Published May 14, 2025 10:00am EDT close ‘CyberGuy’ explains dark side of PayPal, how to stay safe Kurt Knutsson has advice to protect information from cybercriminals who are seeking new ways to gain login credentials and full control of computers and bank accounts. Online scams are becoming more dangerous and convincing every day. Cybercriminals are finding new ways to gain not just your login credentials but full control of your computer and your bank accounts.Take John from King George, Virginia, for example. He recently shared his alarming experience with us. His story is a powerful warning about how quickly things can escalate if you respond to suspicious emails.Here is what happened to John in his own words: "I mistakenly responded to a false PayPal email notifying me of a laptop purchase. The message looked real, and I called the number listed. The person on the phone gave me a strange number to enter into my browser, which installed an app that took control of my PC. A warning popped up saying 'software updating – do not turn off PC,' and I could see my entire file system being scanned. The scammer accessed my bank account and transferred money between accounts. He told me to leave my PC running and go to the bank, keeping him on the phone without telling anyone what was happening. I shut everything down, contacted my bank, and changed my passwords."John’s quick thinking in shutting down his computer and alerting his bank helped minimize the damage. However, not everyone is as lucky. Fake PayPal scam email (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)How this scam worksThis type of scam is known as a remote access scam. It often begins with a fake email that appears to come from a trusted company like PayPal. The message claims there is an issue, such as an unauthorized charge, and urges the victim to call a phone number or click a link. WHAT IS ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)?Once the scammer makes contact, they guide the victim to enter a code into their browser or install a program, claiming it will fix the problem. In reality, this grants the scammer full control of the victim’s computer. Once inside, scammers often search for sensitive files, access banking websites, steal login credentials or install malware to maintain long-term access. Even if the immediate scam is stopped, hidden malware can allow scammers to reenter the system later. A hacker at work (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)Key takeaways from John's experienceJohn’s close call highlights several important lessons.Fake emails are harder to spot than ever: Scammers create emails that look almost identical to real ones from trusted companies like PayPal. They copy logos, formatting and even fake customer support numbers. Always double-check the sender’s email address and verify communications by visiting the official website or app directly instead of clicking links inside emails.Remote access scams can escalate fast: Once scammers gain control of your device, they can steal sensitive data, move funds between accounts and install hidden malware that stays behind even after the scammer disconnects. It often takes only minutes for serious damage to be done, making fast recognition critical.Psychological pressure plays a big role: Scammers rely on creating a sense of urgency and fear. By keeping you on the phone and urging secrecy, they isolate you from help and rush you into making bad decisions. Recognizing when you are being pressured is key to breaking the scammer’s control.Fast action can make all the difference: By quickly disconnecting his computer and contacting his bank, John limited the scammer’s access to his accounts. Acting within minutes rather than hours can stop further theft, block fraudulent transactions and protect your sensitive information from being fully compromised.GET FOX BUSINESS ON THE GO BY CLICKING HERE A warning on a laptop home screen (Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson)How to protect yourself from remote access scamsTaking simple but strong security steps can protect you from falling victim.1. Never call a number listed in a suspicious email: Scammers often set up fake phone numbers that sound professional but are designed to manipulate you into handing over control or information. Always find verified contact information through a company's official website or app, not links/numbers provided in suspicious messages.2. Be skeptical of unusual instructions: No legitimate company will ask you to install software or enter strange codes to protect your account. If anything seems unusual, trust your instincts and stop the communication immediately.3. Install strong antivirus software on all devices: Antivirus programs can detect suspicious downloads, block remote access attempts and help prevent hackers from taking over your system. Having strong antivirus protection installed across all your devices is the best way to safeguard yourself from malicious links that install malware and attempt to access your private information. This protection can also alert you to phishing emails and ransomware scams, keeping your personal information and digital assets safe. Get my picks for the best 2025 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android and iOS devices.4. Use identity theft protection: These services monitor financial accounts, credit reports and online activity for signs of fraud, alerting you to suspicious transactions. See my tips and best picks on how to protect yourself from identity theft.5. React immediately if you suspect a scam: Disconnect your device from the internet, contact your bank or credit card company immediately and change your passwords, especially for banking and email accounts. Monitor your accounts closely for unauthorized activity and report the scam to the Federal Trade Commission as well as the company that was impersonated. Acting quickly can prevent further access and limit the damage scammers can cause.6. Use multifactor authentication (MFA): MFA adds a critical layer of security beyond passwords, blocking unauthorized logins even if credentials are stolen. Enable MFA on all accounts, especially banking, email and payment platforms, to stop scammers from bypassing stolen passwords.7. Update devices and software immediately: Regular updates patch security flaws that scammers exploit to install malware or hijack systems. Turn on automatic updates wherever possible to ensure you’re always protected against newly discovered vulnerabilities.8. Employ a password manager with strong, unique passwords: Avoid password reuse and use complex passphrases to minimize credential-stuffing attacks. A password manager generates and stores uncrackable passwords, eliminating the risk of weak or repeated credentials. Get more details about my best expert-reviewed password managers of 2025 here.9. Never share screen access or grant remote control: Scammers exploit screen-sharing tools to steal passwords and manipulate transactions in real time. Legitimate tech support will never demand unsolicited screen access; terminate the call immediately if pressured.10. Invest in personal data removal services: These services automate requests to delete your personal information from data brokers and people-search sites, reducing publicly available details scammers could exploit for phishing or impersonation. While no service promises to remove all your data from the internet, having a removal service is great if you want to constantly monitor and automate the process of removing your information from hundreds of sites continuously over a longer period of time. Check out my top picks for data removal services here.Kurt’s key takeawaysJohn’s story is a reminder that online scams are evolving quickly and becoming more aggressive. Staying skeptical, verifying all suspicious messages and acting quickly if something feels wrong can make the difference between staying safe and losing sensitive information. Protect your devices, trust your instincts and remember it is always better to be cautious than to take a risk with your security.CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APPHave you or someone you know been targeted by a scam like this? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact.For more of my tech tips and security alerts, subscribe to my free CyberGuy Report Newsletter by heading to Cyberguy.com/Newsletter.Ask Kurt a question or let us know what stories you'd like us to cover.Follow Kurt on his social channels:Answers to the most-asked CyberGuy questions:New from Kurt:Copyright 2025 CyberGuy.com. All rights reserved. Kurt "CyberGuy" Knutsson is an award-winning tech journalist who has a deep love of technology, gear and gadgets that make life better with his contributions for Fox News & FOX Business beginning mornings on "FOX & Friends." Got a tech question? Get Kurt’s free CyberGuy Newsletter, share your voice, a story idea or comment at CyberGuy.com.

