This week, I have been mostly reading:

• Goldman Sachs asks in biotech research report: 'Is curing patients a sustainable business model?' — Tae Kim for CNBC: "The potential to deliver 'one shot cures' is one of the most attractive aspects of gene therapy, genetically-engineered cell therapy and gene editing. However, such treatments offer a very different outlook with regard to recurring revenue versus chronic therapies," analyst Salveen Richter wrote in the note to clients Tuesday. "While this proposition carries tremendous value for patients and society, it could represent a challenge for genome medicine developers looking for sustained cash flow."
• The citation graph is one of humankind's most important intellectual achievements — Dario Taraborelli in Boing Boing: When researchers write, we don't just describe new findings -- we place them in context by citing the work of others. Citations trace the lineage of ideas, connecting disparate lines of scholarship into a cohesive body of knowledge, and forming the basis of how we know what we know. Today, citations are also a primary source of data. Funders and evaluation bodies use them to appraise scientific impact and decide which ideas are worth funding to support scientific progress. Because of this, data that forms the citation graph should belong to the public. The Initiative for Open Citations was created to achieve this goal.
• How the American economy conspires to keep wages down — Gabriel Winant in the Guardian: We tend to think of employment as a market interaction: supply and demand meet to set a price, and that’s the wage you get paid. But work is much more than this. When you buy bread, there’s no other connection between you and the baker. You take your loaf and go home. But when you sell labor in the labor market, you’re entering into an ongoing power relationship. In return for your wages, you’re supposed to submit – not once but every day. It’s not just economic. Work is intrinsically political. […] The political power typically enjoyed by employers is generally experienced by workers as fear: fear of harassment, favoritism and wage theft, fear of joining a union or speaking out, fear of the consequences of injury or sickness, fear of the risks of asking for a raise, and beneath these, the fundamental workplace fear – of losing your job. The current of fear running through the workplace is one of the best ways to tell there’s something more than a market transaction happening there. But fear can go both ways. In West Virginia and Oklahoma, the irreplaceable teachers terrified Republican officials. With unemployment down, more of us are becoming irreplaceable every day. There’s leverage for workers there, but you have to be willing to scare your boss to use it.
• Against citizen science — Philip Mirowski in Aeon: What’s really behind the rise of citizen science? There are a few distinct trends and agendas at work. One is the obvious groundswell of hostility to experts spreading throughout the Western world. It rears its head in revanchist nationalism, the anti-vaccination movement, and global-warming denial. Citizen science seems to be an attempt to co-opt and transform that hostility into something else, something useful. Governments are appealing to the megalomania of the average individual, with the (probably vain) expectation that these people will naturally temper their hostility to scientific expertise, and accept a modicum of regimentation. But it’s hard to see how citizen science can really reverse the post-truth trend. Such a hope flies in the face of sociological research indicating that greater levels of education, combined with Right-of-centre political leanings, exacerbate suspicion towards orthodox science, rather than diminishing it. Secondly, the majority of existing citizen science consists of the public donating its unpaid work and data to privately owned, online entities that subsequently digest it as ‘big data’. In other words, there’s a forest of for-profit networks and startups out there seeking to attract, harvest and capitalise upon the labour they’ve enlisted – a phenomenon that Nick Srnicek, a lecturer in digital economy at King’s College London, has dubbed ‘platform capitalism’. The insertion of such companies into the scientific process creates the risk that they will eventually exert more influence over larger research agendas than they already do.
• 81 Wrongs — TedRall:
  
• Booked: The Ideology of Cheap Stuff — Sarah Jaffe in Dissent Magazine: You wouldn’t be able to have this chicken without cheap feed for the chicken. That means $1.25 billion of subsidy every year to the chicken industry, just in the United States. But also, workers don’t survive on cheap wages without cheap food. You need cheap energy to keep the henhouse going. You need cheap money to be able to bankroll the franchises. And finally, you need cheap lives. You need a regime that makes certain kinds of lives and bodies cheaper. That means, in the chicken industry, it’s women and people of color who are most likely to be injured on the line, most likely to be mangled in the chicken processing. So these are the seven cheap things embodied in the nugget: nature, money, work, care, food, energy, and lives. These things explain the trillions of chicken bones in the fossil record. The reason we wrote the book is because we want to move away from the idea that this is the Anthropocene—you know, humans being humans, in the way that boys will be boys, or sharks will be sharks. It’s not the Anthropocene—it’s the Capitalocene.
• Merit — Flea Snobbery: