Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

First gene-edited babies claimed in China

mainichi.jp

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 281 posts

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#201

Post by abhishek0318 »

AllegedAlec wrote: post #175
wonderwonder wrote: post #12

There have been a good deal of medical and technological breakthroughs over the last couple decades. Reusable rockets, VR, machine learning, etc. This is the first article I have read that has made me realize that the future is right here, right now and there is a very high probability that things are now going to change rapidly. One thing to consider is that via crispr and stem cell treatments, genetic changes can b…

As I said in another thread on this article: On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases. On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a coun…

Sure. Western countries are all good and pure.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#202

Post by mmirate »

nradov wrote: post #28
wycs wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps this is true. I do not know. But human enhancement through genetic engineering is coming. Changes in traits, such as IQ, by 5+ standard deviations looks possible. We would be fools to outlaw it here, for we would become as children compared to future citizens of nations that do not share our taboos.

Genetic engineering might be able to prevent certain inherited diseases, but otherwise major net improvements are unlikely. A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas. That's why evolution through natural selection hasn't significantly increased average human intelligence over the past few thousand years. The average human genome appears to be close to a local maximum.

> A boost in one area tends to cause problems in other areas.

Some problem areas are no longer as such because today's environment is much better at compensating for them than the environment that we actually evolved-for.

Energy efficiency comes to mind prominently: we've never been better at producing human-consumable energy in our entire history, yet we can't actually use the stuff because our bodies still interact with energy much like children-of-the-Depression interact with money.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#203

Post by prossercj »

aaaaaaaaaab wrote: post #169
valtism wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've worked with enough legacy code to know that playing around with seemingly unused areas can have unexpected consequences. The trouble here is that we can't see those consequences until they end up hurting someone.

The genome is the ultimate legacy code: - it's been written for billions of years ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abiogenesis#Earliest_biologica... ) - without any sort of upfront architecture or planning - the development methodology can be summarized as "change characters randomly and see if it compiles" - incredibly bloated ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-coding_DNA ) - contains random snippets copy/pasted fro…

As someone who works on software for DNA analysis, this is spot on

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#204

Post by blueblimp »

jakobegger wrote: post #192
sanxiyn wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

On the other hand, we can (today!) predict height from raw sequence with correlation 0.65: http://www.genetics.org/content/210/2/477 . It does not mean we can do such prediction for designed sequence (predictor likely will fail to generalize), but it can be used to select from natural variation. I don't see any wishful thinking here.

Yes, selecting the "tallest" embryo for implantation sounds somewhat feasible. It's similar to selective breeding with a shorter feedback loop. The only downside is that you are only selecting for genotype, instead of phenotype, so your model might accidentally select for some other things that you didn't expect. But that's very different from designing an embryo by direct genetic modification.

Agreed, there's a big difference between what's possible with selection and what's possible with editing. Selection is already available (as increasingly sophisticated PGD). It's a lot trickier to do anything useful with editing.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#205

Post by AllegedAlec »

abhishek0318 wrote: post #201
AllegedAlec wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As I said in another thread on this article: On the one hand, hurray for them for trying to eliminate a couple of quite serious diseases. On the other hand, we have very little clue what the long term effects of not having CCR5 will be for these children. Furthermore, do we really trust China to start messing with people's DNA? I could think up several uses for this that are downright dangerous in the hands of a coun…

Sure. Western countries are all good and pure.

I never said anything about Western countries being paragons of moral clarity. However, for most of them, it has at least been a few decades since they last made camps where imprisoned people are subjected to torture.

And in most Western countries you don't get imprisoned for speaking out against the government, or being a journalist without government permissions.

And most Western don't feel they have to ban innocuous search terms, such as "Big yellow duck", or "Square", or the letter 'n'.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#206

Post by iamnothere »

buboard wrote: post #59
skosuri wrote: post #5

The edited gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function, but is the entry point for HIV. So editing for prophylaxis. This was probably done because if there aren’t a ton of loss of function beneficial traits, and probably with the main desire to be first. Except, if the reports are true, this is not just an experiment but a person (or people). I guess the main desire is to normalize editing. Brave ne…

oh wow. CCR5 has been found to have a role in memory recently. Knockout mice have better learning[1] and pronounced increase in spine formation/turnover[2]. These babies are going to have super-memory: 1. https://elifesciences.org/articles/20985 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29379017

Echoing another commenter, mouse studies don't necessarily replicate in humans. In fact, it turns out that the mouse => human replication rate is rather poor in many domains. (Turns out we are rather different in many ways!)

Additionally, most cognitive traits come with tradeoffs, so increasing ability in one area may decrease it in another. For instance, some nootropics (modafinil) temporarily improve cognitive performance on complex tasks, at the expense of speed. I don't remember the specifics, but I've also read about similar tradeoffs regarding memory, where boosts in short-term memory may reduce the ability to form new long-term memories. The brain is pretty well-optimized on average, when you consider the unique properties and limitations of its constituent parts/materials.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#207

Post by creep »

throwaway8879 wrote: post #142
coldtea wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the edit was also confirmed and voluntarily implanted in-vitro in willing participants. Did the future kids consent?

Did the future kids even consent to being born in the first place? Birth itself is a violation if we're going to be really technical and strict here.

They consent on the astral plane!

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#208

Post by temptempdog »

watching a lot of programmers comment on genetics is like watching physicists play with the genome.

cs, and for human intents - physics, have predictable structure. biology is far too complex for the human brain to simplify and understand at the level discussed (and practiced) here.

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#209

Post by jamesrcole »

freeone3000 wrote: post #114
nathan_f77 wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if I agree with that. Some theists believe that we shouldn't tamper with God's perfect creation, because everything happens for a reason (including miscarriages, birth defects, and genetic diseases.) Atheists might believe that natural selection has got us this far, so it must be a pretty good process. A scientist shouldn't change anything, because they will be adding unnecessary risk to the natural proc…

It's an accurate way of looking at it, but it assumes humans have a lesser value because lots of them already die, so what's a few more? The difference is a few humans, and that's too big a risk, in my opinion, to take lightly.

> The difference is a few humans, and that's too big a risk, in my opinion, to take lightly.

You're assuming it's riskier, in terms of lives, to try this technology. But it could be -- and obviously it's up in the air, which is my point -- that without such technology many more people will end up dying.

The status quo is never neutral with respect to risks.

What if it was used to provide immunity to malaria, as a hypothetical example?

Re: First gene-edited babies claimed in China

#210

Post by buboard »

iamnothere wrote: post #206
buboard wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

oh wow. CCR5 has been found to have a role in memory recently. Knockout mice have better learning[1] and pronounced increase in spine formation/turnover[2]. These babies are going to have super-memory: 1. https://elifesciences.org/articles/20985 2. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29379017

Echoing another commenter, mouse studies don't necessarily replicate in humans. In fact, it turns out that the mouse => human replication rate is rather poor in many domains. (Turns out we are rather different in many ways!) Additionally, most cognitive traits come with tradeoffs, so increasing ability in one area may decrease it in another. For instance, some nootropics (modafinil) temporarily improve cognitive perf…

Right, but mice evidence is still evidence, probably the best evidence you can have unless one is willing to do human experiments. Also, HIV related dementia is a real thing, so there might be some connection.
Post reply on HN