Apple Adds Brain-to-Computer Protocol to Its Accessibility Repertoire By John P. Mello Jr. May 14, 2025 5:00 AM PT ADVERTISEMENT Rubrik Foward 2025: The Future of Cyber Resilience is here When an attacker comes for your business, will you be ready? Chart your path to cyber resilience and keep your business running. June 4 | Virtual Event | Register Now Among a raft of upcoming accessibility tools revealed Tuesday, Apple announced a new protocol for brain-to-computer interfaces (BCIs) within its Switch Control feature. The protocol allows iOS, iPadOS, and visionOS devices to support an emerging technology that enables users to control their digital hardware without physical movement. One of the first companies to take advantage of the new protocol will be New York-based Synchron. “This marks a major milestone in accessibility and neurotechnology, where users implanted with Synchron’s BCI can control iPhone, iPad, and Apple Vision Pro directly with their thoughts without the need for physical movement or voice commands,” the company said in a statement. It added that Synchron’s BCI system will seamlessly integrate with Apple’s built-in accessibility features, including Switch Control, giving users an intuitive way to use their devices and laying the foundation for a new generation of cognitive input technologies. “This marks a defining moment for human-device interaction,” Synchron CEO and Co-Founder Tom Oxley said in a statement. “BCI is more than an accessibility tool, it’s a next-generation interface layer.” “Apple is helping to pioneer a new interface paradigm, where brain signals are formally recognized alongside touch, voice, and typing,” he continued. “With BCI recognized as a native input for Apple devices, there are new possibilities for people living with paralysis and beyond.” BCI Validation Tetiana Aleksandrova, CEO of Subsense, a biotechnology company in Covina, Calif., specializing in non-surgical bidirectional brain-computer interfaces, maintained Apple’s announcement marks a powerful signal showing the evolution of BCI. “I see it as Apple throwing open the gates — a single-stroke move that invites clinically-validated BCIs like Synchron’s Stentrode to plug straight into a billion-device ecosystem,” she told TechNewsWorld. “For patients, it means ‘mind-to-message’ control without middleware,” she said. “For the BCI industry, it’s a public stamp that neural input is ready for prime time — and yes, that’s a thrilling milestone for all of us building the next generation of non-surgical systems. It’s a shift, moving BCI from a nascent technology to more mainstream applications.” Aleksandrova maintained that BCI fits nicely into Apple’s overall accessibility strategy. “Apple’s playbook is to solve an extreme edge case, polish the UX until it’s invisible, then let the rest of the world adopt it,” she explained. “VoiceOver paved the way for Siri. Switch Control turned into Face Gestures. BCI support is the natural next rung on that ladder. Accessibility isn’t a side quest for Apple — it’s the R and D lab that future-proofs their core UI.” “Apple devices put unlimited information at users’ fingertips,” she added, “but for people with disabilities from TBI or ALS, full access can be out of reach. BCI technology helps bridge that gap, giving them a way to control and interact with their devices using only their brain activity.” Analysts See BCI as Long-Term Technology Apple’s embrace of BCI is significant, but its impact still lies in the future, noted Will Kerwin, technology equity analyst with Morningstar Research Services in Chicago. “While a particularly cool announcement, we think this type of feature is a long way away from full commercialization and not material to investors in Apple at this point,” he told TechNewsWorld. Kerwin pointed out that Synchron’s Stentrode BCI currently only has a sample size of 10 people. “Long-term, yes, this technology could have huge implications for how humans interact with technology, and we see it as an adjacency to AI, where generative AI could help improve the interface and ability for humans to communicate via the implant,” he said. “But again, we see this as an extremely long-term journey in its nascent days.” According to the Wall Street Journal, FDA approval of Synchron’s Stenrode technology is years away. The procedure involves implanting a stent-mounted electrode array into a blood vessel in the brain, so there’s no need for open brain surgery. “Some companies in the BCI space are focused on cortical control of prosthetics, others on cognitive enhancement or memory restoration,” Synchron spokesperson Kimberly Ha told TechNewsWorld. “What sets us apart is our focus on scalability and safety. By implanting via the blood vessels, we avoid open brain surgery, making our approach more feasible for potentially broader medical use.” Solving the BCI Scalability Problem Ha acknowledged that there are significant challenges to the broad adoption of BCI. “Scalability is one of the biggest,” she said. “Historically, many BCI systems have required open brain surgery, which presents serious risks and limits to who can access the technology,” she explained. “It’s simply not scalable for widespread clinical or consumer use.” “Synchron takes a fundamentally different approach,” she continued. “Our Stentrode device is implanted via the blood vessels, similar to a heart stent, avoiding the need to open the skull or directly penetrate brain tissue. This makes the procedure far less invasive, more accessible to patients, and better suited to real-world clinical deployment.” There are also challenges to developing the BCI apps themselves. “The biggest challenge in developing BCI applications is the trade-off between signal quality and accessibility,” Aleksandrova explained. “While a directly implanted BCI offers strong brain signals, surgery is risky. With non-invasive systems, the resolution is poor.” Her company, Subsense, is trying to offer the best of both worlds through the use of nanoparticles, which can provide bidirectional communication by crossing the blood-brain barrier to interact with neurons and transmit signals. Thought-Driven Interfaces for New Use Cases Ha noted that in addition to medical applications, BCI could be used for hands-free device control across all types of digital platforms, neuroadaptive gaming, or immersive XR experiences. “BCI opens doors to applications in mental wellness, communication tools, and cognitive enhancement,” Aleksandrova added. “You’ll fire off texts, browse AR screens, or write code just by thinking,” she said. “You’ll slip seamlessly into a drone or handle a surgical robot as though it were your own hand, and nudge your smart home with a silent impulse that dims the lights when focus peaks.” “Entertainment will read the room inside your head — dialing a game’s difficulty or a film’s plot to match your mood — while always-on neural metrics warn of fatigue, migraines, or anxiety hours before you notice and even surface names or ideas when your memory stalls,” she predicted. “Your unique brainwave ‘fingerprint’ will replace passwords, and researchers are already sketching ways to preserve those patterns so our minds can outlast failing bodies.” “I’m genuinely proud of Synchron and Apple for opening this door,” she said. John P. Mello Jr. has been an ECT News Network reporter since 2003. His areas of focus include cybersecurity, IT issues, privacy, e-commerce, social media, artificial intelligence, big data and consumer electronics. He has written and edited for numerous publications, including the Boston Business Journal, the Boston Phoenix, Megapixel.Net and Government Security News. Email John. Leave a Comment Click here to cancel reply. Please sign in to post or reply to a comment. New users create a free account. More by John P. Mello Jr. view all More in Science

A bill that allows medical clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana.  Under the legislation, doctors can apply for a license to open an experimental treatment clinic and recommend and sell therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to their patients. Once it’s signed by the governor, the law will be the most expansive in the country in allowing access to drugs that have not been fully tested.  The bill allows for any drug produced in the state to be sold in it, providing it has been through phase I clinical trials—the initial, generally small, first-in-human studies that are designed to check that a new treatment is not harmful. These trials do not determine if the drug is effective. The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans—a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers.   These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. “I see no reason why it couldn’t be adopted by most of the other states,” said Todd White, speaking to an audience of policymakers and others interested in longevity at an event late last month in Washington, DC. White, who helped develop the bill and directs a research organization focused on aging, added that “there are some things that can be done at the federal level to allow Right to Try laws to proliferate more readily.”  Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was “optimistic” about the measure, because “it’s great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy.”  Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub. But ethicists and legal scholars aren’t as optimistic. “I hate it,” bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments—and the risks of harm should something go wrong. Easy access? No drugs have been approved to treat human aging. Some in the longevity field believe that regulation has held back the development of such drugs. In the US, federal law requires that drugs be shown to be both safe and effective before they can be sold. That requirement was made law in the 1960s following the thalidomide tragedy, in which women who took the drug for morning sickness had babies with sometimes severe disabilities. Since then, the FDA has been responsible for the approval of new drugs.   Typically, new drugs are put through a series of human trials. Phase I trials generally involve between 20 and 100 volunteers and are designed to check that the drug is safe for humans. If it is, the drug is then tested in larger groups of hundreds, and then thousands, of volunteers to assess the dose and whether it actually works. Once a drug is approved, people who are prescribed it are monitored for side effects. The entire process is slow, and it can last more than a decade—a particular pain point for people who are acutely aware of their own aging.  