Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR • Hacker News Board

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#41

Post by MiddleEndian » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:15 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #28

MiddleEndian wrote: post #5

Regardless of how well this particular case works, I'm in favor of people being able to modify their bodies as they see fit. If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right. Unfortunately, I could see things like this becoming illegal solely because they help people play sports too well.

>If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right. Not necessarily. We as a society have come up with many activities which seem, on their surface, to only harm the individual, but are illegal. This shares many concerns with drug use, gambling, etc. Killing yourself harms others, and society has a vested interest in the population being healthy and productive. If you harm yourse…

You can purchase tons of things with which you can kill or severely injure yourself today, and you will still receive medical care.

If you can edit your genes in a bizarre way for cheap, I imagine it wouldn't be very expensive to reverse such a modification.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#42

Post by jerf » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:19 PM UTC

UltimateFloofy wrote: post #30

I am all for self-experimentation, however, when it exposes risk to humanity, I think we should tread carefully. In the long run, will these genes or other self-experiments be introduced into the global genome with unintended consequences?

The probability of that is basically the same as the probability of an already-existing known deleterious mutation being transmitted into the "global genome". Only if he has children in the future, and not necessarily even then.

Gene changes aren't intrinsically infectious; they're only infectious at all because we tend to modify infectious organisms to carry our changes (e.g., viral gene therapy).

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#43

Post by sl1ck731 » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:20 PM UTC

nomel wrote: post #37

bluedevil2k wrote: post #4

"I want to live in a world where people get drunk and instead of giving themselves tattoos, they’re like, ‘I’m drunk, I’m going to CRISPR myself." Ok, scary thought already. But, casting aside all the safety concerns, how many attributes would someone in general want to change as an adult? You can't change your height, you can't change your hair color, you can't change your eyes. Is a myostatin-inhibitor going to be…

How about genes involved in the production of dopamine, maybe to help chronic depression. Or neuron growth, wakefullness, testosterone production, etc. As adults, we're still chemical machines. There are a million knobs to tweak.

If there was one to put my body on a 24 hour sleep/wake schedule I'd be in line.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#44

Post by copperx » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:21 PM UTC

UltimateFloofy wrote: post #30

I am all for self-experimentation, however, when it exposes risk to humanity, I think we should tread carefully. In the long run, will these genes or other self-experiments be introduced into the global genome with unintended consequences?

I always dismissed Children of Men as laughably implausible. But with CRISPR it seems like it could happen at least to a portion of the population, given enough generations.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#45

Post by steelframe » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

MiddleEndian wrote: post #5

Regardless of how well this particular case works, I'm in favor of people being able to modify their bodies as they see fit. If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right. Unfortunately, I could see things like this becoming illegal solely because they help people play sports too well.

As someone who pays taxes to support socialized health care, I am not willing to pay toward the extraordinary chronic medical expenses incurred by someone who has catastrophically injured themselves in an ad-hoc gene editing experiment.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#46

Post by codeulike » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:22 PM UTC

This was over a year ago, I posted it at the time: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16021738

His reasons for doing it seem a bit confused. But one interesting point he makes it that it's not particularly expensive or difficult to brew up some CRISPR. If this guy can do it in his garage, imagine what's going on in secret labs elsewhere.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#47

Post by MiddleEndian » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

EpicEng wrote: post #40

MiddleEndian wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For your aspirin example, you can already do that without breaking any laws, and you will still get medical care in pretty much any country. Not that many people do it, and medical costs haven't been ruined by people chugging aspirin. For instance, if there were a way to make yourself extremely susceptible to becoming obese with $20 on-the-fly gene editing, presumably you (or medical staff) could reverse that. And I…

All I asked is why you believe the price of altering your genetic material is proportional to fixing any mistakes which arise as a consequence. Legaility has nothing to do with it. I don't imagine the only issues we'd face are the completely and easily reversible with no side effects kind.

I'd wager that more people would end up relieving conditions with gene editing than doing wackier shit as mentioned before. If you genetically cure a bunch of diseases and unhealthy susceptibilities across the population, the marginal cost of the handful of people who make themselves ten feet tall will be trivial.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#48

Post by beaconstudios » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:23 PM UTC

phkahler wrote: post #31

beaconstudios wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the ethics on this wander close to the ethics of personal drug consumption, or at least smoking. Sure, it's his body and he should have personal autonomy, but there's a possibility (maybe high, maybe low, I don't know) that he could end up sick and reliant on others (medical professionals, family). I know its slightly different in the US what with the lack of socialised medicine, but it seems reasonable for s…

> he could end up sick and reliant on others... He could also get that way from driving a car, being thrown from a horse, or any number of activities that are a personal choice. Maybe a bunch of people try this and end up with terrible side effects. Researchers will still be interested in the results if they know what a person did to themself. And then maybe some of them will have good results and then we'll all know…

So do I, but I'm accepting it on the belief that the benefit to liberty is greater than the cost to society and potentially themselves. I don't think amateur injections would provide any meaningful data due to the sample size of 1 plus most likely lower standards of protocol and rigour. But you need a damn good reason to curtail individual liberty.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#49

Post by jchallis » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:24 PM UTC

MiddleEndian wrote: post #41

EpicEng wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>If he wants to become more muscular, morbidly obese, or ten feet tall, that's his right. Not necessarily. We as a society have come up with many activities which seem, on their surface, to only harm the individual, but are illegal. This shares many concerns with drug use, gambling, etc. Killing yourself harms others, and society has a vested interest in the population being healthy and productive. If you harm yourse…

You can purchase tons of things with which you can kill or severely injure yourself today, and you will still receive medical care. If you can edit your genes in a bizarre way for cheap, I imagine it wouldn't be very expensive to reverse such a modification.

As anyone can attest who has seen a $300 M building burn to the ground, very simple permanent changes can be extremely expensive to reverse.

Re: Guy Says He's the First Person to Attempt Editing His DNA with CRISPR

#50

Post by tuxxy » Thu, Jan 17, 2019, 7:25 PM UTC

bronzeage wrote: post #7

This shouldn't be legal. If people fuck themselves up the worst case isn't just them dying, they can accidently unleash a virus. Pretty unlikely, but just the smallest possibility is still too much when the outcome can be so bad. It's not unreasonable that tinkering with dna will unleash some dormant retrovirus.

I remember a few years back where a few biologists released a paper on how to weaponize influenza from CRISPR (IIRC). Before it got produced (or after?) the DoD stepped in and had them redact and classify their paper to have it (re-)published.

Does anyone else remember this? Maybe link to the paper, as well?