191–200 of 218 posts
This just in: fucking with stuff we don't fully understand has negative consequences we don't fully understand. I'm grateful this is happening, otherwise our hubris might get too out if hand.
GMO
What's the agenda behind the spate of gene editing alarmism lately? The article cites the July Nature Biotechnology article about unintended consequences of CRISPR-Cas9 but subsequent work has eliminated many such consequences using slightly different techniques. No word of that fact in this article. If consequences of genetic engineering are poorly understood, then this isn't reason to worry about reckless research.…
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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.
Why do you think changes would be as likely to cause good as to cause harm? In complex, yet structured, systems - I think changes without fully understanding what you're doing are vastly more likely to cause harm than good. Software is the obvious example. Change a line of bytecode/assembly to something else. I think the chances of that change being good are extremely close to 0.
Just look at Atomic gardening [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atomic_gardening] - a practice which should be /way/ worse if mutations really did produce bad effects most of the time. Instead the effects were either dud seeds or a few useful byproducts as opposed to 'this grapefruit is now rich in cyanide'.
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Or the really scary part...if it not noticed for generations. For example, a reduction of IQ each generation or such.
You know I originally thought this was an outlandish idea, but I have to remind myself that the processes that govern reproduction are themselves encoded within the DNA... If those processes are affected adversely, it may well take many generations to realize the effects, at which point for those individuals it is far too late to undo the damage.
What's the agenda behind the spate of gene editing alarmism lately? The article cites the July Nature Biotechnology article about unintended consequences of CRISPR-Cas9 but subsequent work has eliminated many such consequences using slightly different techniques. No word of that fact in this article. If consequences of genetic engineering are poorly understood, then this isn't reason to worry about reckless research.…
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Uh, what makes you think government bioweapon labs haven’t been doing that for decades, since the invention of genomics?
Bioweapons are 1) Cheaper 2) Harder to control 3) Less reliable than traditional arms. This makes them great weapons for poor countries who don't care about indiscriminate killing, but bad weapons for large countries that want precision strikes against specific enemies.
Not to mention most combatants don't do their own arms development - that only really makes sense if you are nearing state of the art or effectively lack a market (say nuclear weapons).
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We should never avoid discovering something out of the fear that it could be misused. We have an imperative to learn all that is learnable and then use the findings to ensure safety and develop countermeasures. Otherwise, someone else will discover it and we will be unprepared. Top scientists would struggle to create a super disease today. Worrying that a kid will do it when the technology is commoditized is putting…
Would you stand by your initial statement provided the discovery was something which was certain to eliminate all life?
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…
Or the really scary part...if it not noticed for generations. For example, a reduction of IQ each generation or such.
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You can make that argument without all the histrionics and performativity. Please give it a try.
I don't believe I can. I'm honestly flabbergasted that I read "Burn the mechanized mills!" on Hacker News. I'm not advocating groupthink, and there are certainly ways we could have built a better present, but the blind ungratefulness to say "Mass manufacture and electricity were mistakes" deserves some outrage.
Also, please don't use quotes to make it look like you're quoting someone when you're not. That's also a flamewar trope and a vector in the unwanted direction.
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I don't think this really takes away from gp's argument, which is that editing genes is complicated and could wind-up with unforeseen consequences. "Genetic engineering" is more like "cut-and-past-programming" on a stream of data that is not-really-code. Fully understanding the implications of even "simple" changes may wind-up impossible.
The "cut-and-paste" analogy is perfect here. Imagine you discover super-complex code for which you have only a rudimentary understanding. Now imagine replacing sections of code from one program with sections from another program and calling it an improvement before even testing the code! Older versions of genetic engineering are like pasting code into a random section of a program. CRISPER-CAS9 is more like replacing…