But some exceptions have been made for people who are terminally ill under Right to Try laws. Those laws allow certain individuals to apply for access to experimental treatments that have been through phase I clinical trials but have not received FDA approval. Montana first passed a Right to Try law in 2015 (a federal law was passed around three years later). Then in 2023, the state expanded the law to include all patients there, not just those with terminal illnesses—meaning that any person in Montana could, in theory, take a drug that had been through only a phase I trial. At the time, this was cheered by many longevity enthusiasts—some of whom had helped craft the expanded measure. But practically, the change hasn’t worked out as they envisioned. “There was no licensing, no processing, no registration” for clinics that might want to offer those drugs, says White. “There needed to be another bill that provided regulatory clarity for service providers.”  So the new legislation addresses “how clinics can set up shop in Montana,” says Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, which hosted the DC event. Livingston built A4LI, as it’s known, a few years ago, as a lobbying group for the science of human aging and longevity. Livingston, who is exploring multiple approaches to improve both funding for scientific research and to change drug regulation, helped develop and push the 2023 bill in Montana with the support of State Senator Kenneth Bogner, he says. “I gave [Bogner] a menu of things that could be done at the state level … and he loved the idea” of turning Montana into a medical tourism hub, he says.  After all, as things stand, plenty of Americans travel abroad to receive experimental treatments that cannot legally be sold in the US, including expensive, unproven stem cell and gene therapies, says Livingston.  “If you’re going to go and get an experimental gene therapy, you might as well keep it in the country,” he says. Livingston has suggested that others might be interested in trying a novel drug designed to clear aged “senescent” cells from the body, which is currently entering phase II trials for an eye condition caused by diabetes. “One: let’s keep the money in the country, and two: if I was a millionaire getting an experimental gene therapy, I’d rather be in Montana than Honduras.” “Los Alamos for longevity” Honduras, in particular, has become something of a home base for longevity experiments. The island of Roatán is home to the Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine clinic, which, along with various stem cell products, sells a controversial unproven “anti-aging” gene therapy for around $20,000 to customers including wealthy longevity influencer Bryan Johnson.  Tech entrepreneur and longevity enthusiast Niklas Anzinger has also founded the city of Infinita in the region’s special economic zone of Próspera, a private city where residents are able to make their own suggestions for medical regulations. It’s the second time he’s built a community there as part of his effort to build a “Los Alamos for longevity” on the island, a place where biotech companies can develop therapies that slow or reverse human aging “at warp speed,” and where individuals are free to take those experimental treatments. (The first community, Vitalia, featured a biohacking lab, but came to an end following a disagreement between the two founders.)  Anzinger collaborated with White, the longevity enthusiast who spoke at the A4LI event (and is an advisor to Infinita VC, Anzinger’s investment company), to help put together the new Montana bill. “He asked if I would help him try to advance the new bill, so that’s what we did for the last few months,” says White, who trained as an electrical engineer but left his career in telecommunications to work with an organization that uses blockchain to fund research into extending human lifespans.  “Right to Try has always been this thing [for people] who are terminal[ly ill] and trying a Hail Mary approach to solving these things; now Right to Try laws are being used to allow you to access treatments earlier,” White told the audience at the A4LI event. “Making it so that people can use longevity medicines earlier is, I think, a very important thing.” The new bill largely sets out the “infrastructure” for clinics that want to sell experimental treatments, says White. It states that clinics will need to have a license, for example, and that this must be renewed on an annual basis.  “Now somebody who actually wants to deliver drugs under the Right to Try law will be able to do so,” he says. The new legislation also protects prescribing doctors from disciplinary action. And it sets out requirements for informed consent that go further than those of existing Right to Try laws. Before a person takes an experimental drug under the new law, they will be required to provide a written consent that includes a list of approved alternative drugs and a description of the worst potential outcome. On the safe side “In the Montana law, we explicitly enhanced the requirements for informed consent,” Anzinger told an audience at the same A4LI event. This, along with the fact that the treatments will have been through phase I clinical trials, will help to keep people safe, he argued. “We have to treat this with a very large degree of responsibility,” he added. “We obviously don’t want to be killing people,” says Livingston.  But he also adds that he, personally, won’t be signing up for any experimental treatments. “I want to be the 10 millionth, or even the 50 millionth, person to get the gene therapy,” he says. “I’m not that adventurous … I’ll let other people go first.” Others are indeed concerned that, for the “adventurous” people, these experimental treatments won’t necessarily be safe. Phase I trials are typically tiny, and they often involve less than 50 people, all of whom are typically in good health. A trial like that won’t tell you much about side effects that only show up in 5% of people, for example, or about interactions the drug might have with other medicines. Around 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. And around 17% of drugs fail late-stage clinical trials because of safety concerns. Even those that make it all the way through clinical trials and get approved by the FDA can still end up being withdrawn from the market when rare but serious side effects show up. Between 1992 and 2023, 23 drugs that were given accelerated approval for cancer indications were later withdrawn from the market. And between 1950 and 2013, the reason for the withdrawal of 95 drugs was “death.” “It’s disturbing that they want to make drugs available after phase I testing,” says Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “This could endanger patients.” “Famously, the doctor’s first obligation is to first do no harm,” says Bateman-House. “If [a drug] has not been through clinical trials, how do you have any standing on which to think it isn’t going to do any harm?” But supporters of the bill argue that individuals can make their own decisions about risk. When speaking at the A4LI event, Flanigan introduced herself as a bioethicist before adding “but don’t hold it against me; we’re not all so bad.” She argued that current drug regulations impose a “massive amount of restrictions on your bodily rights and your medical freedom.” Why should public officials be the ones making decisions about what’s safe for people? Individuals, she argued, should be empowered to make those judgments themselves. Other ethicists counter that this isn’t an issue of people’s rights. There are lots of generally accepted laws about when we can access drugs, says Hoffman; people aren’t allowed to drink and drive because they might kill someone. “So, no, you don’t have a right to ingest everything you want if there are risks associated with it.” The idea that individuals have a right to access experimental treatments has in fact failed in US courts in the past, says Carl Coleman, a bioethicist and legal scholar at Seton Hall in New Jersey.  He points to a case from 20 years ago: In the early 2000s, Frank Burroughs founded the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. His daughter, Abigail Burroughs, had head and neck cancer, and she had tried and failed to access experimental drugs. In 2003, about two years after Abigail’s death, the group sued the FDA, arguing that people with terminal cancer have a constitutionally protected right to access experimental, unapproved treatments, once those treatments have been through phase I trials. In 2007, however, a court rejected that argument, determining  that terminally ill individuals do not have a constitutional right to experimental drugs. Bateman-House also questions a provision in the Montana bill that claims to make treatments more equitable. It states that “experimental treatment centers” should allocate 2% of their net annual profits “to support access to experimental treatments and healthcare for qualifying Montana residents.” Bateman-House says she’s never seen that kind of language in a bill before. It may sound positive, but it could in practice introduce even more risk to the local community. “On the one hand, I like equity,” she says. “On the other hand, I don’t like equity to snake oil.” After all, the doctors prescribing these drugs won’t know if they will work. It is never ethical to make somebody pay for a treatment when you don’t have any idea whether it will work, Bateman-House adds. “That’s how the US system has been structured: There’s no profit without evidence of safety and efficacy.” The clinics are coming Any clinics that offer experimental treatments in Montana will only be allowed to sell drugs that have been made within the state, says Coleman. “Federal law requires any drug that is going to be distributed in interstate commerce to have FDA approval,” he says. White isn’t too worried about that. Montana already has manufacturing facilities for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer. “That was one of the specific advantages [of focusing] on Montana, because everything can be done in state,” he says. He also believes that the current administration is “predisposed” to change federal laws around interstate drug manufacturing. (FDA commissioner Marty Makary has been a vocal critic of the agency and the pace at which it approves new drugs.) At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says Livingston. “We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there.” He won’t name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad.  Mac Davis—founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial “anti-aging” gene therapy—told MIT Technology Review he was “looking into it.” “I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism,” says Livingston. “There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment.”

