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

China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

theguardian.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 150 posts

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#11

Post by holler »

markdown wrote: post #10
deusofnull wrote: post #3

Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level. the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs du…

If you want to play god, you have to take it all the way ie. be prepared to sterilize or kill your creations.

Or you know, set them free...

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#14

Post by jandrese »

deusofnull wrote: post #3

Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level. the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs du…

For the most part mutations like that simply reduce the reproductive viability of the offspring. We can't really poison the entire human genome worldwide without going to absolute extremes.

Could we engineer a human so irresistibly sexually desirable and voracious that they could spread their genetic material with a subtle recessive defect across the globe in the span of a generation so that it could take effect before people realized what was going on?

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#15

Post by allovernow »

infinity0 wrote: post #13

Unintended mutations happen all the time naturally. Some are beneficial, and some are harmful. This just speeds up the process a bit. Life has natural processes to error-correct, otherwise it would not have survived for millions of years.

Sure, but too many unintended mutations in too short of a time period and you end up with things like cancer or fatal congenital diseases. Gene editing with CRISPR is potentially increasing the mutation rate by orders of magnitude. Where is the line?

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#16

Post by wahern »

deusofnull wrote: post #3

Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level. the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs du…

> natural system of transcription, translation, and protein synthesis at the core of DNA still makes mistakes.

Exactly, which means the system is resilient, which means it's more forgiving of random mutations introduced by gene editing, which is perhaps why most scientists are less concerned than you think they ought to be.

Imagine if we took the same approach to surgery--overly worried that scar tissue of any kind at any point would completely disrupt the functioning of an organ. We'd be a hundred years or more behind where we are now. Scientists and doctors understand that the body is both much more complex than a simple machine, but also much more resilient.

Such criticism cuts both ways. Likewise for GMOs. Demanding perfection is unreasonable and unnecessary.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#17

Post by hatracksat »

Who cares about unintended consequences if you're the first person to study them? China gets to deal with a novel problem and will get novel rewards eventually because the west let itself get soft.

EDIT: To all the people making Nazi comparisons, we stole the atom bomb from the Nazis. Their science across multiple disciplines was on par or superior. We're smarter than them now because we /destroyed/ them. It's easy to surpass someone who's standing still. My point is that we need real strategies and plans if we don't want certain science domains to become irrelavent due to the restrictions we place on ourselves. "We beat the Nazis" isn't a real counter argument.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#18

Post by pythonaut_16 »

wahern wrote: post #16
deusofnull wrote: post #3

Back in my genetics class in Uni, unitended mutations from gene editing struck me as a concern almost immediately. and its scary to think about. these unknown mutations could be benign, harmful, or even helpful, but if they entered the population through procreation... i mean i had an anxiety that the whole human genome could be damaged at a fundamental level. the complexity of the biological machinery that occurs du…

> natural system of transcription, translation, and protein synthesis at the core of DNA still makes mistakes. Exactly, which means the system is resilient , which means it's more forgiving of random mutations introduced by gene editing, which is perhaps why most scientists are less concerned than you think they ought to be. Imagine if we took the same approach to surgery--overly worried that scar tissue of any kind…

To play devil's advocate: Scar tissue doesn't get passed to offspring or propagated throughout the population though.

Re: China gene-edited baby experiment 'may have created unintended mutations'

#19

Post by buboard »

The articles don't really say much about the data. I think this is the same data from his talk in 2018. I read somewhere that one baby is a heterozygous CCR5+/- knockout and the other is a mosaic. His clinical plan was to test to infect the babies blood a few months after birth, probably someone has done that already. Pity that we have to play hide and seek with this study.

his talk where he probably presented the same data : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pcGALqX_YD8

Consent forms that he had published in his website at the time:

https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061149/http://www.sustc-...

Second informed consent; https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061153/http://www.sustc-...

Ethical approval: https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061204/http://www.sustc-...

Clinical registry: https://web.archive.org/web/20181128061216/http://www.sustc-...

There is also some info including an excel file with the outcomes of the trial here: http://www.chictr.org.cn/showproj.aspx?proj=32758

Post reply on HN