Imagine you've been diagnosed with chronic kidney disease, told by your physician that if it can't be managed, you may eventually need a transplant or long-term dialysis. This scary situation is one faced by hundreds of thousands of Americans every year.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is an illness that affects an estimated 37 million people in the U.S. That's more than one in seven adults across the country, or nearly the entire population of California. Despite this alarming statistic, investment in kidney disease research and therapies lags other sectors. We must redress that imbalance.

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The conflict in Ukraine evokes a World War II strategy we had all hoped was gone forever: the purposeful victimization and killing of civilians to weaken and demoralize the opposition. Sadly, climate activists who seem to exert inordinate control over U.S. government policies are exacting an analogously high price from the American public in pursuit of their ideological goals. They are conducting what we call the War On American Energy, or WOAE (pronounced "WHOA!")

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Modern medicine has produced many kinds of high-tech miracles, among them gene therapy to correct malfunctioning genes, electrical stimulation devices to restore significant function after traumatic spinal cord injury, and robotically-executed surgery.

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• India has exempted crops with certain kinds of genetic modifications from the regulations previously imposed on the commercialisation of all genetically modified crops.
• The new policy – expedient but unscientific – exempts crops with simple tweaks to genes that are already 'natural' to the plant but that have not had any 'foreign' DNA added.
• Regulatory discrimination against these crops means some new useful varieties will remain proscribed and unavailable except through the stealth practices of farmers.
• The difference between these categories is determined by the presence of a foreign gene, but the term 'foreign' has many connotations, none meaningful in the current context.
• Flawed regulation is not the only problem related to genetically engineered crops in India, but the differentiation based on foreignness is a new and unsound addition to the list.

India has a long and dubious record of regulating genetically altered crops for agriculture. While the nation began at the same time as many other countries with the same ambitious goals – to deploy new genetic engineering tools to address agricultural vulnerabilities – it has fallen behind. Only one crop, modified with molecular techniques – pest-resistant cotton – has been approved by regulators.

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Decades ago, a case report (relating the experience with a single patient) was published which described how a person's flu symptoms improved after a bowl of chicken soup, but then reappeared. The article was meant as a kind of parody of the old maxim that chicken soup is the best cure for a cold. Pediatricians occasionally see a similar phenomenon when children are treated with an antibiotic for an ear infection; they may then have to prescribe another course of the drug. We're seeing a similar phenomenon with Paxlovid, an oral two-drug combination regimen that treats COVID-19. One drug is nirmatrelvir, an antiviral, while the second, ritonavir, inhibits the metabolism of the nirmatrelvir, maintaining therapeutic levels.

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