OpinionMay 14, 20254 min readScience Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a DictatorshipThe red flags abound—political research tells us the U.S. is becoming an autocracyBy Dan Vergano President Donald Trump delivers address to a joint session of Congress, split image seen from watching television, March 4, 2025. Andrew Lichtenstein/Corbis via Getty ImagesAs president, Donald Trump pretty much checks all the warning boxes for an autocrat. Last September Scientific American warned of Trump’s “nonsensical conspiracy fantasies,” that he “ignores the climate crisis” and has fondness for “unqualified ideologues,” whom he would appoint should he become president again. It’s now May and sadly, that all checks out.The U.S. is in a bad place, and scholars warn, looks to be headed for worse.Worse even than Trump’s relentless attacks on science have been his administration’s assaults on the law. His officials have illegally fired federal workers, impounded congressional appropriations and seized people off the street for deportations to foreign prisons, threatening the same for all U.S. citizens. “The depth and breadth of this administration’s disregard for civil liberties, political pluralism, the separation of powers and legal constraints of all kinds mark it as an authoritarian regime,” law professor David Pozen of the Columbia University School of Law told the New York Times in April.On supporting science journalismIf you're enjoying this article, consider supporting our award-winning journalism by subscribing. By purchasing a subscription you are helping to ensure the future of impactful stories about the discoveries and ideas shaping our world today.We should all be worried that the U.S. is headed toward an autocracy—government by one person—even without political science offering a warning. But scholarship on how nations descend into this unfortunate state, seen in places like Turkey and Hungary, might not surprise you with what it suggests about the U.S.“Since Donald Trump’s inauguration, the country has embarked on the slippery slope toward autocracy,” concludes political scientist Daniel Stockemer of the University of Ottawa, in a May report in Politics & Policy. Rather than a coup, Trump’s attacks on law firms, universities, immigrants and others constitute “a more incremental form of democratic erosion,” he writes, one that follows a six-step theory of incremental autocratization based on research on the democratic backsliding seen worldwide in recent decades. The model arose in major part from the work of political scientist Marianne Kneuer of TU Dresden. She looked at the last quarter-century’s collapse in Venezuela, examining how states turn from democratic to autocratic in stages, as opposed to a sudden coup.The U.S. has already breached the first three steps of Stockemer’s theory. The first step is one of social turmoil; this originated with the Tea Party movement during the Obama administration. Marked by angry politics, backlash against minorities and immigrants, and distrust in institutions, the U.S. has in the last two decades changed from a “full” to a “flawed” democracy, according to the Economist’s global democracy index.The second step requires a “project of radical change,” like the populist movement of Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez in the 1990s, or in the U.S. case Trump’s MAGA movement, which defends white, male privileges and holds prime loyalty for many Republicans.The third step is a “decisive electoral victory,” applicable to Chavez in 1999 or Trump in 2024, the latter a vote that also brought Trump control of a subservient Congress.That leaves us at the edge of the fourth step, the dismantling of checks and balances on executive power.“If my theory is correct, the U.S. is still in this transition phase between democracy and autocracy,” says Stockemer, by e-mail. “If they move more in the direction of autocracy, we would see that the administration tries to defy more court orders.” One key part of the fourth step is the declaration of fabricated emergencies, such as the “red scare” of the McCarthy era, to trample checks and balances, such as the judiciary’s control of the legal system. In May, for example, the White House deputy chief of staff suggested Trump could unilaterally suspend habeas corpus, a legal remedy for unlawful detention that dates at least to the Magna Carta and is in the U.S. Constitution, to summarily round up immigrants. He cited an imaginary “invasion”—even though border crossings are at their lowest point in U.S, history, according to Trump’s U.S. Customs and Border Protection agency—as a reason. The courts would likely resist such a move, as the Supreme Court did under the Bush administration in 2008, and whether the Trump administration abides by judicial decisions will determine whether the fourth step has occurred.Warnings of the fifth step on the road to autocracy, securing long-term power, come in Trump’s musing of seeking an unconstitutional third term as president. The final step, the infringement of basic rights and freedoms, also is flashing warning signs, says Stockemer. These are already evident in executive orders that disengage the U.S. from the United Nations Human Rights Council, remove transgender service members from the military and privilege Christianity. He predicts that attacks on minority voting rights in 2026 and 2028 would be an expected outcome of this step.A simpler “competitive authoritarianism” yardstick for measuring democratic collapse comes from political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way and Daniel Ziblatt earlier this month. “We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government,” they write in the New York Times. By that measure, they add, the U.S. has already crossed that line, ordering Department of Justice investigations into perceived political enemies, donors to the Democratic Party and news outlets ranging from CBS News to the Des Moines Register. “The administration’s authoritarian offensive has had a clear impact. It has changed how Americans behave, forcing them to think twice,” they added.The good news is that the slide into autocracy isn’t inevitable for the U.S. The courts may hold, Congress may start listening to protestors as Trump’s approval rating slides, and the Republican coalition, described as “Big Tech on one side, white nationalists on the other,” in the Boston Review, may fracture.Even so, the damage already done is real: “It is very easy to destroy something such as USAID, but it takes a long time to rebuild it both physically and also in a trust sense, both in America and abroad,” says Stockemer, noting the rapid plummet of Canadian attitudes toward the U.S., from positive to sharply negative. “I can tear down a house in a day, but it will take a year or longer to rebuild it.”This is an opinion and analysis article, and the views expressed by the author or authors are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

Five-tower Goods Station scheme signed off after developer Vita Group changes one tower to private sale Simpson Haugh will be required to stay on the project as a ‘guardian of quality’ following changes to the scheme’s section 106 agreement Birmingham council has approved Simpson Haugh’s plans for 1,200-home Goods Station scheme a month after councillors deferred a decision over fears about an excess of tall buildings in the city. A recommendation to approve Vita Group’s five-tower redevelopment of a former office building occupied by Atkins was carried with seven votes in favour and one abstention. The scheme, located next to the Mailbox, will consist of three blocks of 49, 39 and 10 storeys containing a combined 868 homes, a 29-storey student accommodation tower containing 720 bedpsaces and a 19-storey hotel building containing 229 serviced apartments. The height, scale and housing mix of the scheme had come under attack in the council’s last planning committee in April, with one councillor warning approval would represent “another incremental twist towards a city of tall towers”. Councillors also criticised the design of the proposals, which councillor Gareth Moore described as “just a collection of boxes”.  However, concerns over the scheme’s housing mix, which had consisted entirely of build-to-rent, were alleviated by Vita’s decision to change one of the residential towers to private sale following the vote for deferral in last month’s committee meeting. Councillors had criticised the build-to-rent plans for contributing to an oversupply of housing targeted at single professionals rather than families.  A clause has also been added to the scheme’s section 106 requiring Simpson Haugh to be retained throughout the delivery of the scheme to act as a “guardian of quality”. Councillor David Barker said: “I believe we have a much better scheme now than the one previously there… I do think this is probably a lesson and a reason to defer more things when we are unhappy with it, to actually be a bit braver in the committee in saying we are able to determine what is good enough for the city and clearly we’ve had success by doing it. Planning committee chair Lee Marsham added: “I think it’s great to see a brownfield site brought into use. I think it’s good that they listened to our previous committee’s comments. I think as a committee we have to be mindful when we do show a bit of rigour and be careful when we do and this is an example where clearly that has made a difference.”  Commenting on the requirement for Simpson Haugh to stay on the project as delivery architect, he said: “Having that reassurance and that oversight is to be welcomed and i think we should be pushing for more of that, particularly on large schemes that have a huge impact on our city.” The project team for the Goods Station scheme includes landscape architect LDA Design, planning consultant Turley, structural and civil engineer Ramboll, cost consultant Arcadis, commercial agent CBRE and daylight consultant GIA.

