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First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

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Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#111

Post by technotony »

rubatuga wrote: post #48
albertTJames wrote: post #36

Ethics questions need to be raised now, and guidelines have to be decided. The future of humanity is in gene editing. It should not depends on the lazyness of law makers and outrage of godfearing creatures to decide the fate of humanity. It is time we take our evolution into our own hands.

Most agree that it is unethical to purposely have a disabled/diseased child if it possible to not have a nondisabled one. In that case, I think it is quite ethical for this technology to be used on those with debilitating genetic defects. We’re in no rush to allow any genome editing other than that.

Actually medical ethics struggles with this question. The right of deaf parents to have deaf children so that they can understand deaf culture is a major case study. Here's one article, the ethics community hasn't answered this one as far as I understand (there are many more recent articles). http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/deaf-parents-could...

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#112

Post by LoSboccacc »

rubatuga wrote: post #51
devrandomguy wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem with not editing the germline, is that that could easily be used to implement a DRM scheme. The recipient of this sort of editing might have a very high chance of only producing disabled or dead offspring, as they themselves would have been, without intervention. They, and their descendants, would have to procure this same treatment in order to procreate.

I can’t imagine anybody in their right mind would create a genome that had a DRM. Furthermore, would you sign up for a procedure like that? Also it’s a violation of somebody’s human rights to stop them from reproducing! What is really happening is that normal copies of the human genome are being incorporated. Which are then passed on to your sperm/ovum.

Boy do I have news for you https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_use_restriction_tech...

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#113

Post by a_imho »

adventured wrote: post #26
cellis wrote: post #15

CRISPR is coming. I seriously think with CRISPR we could see several trillion dollar companies. From cancer and aids cures to fundamentally altering what it means to be human, this is all within the near grasp of CRISPR ( if what i've been reading is to be believed ).

Gilead managed to demonstrate how curing a major disease does not result in such a spectacular outcome (of the trillion dollar scale). They did very well by curing HepC, briefly, and now they're eroding back down after just a few boom years. The same would occur with curing HIV/AIDS. There would be a brief boom derived from sales in some developed nations (most nations would receive the cure extremely inexpensively,…

Well said, I would only disagree with the treatment of Gilead and pharma in general. The moral outrage is against greed. Even when the cost-benefit relation works to other (similarly overpriced) treatments, their margins are way too excessive from the patients' pov imo, because 1. manufacturing cost next to nothing 2. pharma spends way more on marketing than r&d [1]

[1] http://www.randalolson.com/2015/03/01/design-critique-puttin...

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#114

Post by saiya-jin »

theWatcher37 wrote: post #101
tcbawo wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I appreciate the optimism in this sentiment, the similarity to the early atomic age gives me pause. Human beings have shown time and time again that they cannot be absolutely trusted.

The atomic age came without the world or our species ending.

yes but we were so close, quite a few times...

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#115

Post by andreamez »

sethbannon wrote: post #12

I am so insanely excited for the potential of this technology. There are many ethical questions here, but the potential benefits far outweigh the downsides. In the near future, we can detect and eliminate genetic disorders, ensuring no child has to suffer from these defects any longer. Long term, this gives us a tool to take control of our own evolution in a way never before possible. Couldn't be more excited for wha…

I agree for deadly genetic disorders, but we can't be sure if a harmful mutation will be important in the future. For example sickle-cell disease make people immune to malaria.

What if in the future a pandemic rises, and we have "edited away" the only mutation that would give immunity?

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#116

Post by AstralStorm »

Amygaz wrote: post #66
alextheparrot wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not certain where the premise that our medicine must "Do no harm" comes from. Chemotherapy, for example, is known for being extremely toxic and harmful, yet the justification is that it often yields better outcomes than no treatment. Why can we not use the same justification for editing DNA? Honestly some therapies cause mutations by design, as some cancers are less capable of DNA repair. I do see one argument, h…

Maybe because chemo currently gives you 10% chance, while gene editing at the whole embryo level has 100% chance of resulting in mosaicism. This more recent work by Mitalipov's group dealt with single cell embryo and still ended up with mosaicism, which I was a bit surprised at first. But when you think about it, this single-cell embryo's genome is actively being replicated, so not 100% of the alleles will be edited.…

And is mosaicism inherently bad or harmful? Some people have more than one genome and don't even know about it...

Many of the worst disorders are lack of function mutations where mosaicism would indeed fix it.

I would be more worried about unwanted edits than missing ones.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#117

Post by hirenj »

kanzure wrote: post #89

here's a TODO list i made for possibly interesting genome editing targets: http://diyhpl.us/wiki/genetic-modifications/ Many of these have low demonstrated correlation or significance so don't just blindly load everything on that document into your at-home CRISPR kit http://www.the-odin.com/gene-engineering-kits/ but it should be a good starting point for thinking about what can be modified, improved, disimproved, et…

I can't speak for all the genes on that list, but I wouldn't go around knocking out FUT2 just yet. We don't know the full extent of biological roles for it, and the functionality is probably redundantly encoded in multiple genes too.

Specifically for viral interactions I reckon you'd be better off designing a small molecule inhibitor of viral binding via whatever lectin they have to whichever protein (or lipid for that matter) the sugar that FUT2 glycosylates is attached to. This allows for much more precise targeting of the undesired behaviour, rather than just chopping out the whole gene.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#118

Post by AstralStorm »

andreamez wrote: post #115
sethbannon wrote: post #12

I am so insanely excited for the potential of this technology. There are many ethical questions here, but the potential benefits far outweigh the downsides. In the near future, we can detect and eliminate genetic disorders, ensuring no child has to suffer from these defects any longer. Long term, this gives us a tool to take control of our own evolution in a way never before possible. Couldn't be more excited for wha…

I agree for deadly genetic disorders, but we can't be sure if a harmful mutation will be important in the future. For example sickle-cell disease make people immune to malaria. What if in the future a pandemic rises, and we have "edited away" the only mutation that would give immunity?

Unless you modify everyone ever, this is extremely unlikely to happen.

There are people resistant to malaria that do not carry the deleterious red blood cell mutation, but a different variant.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#119

Post by visarga »

andreamez wrote: post #115
sethbannon wrote: post #12

I am so insanely excited for the potential of this technology. There are many ethical questions here, but the potential benefits far outweigh the downsides. In the near future, we can detect and eliminate genetic disorders, ensuring no child has to suffer from these defects any longer. Long term, this gives us a tool to take control of our own evolution in a way never before possible. Couldn't be more excited for wha…

I agree for deadly genetic disorders, but we can't be sure if a harmful mutation will be important in the future. For example sickle-cell disease make people immune to malaria. What if in the future a pandemic rises, and we have "edited away" the only mutation that would give immunity?

You simulate and test in lab for an even better mutation. Guided evolution is much faster than genetic evolution.

Re: First Human Embryos Edited in U.S

#120

Post by visarga »

yohann305 wrote: post #61
dogprez wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We could get rid of genetic diseases without editing the genome. Just screen embryos before IVF.

this does not edit embryos, this only select the ones without defect and trash the defective ones. Very different from editing, especially for couple that only get bad embryos, they'd love to "fix" it.

Or they could use a different source for sperm or eggs, especially that they are supposedly not attached to their own genetic code (being willing to "edit" it anyway).
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