitted to the Burn Unit of Children’s Hospital of Ruhr University, in Bochum, Germany, where Hirsch and his colleagues (Tobias Rothoeft, Norbert Teig, and others) work. The child wasn't suffering from burns: he had a devastating genetic disease, junctional epidermolysis bullosa (JEB), that had caused him to lose 80% of his skin.

Figure 1b from Hirsch et al. Schematic
representation of the clinical picture.
The denuded skin is indicated in red;
blistering areas are indicated in green.
Flesh-colored areas indicate currently
non- blistering skin. Transgenic grafts
were applied on both red and green areas.

Children with JEB suffer from constant blistering, wounds, and scarring. The disease is uncurable and children often die before reaching their teens. The 7-year-old boy was near death when he was admitted to the hospital–his weight had dropped to 17 kilograms (38 pounds) and he had severe skin infections from streptococcus and pseudomonas bacteria.

Dr. Hirsch and his team were struggling to keep the boy alive, and they had no treatments to offer. In desperation, they searched the scientific literature and found a possible treatment using gene therapy, developed by Michele De Luca, of the Center for Regenerative Medicine at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia in Italy. Dr. De Luca had only tried this treatment twice before, and even then only on tiny patches of skin. He had never tried it on such a severe case.

The boy and his parents had no other options to save his life. They agreed to let Dr. De Luca try.

In September of 2015, De Luca took a small patch of undamaged skin (4 square centimeters) back to his lab in Italy. There, he used a retrovirus containing a functioning copy of the LAMB3 gene–the gene that was mutated in the boy–to infect the skin cells. The retrovirus integrated itself into the genome of many of the skin cells, giving them the ability to function normally. Then De Luca grew the repaired cells into new skin grafts, enough to cover 80% of the child's body.

In a series of surgeries starting in October 2015, Hirsch and his colleagues applied the skin grafts to the young boy. The results were amazing.

As reported in the paper itself:

"Virtually complete epidermal regeneration was observed after 1 month.... Over the following weeks, the regenerated epidermis surrounding the open lesions and the epidermal islands spread and covered most of the denuded areas."

In other words, it worked. The new skin completely replaced the missing or damaged skin on 80% of the boy's body. What's even more remarkable is that two years later, his skin remains normal. The new skin is functioning perfectly and the young boy has returned to school.

The science behind this treatment represents the culmination of decades of research into gene therapy, stem cells, retroviruses, and genomics. To make it all work, we had to know: the identity of the gene that caused the disease (LAMB3); the DNA sequence of a normal LAMB3 gene; how to insert the human gene into a retrovirus; how to create a modified retrovirus that wouldn't harm humans; and much more.

The success of the therapy also revealed new insights into stem cells in human skin: the small patch of undamaged skin from the boy contained many cells, a few of which were stem cells (holoclones) that could replenish the skin indefinitely. It was these stem cells that allowed the skin grafts to take hold and continue to function, hopefully for the rest of the boy's life.

Sometimes science and medicine converge, and miracles happen.

(Note: the paper is "Regeneration of the entire human epidermis using transgenic stem cells" by T. Hirsch et al.)