A bill that allows medical clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana.  Under the legislation, doctors can apply for a license to open an experimental treatment clinic and recommend and sell therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to their patients. Once it’s signed by the governor, the law will be the most expansive in the country in allowing access to drugs that have not been fully tested.  The bill allows for any drug produced in the state to be sold in it, providing it has been through phase I clinical trials—the initial, generally small, first-in-human studies that are designed to check that a new treatment is not harmful. These trials do not determine if the drug is effective. The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans—a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers.   These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. “I see no reason why it couldn’t be adopted by most of the other states,” said Todd White, speaking to an audience of policymakers and others interested in longevity at an event late last month in Washington, DC. White, who helped develop the bill and directs a research organization focused on aging, added that “there are some things that can be done at the federal level to allow Right to Try laws to proliferate more readily.”  Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was “optimistic” about the measure, because “it’s great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy.”  Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub. But ethicists and legal scholars aren’t as optimistic. “I hate it,” bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments—and the risks of harm should something go wrong. Easy access? No drugs have been approved to treat human aging. Some in the longevity field believe that regulation has held back the development of such drugs. In the US, federal law requires that drugs be shown to be both safe and effective before they can be sold. That requirement was made law in the 1960s following the thalidomide tragedy, in which women who took the drug for morning sickness had babies with sometimes severe disabilities. Since then, the FDA has been responsible for the approval of new drugs.   Typically, new drugs are put through a series of human trials. Phase I trials generally involve between 20 and 100 volunteers and are designed to check that the drug is safe for humans. If it is, the drug is then tested in larger groups of hundreds, and then thousands, of volunteers to assess the dose and whether it actually works. Once a drug is approved, people who are prescribed it are monitored for side effects. The entire process is slow, and it can last more than a decade—a particular pain point for people who are acutely aware of their own aging.  But some exceptions have been made for people who are terminally ill under Right to Try laws. Those laws allow certain individuals to apply for access to experimental treatments that have been through phase I clinical trials but have not received FDA approval. Montana first passed a Right to Try law in 2015 (a federal law was passed around three years later). Then in 2023, the state expanded the law to include all patients there, not just those with terminal illnesses—meaning that any person in Montana could, in theory, take a drug that had been through only a phase I trial. At the time, this was cheered by many longevity enthusiasts—some of whom had helped craft the expanded measure. But practically, the change hasn’t worked out as they envisioned. “There was no licensing, no processing, no registration” for clinics that might want to offer those drugs, says White. “There needed to be another bill that provided regulatory clarity for service providers.”  So the new legislation addresses “how clinics can set up shop in Montana,” says Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, which hosted the DC event. Livingston built A4LI, as it’s known, a few years ago, as a lobbying group for the science of human aging and longevity. Livingston, who is exploring multiple approaches to improve both funding for scientific research and to change drug regulation, helped develop and push the 2023 bill in Montana with the support of State Senator Kenneth Bogner, he says. “I gave [Bogner] a menu of things that could be done at the state level … and he loved the idea” of turning Montana into a medical tourism hub, he says.  After all, as things stand, plenty of Americans travel abroad to receive experimental treatments that cannot legally be sold in the US, including expensive, unproven stem cell and gene therapies, says Livingston.  “If you’re going to go and get an experimental gene therapy, you might as well keep it in the country,” he says. Livingston has suggested that others might be interested in trying a novel drug designed to clear aged “senescent” cells from the body, which is currently entering phase II trials for an eye condition caused by diabetes. “One: let’s keep the money in the country, and two: if I was a millionaire getting an experimental gene therapy, I’d rather be in Montana than Honduras.” “Los Alamos for longevity” Honduras, in particular, has become something of a home base for longevity experiments. The island of Roatán is home to the Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine clinic, which, along with various stem cell products, sells a controversial unproven “anti-aging” gene therapy for around $20,000 to customers including wealthy longevity influencer Bryan Johnson.  Tech entrepreneur and longevity enthusiast Niklas Anzinger has also founded the city of Infinita in the region’s special economic zone of Próspera, a private city where residents are able to make their own suggestions for medical regulations. It’s the second time he’s built a community there as part of his effort to build a “Los Alamos for longevity” on the island, a place where biotech companies can develop therapies that slow or reverse human aging “at warp speed,” and where individuals are free to take those experimental treatments. (The first community, Vitalia, featured a biohacking lab, but came to an end following a disagreement between the two founders.)  Anzinger collaborated with White, the longevity enthusiast who spoke at the A4LI event (and is an advisor to Infinita VC, Anzinger’s investment company), to help put together the new Montana bill. “He asked if I would help him try to advance the new bill, so that’s what we did for the last few months,” says White, who trained as an electrical engineer but left his career in telecommunications to work with an organization that uses blockchain to fund research into extending human lifespans.  “Right to Try has always been this thing [for people] who are terminal[ly ill] and trying a Hail Mary approach to solving these things; now Right to Try laws are being used to allow you to access treatments earlier,” White told the audience at the A4LI event. “Making it so that people can use longevity medicines earlier is, I think, a very important thing.” The new bill largely sets out the “infrastructure” for clinics that want to sell experimental treatments, says White. It states that clinics will need to have a license, for example, and that this must be renewed on an annual basis.  “Now somebody who actually wants to deliver drugs under the Right to Try law will be able to do so,” he says. The new legislation also protects prescribing doctors from disciplinary action. And it sets out requirements for informed consent that go further than those of existing Right to Try laws. Before a person takes an experimental drug under the new law, they will be required to provide a written consent that includes a list of approved alternative drugs and a description of the worst potential outcome. On the safe side “In the Montana law, we explicitly enhanced the requirements for informed consent,” Anzinger told an audience at the same A4LI event. This, along with the fact that the treatments will have been through phase I clinical trials, will help to keep people safe, he argued. “We have to treat this with a very large degree of responsibility,” he added. “We obviously don’t want to be killing people,” says Livingston.  But he also adds that he, personally, won’t be signing up for any experimental treatments. “I want to be the 10 millionth, or even the 50 millionth, person to get the gene therapy,” he says. “I’m not that adventurous … I’ll let other people go first.” Others are indeed concerned that, for the “adventurous” people, these experimental treatments won’t necessarily be safe. Phase I trials are typically tiny, and they often involve less than 50 people, all of whom are typically in good health. A trial like that won’t tell you much about side effects that only show up in 5% of people, for example, or about interactions the drug might have with other medicines. Around 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. And around 17% of drugs fail late-stage clinical trials because of safety concerns. Even those that make it all the way through clinical trials and get approved by the FDA can still end up being withdrawn from the market when rare but serious side effects show up. Between 1992 and 2023, 23 drugs that were given accelerated approval for cancer indications were later withdrawn from the market. And between 1950 and 2013, the reason for the withdrawal of 95 drugs was “death.” “It’s disturbing that they want to make drugs available after phase I testing,” says Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “This could endanger patients.” “Famously, the doctor’s first obligation is to first do no harm,” says Bateman-House. “If [a drug] has not been through clinical trials, how do you have any standing on which to think it isn’t going to do any harm?” But supporters of the bill argue that individuals can make their own decisions about risk. When speaking at the A4LI event, Flanigan introduced herself as a bioethicist before adding “but don’t hold it against me; we’re not all so bad.” She argued that current drug regulations impose a “massive amount of restrictions on your bodily rights and your medical freedom.” Why should public officials be the ones making decisions about what’s safe for people? Individuals, she argued, should be empowered to make those judgments themselves. Other ethicists counter that this isn’t an issue of people’s rights. There are lots of generally accepted laws about when we can access drugs, says Hoffman; people aren’t allowed to drink and drive because they might kill someone. “So, no, you don’t have a right to ingest everything you want if there are risks associated with it.” The idea that individuals have a right to access experimental treatments has in fact failed in US courts in the past, says Carl Coleman, a bioethicist and legal scholar at Seton Hall in New Jersey.  He points to a case from 20 years ago: In the early 2000s, Frank Burroughs founded the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. His daughter, Abigail Burroughs, had head and neck cancer, and she had tried and failed to access experimental drugs. In 2003, about two years after Abigail’s death, the group sued the FDA, arguing that people with terminal cancer have a constitutionally protected right to access experimental, unapproved treatments, once those treatments have been through phase I trials. In 2007, however, a court rejected that argument, determining  that terminally ill individuals do not have a constitutional right to experimental drugs. Bateman-House also questions a provision in the Montana bill that claims to make treatments more equitable. It states that “experimental treatment centers” should allocate 2% of their net annual profits “to support access to experimental treatments and healthcare for qualifying Montana residents.” Bateman-House says she’s never seen that kind of language in a bill before. It may sound positive, but it could in practice introduce even more risk to the local community. “On the one hand, I like equity,” she says. “On the other hand, I don’t like equity to snake oil.” After all, the doctors prescribing these drugs won’t know if they will work. It is never ethical to make somebody pay for a treatment when you don’t have any idea whether it will work, Bateman-House adds. “That’s how the US system has been structured: There’s no profit without evidence of safety and efficacy.” The clinics are coming Any clinics that offer experimental treatments in Montana will only be allowed to sell drugs that have been made within the state, says Coleman. “Federal law requires any drug that is going to be distributed in interstate commerce to have FDA approval,” he says. White isn’t too worried about that. Montana already has manufacturing facilities for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer. “That was one of the specific advantages [of focusing] on Montana, because everything can be done in state,” he says. He also believes that the current administration is “predisposed” to change federal laws around interstate drug manufacturing. (FDA commissioner Marty Makary has been a vocal critic of the agency and the pace at which it approves new drugs.) At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says Livingston. “We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there.” He won’t name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad.  Mac Davis—founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial “anti-aging” gene therapy—told MIT Technology Review he was “looking into it.” “I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism,” says Livingston. “There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment.”

