That's absolutely not the standard for deciding to conduct an experiment on humans.
Only true if your country and culture cares about IRBs. China doesn’t, it’s a quarter of the human population and it won’t be long until it’s that of global GDP at least. What a bunch of post Christians with delusions about the universality of their ethical code think does not bother them at all.
Yeah, but then maybe India will counter-balance that. From what I've heard, their ethical code will be against any such modifications.
Compared to a few decades ago, you can live a much longer life thanks to the medication available nowadays.
well, then it means one understands "treatable" as "there's a treatmen for", it's different thatn "there's a cure for"...
According to the OED[0], "treatable" is a boolean that means "able to be cured". "Very" is superfluous here - something is able to be cured or not, I'm not sure what room there is for degree. As far as I know, there is no cure for HIV (but I'd be happy to learn otherwise).
So unless "very treatable" is medical jargon with a different meaning from the how the laity use it, calling HIV "very treatable" does seem to be a stretch.
We know IQ is heritable the same way we know height is heritable. People resemble their relatives more as their shared inheritance grows. BGI found no common genes of large effect. That means intelligence is more like height than skin colour. There are lots of genes that have a small effect. We know there are rare genes of large effect because Ashkenazim have at least two, the ones that lead to torsion dystonia and T…
>We know evolution in intelligence has not stopped because human populations differ in intellectual productivity to absurd degrees of that wasn’t true. Evolution requires heritability, variation and selection and all those clearly exist. Do you have any references to it? I'd like to learn more...
If you’re asking about the degree of difference Ashkrnazim have ~25% of science Nobel prizes having never been more than 1% of global population. That’s one group that’s highly over represented in intellectual achievement. For a more prosaic example look at the list of US spelling bee finalists or national science foundation merit scholarship finalists. There will be a great deal more Asian names than their share of the US population.
As to evolution and its necessary precursors it’s all in Darwin, or shorter on the Wikipedia page for evolution.
Almost certainly not; improved memory is absolutely something evolution would select for in primates, especially humans. Most mouse models don't replicate in other animals either.
You have to live to reproductive age for your genes to carry on. So a genetic difference that improves outcome for adults, but harms children won't be carried on as often (per other comments, this one may improve memory--in mice--but has negative effects related to resisting common diseases like the flu). On the other hand, genes related to cancer perpetuate because their impact often is felt after primary reproducti…
Well, yes and no. We each have 3.2 billion bases and about roughly 100 mutations each, over 100 billion people who've ever lived. That's about 3000 mutations per base pair, so if the eternal-youth mutation was indeed a single base-pair swap away, thousands of people would already have been born with it. Of those, we could expect some decent fraction to have had children. Given that eternal youth confers a staggering reproductive advantage, and we don't have it, it's safe to say that if it exists at all, it's more than a base-pair swap away.
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…
Homozygous CCR5 mutations cause "immunity" against HIV and heterozygous causes a slower disease course. I do not think this applies to all strains of HIV. Unsure.
Pretty sure hiv can infect on other pathways besides CCR5. It’s just not as common. Some of the antivirals block the CCR5 pathways and HIV can mutate to render them ineffective.
> "gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function" It's in the article: > "Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said."
it's very treatable if it occurs Surely it is a bit of a stretch.
People with HIV just have to pop a couple pills a day now to take their viral loads to literally undetectable levels. With treatment, people with HIV can expect to live normal lives, and be healthy and active. It's also almost impossible to transmit HIV with such low viral loads.
> "gene is for CCR5, which currently doesn’t have known function" It's in the article: > "Even if editing worked perfectly, people without normal CCR5 genes face higher risks of getting certain other viruses, such as West Nile, and of dying from the flu. Since there are many ways to prevent HIV infection and it's very treatable if it occurs, those other medical risks are a concern, Musunuru said."
it's very treatable if it occurs Surely it is a bit of a stretch.
If you're on modern treatments life expectancy is near that of a non-HIV person.
The biggest problem is modern medicines aren't available to everyone across the world. So it's still a much more serious problem in developing nations.
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…
This is an inaccurate understanding of CRISPR, which is not yet at the point where zero off-target effects can be expected. That is an important aspect of this discussion.
But if the off-target effect is random, then its not really any worse off than an unmodified embryo, with around 30 random mutations naturally. Of course, the actual numbers matter but in principle this isn't a worse situation.
it's very treatable if it occurs Surely it is a bit of a stretch.
People with HIV just have to pop a couple pills a day now to take their viral loads to literally undetectable levels. With treatment, people with HIV can expect to live normal lives, and be healthy and active. It's also almost impossible to transmit HIV with such low viral loads.
well, then it means one understands "treatable" as "there's a treatmen for", it's different thatn "there's a cure for"...
According to the OED[0], "treatable" is a boolean that means "able to be cured". "Very" is superfluous here - something is able to be cured or not, I'm not sure what room there is for degree. As far as I know, there is no cure for HIV (but I'd be happy to learn otherwise). So unless "very treatable" is medical jargon with a different meaning from the how the laity use it, calling HIV "very treatable" does seem to be…
In the medical world, treatable is very different from curable.
Chlamydia is a curable bacteria infection (antibiotics). There is no known cure for HIV.