Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA • Hacker News Board

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#71

Post by Valmar » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:38 PM UTC

sleepydog wrote: post #37

Valmar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. DNA is the most fucking complex and complicated programming language. We have barely any understanding of how the whole thing hangs together, let alone how it's parsed and written, and how it all translates from stem cells to whole organs, an immune system, the complex interrelation between organs, the nervous system, the whole gamut. And that's not even touching on the nature of mind and consciousness in rel…

It's like if you had a version of C that replaced all compilation errors with undefined behavior.

Exactly.

And that's why the OP is a bit horrifying.

DNA's compiler seems to love undefined behaviour ~ probably because the DNA writers knew precisely what to do, without errors.

Undefined behaviour? Whatever ~ creativity ftw!

So, life is greatest and laziest hacker, confirmed, lol?

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#72

Post by tardigraded » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:40 PM UTC

dpflan wrote: post #60

The irony is too strong: “”” The goals are to improve agricultural productivity, produce hardier beasts and reduce practices that are costly or considered inhumane. “”” I can’t help but think about Oryx and Crake . I’m more interested in applying these principles and efforts and resources to plants and non-animal sources. I feel that further modifying animal agriculture is orthogonal to direction we can move civiliza…

We'll, the reality is that most people will continue eating meat regardless of what people like me and you think of it, so it's probably a good idea to put some effort into minimizing the negative consequences.

Also, we can research lots of things at once, and research funding is not a zero-sum game. I don't think anybody's defunding non-animal agriculture research for this.

Finally, there's a good chance that this sort of research will produce results that will be useful in other fields (e.g. for genetically engineering of plants, or curing genetic disorders in humans).

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#73

Post by Valmar » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

TeMPOraL wrote: post #29

Valmar wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. DNA is the most fucking complex and complicated programming language. We have barely any understanding of how the whole thing hangs together, let alone how it's parsed and written, and how it all translates from stem cells to whole organs, an immune system, the complex interrelation between organs, the nervous system, the whole gamut. And that's not even touching on the nature of mind and consciousness in rel…

All of those are nothing but challenges. We'll figure all of them out, eventually.

You have too much faith in science.

Scientists are highly fallible, and prone to making errors, as well as being corruptible by politics and corporate greed.

DNA is ridiculously hard to understand, and it continues to defy current theories.

So, messing with DNA at this time is extremely dangerous, due to just how incomplete our knowledge of DNA is shown to be, and just how fragile DNA is in terms of resilience to random changes.

The OP is case in point, as to where we currently are.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#74

Post by Sawamara » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:42 PM UTC

jayalpha wrote: post #65

cronix wrote: post #57

From my laymans POV, DNA is just a shit ton of variables in a very complex code that interact with each other. No single point just does a single thing. They all interact with each other. No different than changing a variable in one piece of code and having it create a bug in another that was previously working. For me, the real scary part is altering something, which inadvertently changes something else that isn't q…

"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.

No, please, please. Do not do this. You eat your food. The purpose is different. It has been engineered to shit already.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#75

Post by curious_fella2 » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

smaddox wrote: post #69

jayalpha wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.

GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.

Can you elaborate?

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#76

Post by Valmar » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:47 PM UTC

smaddox wrote: post #69

jayalpha wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.

GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.

GM foods are actually more dangerous, due to how GM works.

Cross-breeding allows nature to combine things that fit together in all of the right places. And we just don't know how that even happens, or why. We don't understand nature's algorithm for DNA. No even the tip of the iceberg.

Sure, nature isn't always correct, but does thing properly 99.999% of the time. And that's good enough.

It is utterly incomparable to GM done by humans ~ genes are inserted, but the results are not equivalent to what is done by nature, because we don't understand DNA enough to know where we should be placing the inserted DNA, so that things don't massively fuck up inexplicably somewhere down the line.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#77

Post by Valmar » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:49 PM UTC

htk wrote: post #70

jayalpha wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"No single point just does a single thing." Exactly this! And this is why GM foods are more dangerous than you might expect. Even if gene x does only x in organism A, there is no guarantee that gene x does only one thing or the same thing in organism B.

Even if this hypothesis is correct, I would replace "dangerous" with "unpredictable", because the resulting effects of those interactions would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm.

Unpredictable, therefore being dangerous and extremely risky?

They're often partners in crime, when it comes to subjects not well understood. Especially with something as fragile as DNA.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#78

Post by xvilka » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:51 PM UTC

james_s_tayler wrote: post #61

jchw wrote: post #47

This is very conflicting. Clearly, we have to learn somehow... But this is just about the last kind of thing where you want to do trial and error.

What if the consequences are some kind of natural DRM? Like if you can't cut out that gene to remove X without also altering Y and you can't live with the possibility of altering Y in a negative way then you cannot remove X.

It is more like a low-level, holographic language. We have to figure a higher level one, which defines all the properties and create a compiler into DNA sequences. Most likely it will change quite a bit in the resulting sequence.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#79

Post by jf- » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

curious_fella2 wrote: post #75

smaddox wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

GM foods are arguably no more dangerous than any massively engineered foods we've been eating for decades/centuries. Direct gene modification is more like using a scalpel rather than a 2x4. Still potentially dangerous, but far more precise.

Can you elaborate?

Selective breeding is the poor man’s genetic engineering.

Re: Deformities Alarm Scientists Racing to Rewrite Animal DNA

#80

Post by intralizee » Sat, Dec 22, 2018, 7:52 PM UTC

jf- wrote: post #68

andrewflnr wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

DNA is almost exactly machine code. It's directly executed by ribosomes and other cellular machines. Of course there are no guard rails.

Except that it doesn’t represent logic, it represents strings of amino acids that form proteins that fold up in unpredictable ways and interact with lots of other things to do stuff that half the time is weird and inefficient and doesn’t make sense.

That is logic, even if we cannot fully comprehend the system yet.