A bill that allows medical clinics to sell unproven treatments has been passed in Montana.  Under the legislation, doctors can apply for a license to open an experimental treatment clinic and recommend and sell therapies not approved by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to their patients. Once it’s signed by the governor, the law will be the most expansive in the country in allowing access to drugs that have not been fully tested.  The bill allows for any drug produced in the state to be sold in it, providing it has been through phase I clinical trials—the initial, generally small, first-in-human studies that are designed to check that a new treatment is not harmful. These trials do not determine if the drug is effective. The bill, which was passed by the state legislature on April 29 and is expected to be signed by Governor Greg Gianforte, essentially expands on existing Right to Try legislation in the state. But while that law was originally designed to allow terminally ill people to access experimental drugs, the new bill was drafted and lobbied for by people interested in extending human lifespans—a group of longevity enthusiasts that includes scientists, libertarians, and influencers.   These longevity enthusiasts are hoping Montana will serve as a test bed for opening up access to experimental drugs. “I see no reason why it couldn’t be adopted by most of the other states,” said Todd White, speaking to an audience of policymakers and others interested in longevity at an event late last month in Washington, DC. White, who helped develop the bill and directs a research organization focused on aging, added that “there are some things that can be done at the federal level to allow Right to Try laws to proliferate more readily.”  Supporters of the bill say it gives individuals the freedom to make choices about their own bodies. At the same event, bioethicist Jessica Flanigan of the University of Richmond said she was “optimistic” about the measure, because “it’s great any time anybody is trying to give people back their medical autonomy.”  Ultimately, they hope that the new law will enable people to try unproven drugs that might help them live longer, make it easier for Americans to try experimental treatments without having to travel abroad, and potentially turn Montana into a medical tourism hub. But ethicists and legal scholars aren’t as optimistic. “I hate it,” bioethicist Alison Bateman-House of New York University says of the bill. She and others are worried about the ethics of promoting and selling unproven treatments—and the risks of harm should something go wrong. Easy access? No drugs have been approved to treat human aging. Some in the longevity field believe that regulation has held back the development of such drugs. In the US, federal law requires that drugs be shown to be both safe and effective before they can be sold. That requirement was made law in the 1960s following the thalidomide tragedy, in which women who took the drug for morning sickness had babies with sometimes severe disabilities. Since then, the FDA has been responsible for the approval of new drugs.   Typically, new drugs are put through a series of human trials. Phase I trials generally involve between 20 and 100 volunteers and are designed to check that the drug is safe for humans. If it is, the drug is then tested in larger groups of hundreds, and then thousands, of volunteers to assess the dose and whether it actually works. Once a drug is approved, people who are prescribed it are monitored for side effects. The entire process is slow, and it can last more than a decade—a particular pain point for people who are acutely aware of their own aging.  But some exceptions have been made for people who are terminally ill under Right to Try laws. Those laws allow certain individuals to apply for access to experimental treatments that have been through phase I clinical trials but have not received FDA approval. Montana first passed a Right to Try law in 2015 (a federal law was passed around three years later). Then in 2023, the state expanded the law to include all patients there, not just those with terminal illnesses—meaning that any person in Montana could, in theory, take a drug that had been through only a phase I trial. At the time, this was cheered by many longevity enthusiasts—some of whom had helped craft the expanded measure. But practically, the change hasn’t worked out as they envisioned. “There was no licensing, no processing, no registration” for clinics that might want to offer those drugs, says White. “There needed to be another bill that provided regulatory clarity for service providers.”  So the new legislation addresses “how clinics can set up shop in Montana,” says Dylan Livingston, founder and CEO of the Alliance for Longevity Initiatives, which hosted the DC event. Livingston built A4LI, as it’s known, a few years ago, as a lobbying group for the science of human aging and longevity. Livingston, who is exploring multiple approaches to improve both funding for scientific research and to change drug regulation, helped develop and push the 2023 bill in Montana with the support of State Senator Kenneth Bogner, he says. “I gave [Bogner] a menu of things that could be done at the state level … and he loved the idea” of turning Montana into a medical tourism hub, he says.  After all, as things stand, plenty of Americans travel abroad to receive experimental treatments that cannot legally be sold in the US, including expensive, unproven stem cell and gene therapies, says Livingston.  “If you’re going to go and get an experimental gene therapy, you might as well keep it in the country,” he says. Livingston has suggested that others might be interested in trying a novel drug designed to clear aged “senescent” cells from the body, which is currently entering phase II trials for an eye condition caused by diabetes. “One: let’s keep the money in the country, and two: if I was a millionaire getting an experimental gene therapy, I’d rather be in Montana than Honduras.” “Los Alamos for longevity” Honduras, in particular, has become something of a home base for longevity experiments. The island of Roatán is home to the Global Alliance for Regenerative Medicine clinic, which, along with various stem cell products, sells a controversial unproven “anti-aging” gene therapy for around $20,000 to customers including wealthy longevity influencer Bryan Johnson.  Tech entrepreneur and longevity enthusiast Niklas Anzinger has also founded the city of Infinita in the region’s special economic zone of Próspera, a private city where residents are able to make their own suggestions for medical regulations. It’s the second time he’s built a community there as part of his effort to build a “Los Alamos for longevity” on the island, a place where biotech companies can develop therapies that slow or reverse human aging “at warp speed,” and where individuals are free to take those experimental treatments. (The first community, Vitalia, featured a biohacking lab, but came to an end following a disagreement between the two founders.)  Anzinger collaborated with White, the longevity enthusiast who spoke at the A4LI event (and is an advisor to Infinita VC, Anzinger’s investment company), to help put together the new Montana bill. “He asked if I would help him try to advance the new bill, so that’s what we did for the last few months,” says White, who trained as an electrical engineer but left his career in telecommunications to work with an organization that uses blockchain to fund research into extending human lifespans.  “Right to Try has always been this thing [for people] who are terminal[ly ill] and trying a Hail Mary approach to solving these things; now Right to Try laws are being used to allow you to access treatments earlier,” White told the audience at the A4LI event. “Making it so that people can use longevity medicines earlier is, I think, a very important thing.” The new bill largely sets out the “infrastructure” for clinics that want to sell experimental treatments, says White. It states that clinics will need to have a license, for example, and that this must be renewed on an annual basis.  “Now somebody who actually wants to deliver drugs under the Right to Try law will be able to do so,” he says. The new legislation also protects prescribing doctors from disciplinary action. And it sets out requirements for informed consent that go further than those of existing Right to Try laws. Before a person takes an experimental drug under the new law, they will be required to provide a written consent that includes a list of approved alternative drugs and a description of the worst potential outcome. On the safe side “In the Montana law, we explicitly enhanced the requirements for informed consent,” Anzinger told an audience at the same A4LI event. This, along with the fact that the treatments will have been through phase I clinical trials, will help to keep people safe, he argued. “We have to treat this with a very large degree of responsibility,” he added. “We obviously don’t want to be killing people,” says Livingston.  But he also adds that he, personally, won’t be signing up for any experimental treatments. “I want to be the 10 millionth, or even the 50 millionth, person to get the gene therapy,” he says. “I’m not that adventurous … I’ll let other people go first.” Others are indeed concerned that, for the “adventurous” people, these experimental treatments won’t necessarily be safe. Phase I trials are typically tiny, and they often involve less than 50 people, all of whom are typically in good health. A trial like that won’t tell you much about side effects that only show up in 5% of people, for example, or about interactions the drug might have with other medicines. Around 90% of drug candidates in clinical trials fail. And around 17% of drugs fail late-stage clinical trials because of safety concerns. Even those that make it all the way through clinical trials and get approved by the FDA can still end up being withdrawn from the market when rare but serious side effects show up. Between 1992 and 2023, 23 drugs that were given accelerated approval for cancer indications were later withdrawn from the market. And between 1950 and 2013, the reason for the withdrawal of 95 drugs was “death.” “It’s disturbing that they want to make drugs available after phase I testing,” says Sharona Hoffman, professor of law and bioethics at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. “This could endanger patients.” “Famously, the doctor’s first obligation is to first do no harm,” says Bateman-House. “If [a drug] has not been through clinical trials, how do you have any standing on which to think it isn’t going to do any harm?” But supporters of the bill argue that individuals can make their own decisions about risk. When speaking at the A4LI event, Flanigan introduced herself as a bioethicist before adding “but don’t hold it against me; we’re not all so bad.” She argued that current drug regulations impose a “massive amount of restrictions on your bodily rights and your medical freedom.” Why should public officials be the ones making decisions about what’s safe for people? Individuals, she argued, should be empowered to make those judgments themselves. Other ethicists counter that this isn’t an issue of people’s rights. There are lots of generally accepted laws about when we can access drugs, says Hoffman; people aren’t allowed to drink and drive because they might kill someone. “So, no, you don’t have a right to ingest everything you want if there are risks associated with it.” The idea that individuals have a right to access experimental treatments has in fact failed in US courts in the past, says Carl Coleman, a bioethicist and legal scholar at Seton Hall in New Jersey.  He points to a case from 20 years ago: In the early 2000s, Frank Burroughs founded the Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs. His daughter, Abigail Burroughs, had head and neck cancer, and she had tried and failed to access experimental drugs. In 2003, about two years after Abigail’s death, the group sued the FDA, arguing that people with terminal cancer have a constitutionally protected right to access experimental, unapproved treatments, once those treatments have been through phase I trials. In 2007, however, a court rejected that argument, determining  that terminally ill individuals do not have a constitutional right to experimental drugs. Bateman-House also questions a provision in the Montana bill that claims to make treatments more equitable. It states that “experimental treatment centers” should allocate 2% of their net annual profits “to support access to experimental treatments and healthcare for qualifying Montana residents.” Bateman-House says she’s never seen that kind of language in a bill before. It may sound positive, but it could in practice introduce even more risk to the local community. “On the one hand, I like equity,” she says. “On the other hand, I don’t like equity to snake oil.” After all, the doctors prescribing these drugs won’t know if they will work. It is never ethical to make somebody pay for a treatment when you don’t have any idea whether it will work, Bateman-House adds. “That’s how the US system has been structured: There’s no profit without evidence of safety and efficacy.” The clinics are coming Any clinics that offer experimental treatments in Montana will only be allowed to sell drugs that have been made within the state, says Coleman. “Federal law requires any drug that is going to be distributed in interstate commerce to have FDA approval,” he says. White isn’t too worried about that. Montana already has manufacturing facilities for biotech and pharmaceutical companies, including Pfizer. “That was one of the specific advantages [of focusing] on Montana, because everything can be done in state,” he says. He also believes that the current administration is “predisposed” to change federal laws around interstate drug manufacturing. (FDA commissioner Marty Makary has been a vocal critic of the agency and the pace at which it approves new drugs.) At any rate, the clinics are coming to Montana, says Livingston. “We have half a dozen that are interested, and maybe two or three that are definitively going to set up shop out there.” He won’t name names, but he says some of the interested clinicians already have clinics in the US, while others are abroad.  Mac Davis—founder and CEO of Minicircle, the company that developed the controversial “anti-aging” gene therapy—told MIT Technology Review he was “looking into it.” “I think this can be an opportunity for America and Montana to really kind of corner the market when it comes to medical tourism,” says Livingston. “There is no other place in the world with this sort of regulatory environment.”

Nvidia’s efforts to suck up to the Trump administration have seemingly paid off, with the US now lifting export limits on US-made AI chips and cracking down on anyone using Huawei’s emerging alternatives. The announcements come as Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang joined President Trump in Saudi Arabia this week to solicit AI investments for US companies.The US Department of Commerce (DOC) announced on Monday that it has rescinded the Artificial Intelligence Diffusion Rule, due to take effect on May 15th, that aimed to restrict how many US-made AI chips could be sent to international markets without special government approval. The DOC said that a replacement rule for protecting US AI technology will be issued “in the future,” but provided no specific details.“These new requirements would have stifled American innovation and saddled companies with burdensome new regulatory requirements,” The DOC said in a statement. “The AI Diffusion Rule also would have undermined US diplomatic relations with dozens of countries by downgrading them to second-tier status.”Trump’s favorite government meddler Elon Musk was also rubbing shoulders with Huang and the Saudi prince at the investment forum. Image: Brendan Smialowski / Getty ImagesWhile the goal was to prevent countries already subject to chip restrictions, such as Russia and China, from accessing or building AI tech, it also placed Nvidia’s estimated 90 percent share of the AI chip market in jeopardy. Shortly after the Diffusion Rule was introduced by former President Joe Biden in January, Nvidia issued a statement calling it “misguided,” while anticipating a return to Trump’s first term policies “that strengthen American leadership, bolster our economy and preserve our competitive edge in AI and beyond.”The DOC also warned companies that using Huawei’s Ascend AI chipset “anywhere in the world” would violate US export control agreements. Huawei’s home-grown Ascend processors are seen as China’s best answer to Nvidia’s powerful AI chips. Nvidia’s Huang was notably one of the only US tech leaders to not attend Donald Trump’s inauguration. His absence doesn’t appear to have soured the relationship between them, however, with Huang spotted cosying up to Trump at a US-Saudi investment summit in Riyadh on Tuesday, alongside other tech leaders like Elon Musk, AMD’s Lisa Su, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and Epic CEO Tim Sweeney.The Washington Post reports that Trump was far from subtle about what the US wanted from the gathering. “As you know, we have the biggest business leaders in the world here,” he told Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. “They’re going to walk away with a lot of checks for a lot of things that you’re going to provide.”See More:

Donald Trump inaugure sa tournée au Moyen-Orient en grande pompe. Son premier voyage majeur depuis son retour dans le bureau ovale a débuté...

Hyper-converged infrastructure pioneer Nutanix is among a number of suppliers that smell blood in the water when it comes to VMware and its customers following the virtualisation giant’s acquisition by Broadcom. At Nutanix’s annual .Next bash in Washington DC last week, migration away from VMware and to – it hopes – its own Acropolis hypervisor (AHV) was a constant theme. As part of this, it gathered three customers to talk about their experiences of moving from VMware to Nutanix.  Of these, only one was directly attributable to Broadcom’s licensing changes, but Broadcom-Amazon Web Services (AWS) relations were key to another. We asked them about their journey to Nutanix and away from VMware, as well as the precise pain points that prompted their decisions. Here, we talk to: Dom Johnston, IT manager for Golding in Brisbane, Australia, which is a heavy civil and mining contracting company that has operated on the east coast of Australia for about 75 years.  Kee Yew Wei, associate vice-president for infrastructure and operations at MSIG, which is a Japan-headquartered insurance company that operates internationally.  Mike Taylor, hospital ship joint task director for Military Sealift Command and the US Navy, which operates two hospital ships, Mercy (pictured above) and Comfort. Dom Johnston: Golding had its infrastructure sitting in VMware on AWS. We had a three-year contract with VMware for that platform, which ended in February this year. About March of last year, there was a fairly public divorce between VMware and AWS. We weren’t sure where that left us.  To cut a long story short, with what we saw over the next two to three months from there, we considered the risk of leaving our infrastructure there beyond the end of that three-year contract was too great for us. Golding had its infrastructure sitting in VMware on AWS. [After the] fairly public divorce between VMware and AWS, we weren’t sure where that left us. With what we saw over the next two to three months, we considered the risk of leaving our infrastructure there beyond the end of that three-year contract was too great. Nutanix has kind of swung in to replace that Dom Johnston, Golding So we went out to market to look at alternatives. And Nutanix has kind of swung in to essentially replace that. We use NC2 [Nutanix Cloud Clusters] to run our production workloads in AWS, for our DR [disaster recovery] capability, and that’s essentially to directly replace the functionality that existed within AWS and VMware Cloud Disaster Recovery, which was the DR product that sat alongside that.  So essentially, our DR strategy is that if an event occurs, we immediately spin up the DR environment ready to accept a workload. In the event that is not required, it’s spun back down again, and we’ve lost, you know, a couple 100 bucks worth of compute usage.  Kee Yew Wei: Our journey with Nutanix is from 2017. We were looking for a hyper-converged system to simplify our environment, to do away with the traditional three-tier legacy system, to simplify our environment, and to reduce our datacentre footprint.  Nutanix is the system, but we didn’t have full confidence in Acropolis at that time, because it was quite new compared to VMware.  After a couple of years using Nutanix, we built confidence, so we have recently migrated all our VMware to Nutanix AHV. We completed the full migration last month.  All this came about after the acquisition by Broadcom, and we received a quotation with a 300% to 400% increase on our renewal pricing. So, then we made the decision to go for Nutanix.  We started planning somewhere around Q3 last year and were quite conservative, with completion planned for maybe somewhere in Q2 this year. My team migrated 1,000 to 2,000 VMs [virtual machines] from Q4 and completed that at the beginning of April. So today, we are a full Nutanix house. Mike Taylor: Our story with Nutanix started way back in 2017. We’d been Nutanix lookers for a long time.  On my ships, we had 1,000 blade servers and EMC tiered storage taking up multiple racks. But on the ships, there’s only a finite amount of power they generate, so I needed to find a way to bring everything down into a smaller footprint – but a smarter, smaller footprint, something that would allow me to very elegantly manage and have ease of use that my teams aboard the ships could deal with.  After a couple of years using Nutanix, we built confidence, so we have recently migrated all our VMware to Nutanix AHV Kee Yew Wei, MSIG So, we did a bake-off with Dell, Cisco and Nutanix, and we implemented Nutanix on Mercy in 2019 and Comfort in 2020. Now, we’re looking at generational refreshes of all of our equipment and probably expanding from there and getting some new features, with redundancy and disaster recovery. We do have an onboard continuity-of-operations rack, so we have mirrored failover clusters of Nutanix aboard the ships.  Now we’re all Nutanix. Everything moved over. That’s like, out of 80-something servers, we only had two or three servers that had hiccups.  Taylor: I remember standing in my main datacentre on the hospital ships. It’s very anticlimactic if you ever get to go; I just have five racks, but two of those five were purely just to run my server infrastructure. I remember standing there with one of my peers, and we were looking at it and we said, “Oh, hey, we’re still using SAN directors.” And SAN was going away, they were on their way out.  Dell had come out with stuff like FX, and other people were dabbling with hyper-converged, whereas Nutanix had already done it, and they had their own software, which was easy to understand for my engineers. So, I’m looking at these racks full of equipment, especially the VNX, which was power hungry. So, we said, “There has to be a better way to do this.” Energy was the problem. Energy was the driver to finding a solution.  We weren’t impacted by the Broadcom event. We got in before it. I do still run some VMware, so I am impacted by it there. The challenge we have incurred in continuing to operate that small part isn’t financial. It’s purely that I can’t get to updates. I can’t get to download them. It’s support aspects of the change that impact us the most, not the financial part of it.  If we hadn’t moved to Nutanix, if we were still purely ESXi, the financial part would certainly be a burden, like it is for other military commands.  Johnston: After AWS and VMware had their thing, we were notified by VMware that we were no longer able to spin up our on-demand DR cluster. They told us that, essentially, we could still use our DR plan if we powered down our production cluster before spinning up a DR cluster. We were testing quarterly, but we were no longer able to do that. In fact, we shifted to testing monthly because there was so much uncertainty in that space. We were left in a situation where, because we couldn’t test, we had zero confidence.  Kee Yew Wei: It was all about cost. We got a bill with a 300% to 400% increase on our last renewal. So, this is one of the key factors that drove us to migrate all our workloads to Nutanix. Taylor: The trade-offs are very, very light, if any. My people were very seasoned with ESXi VMware Tools and the orchestration that VMware had.  But the learning curve for Nutanix is very short. It’s very easy to pick up, but you have to learn it. There’s a different way to import an OVA, as opposed to the way you do it within the VMware ecosystem, for example. So, the trade-off is really just time to become a master at using the system with regard to functionality.  The learning curve for Nutanix is very short. It’s very easy to pick up Mike Taylor, US Navy In fact, I think I have enhanced capability using AHV as my hypervisor. When it comes to security, using VMware with the military, we have to submit vulnerability scans constantly. That’s just part of our regular drumbeat. I still run VMware on classified parts of my network, and it is very challenging to keep it secure and up to date. I don’t have that issue with Nutanix. Johnson: I second that. As far as trade-offs are concerned, or the functionality, it’s really just a question of semantics in relation to the differences between the two platforms. The way that Nutanix handles snapshots is different to the way that VMware handles snapshots. That was a learning curve for us. It’s like going from Windows 10 to Windows 11. Things are in a different spot, but it’s the same functionality.  You need to prepare your team, get them training, show them what to do. I don’t think there’s any loss of functionality. In fact, I think there are faster workflows, better availability of tools.  Kee Yew Wei: I don’t see trade-offs. Maybe 10 years ago, compatibility with other suppliers’ software might have been an issue, like backup solutions such as [Veritas] NetBackup. Maybe seven or eight years ago, they did not support Nutanix. But that’s not the case today. Read more about virtualisation and storage University will ‘pull the plug’ to test Nutanix disaster recovery: University of Reading set to save circa £500,000 and deploy Nutanix NC2 hybrid cloud that will allow failover from main datacentre.  NHS trust cloud plans hampered by Trump tariff uncertainty: Essex NHS wants to move some capacity to the Nutanix cloud, but can’t be certain prices will hold between product selection and when procurement plans gain approval.