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

131–140 of 150 posts

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

#131

Post by fvncc »

kabouseng wrote: post #126
wahern wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Many chromosomal abnormalities can be reliably detected at 10 weeks into a pregnancy, if not earlier. 10 weeks is well within the window at which many if not most women would be comfortable terminating. In California these tests are required to be covered by insurance for at-risk women (i.e. 38 and older, etc). I imagine at some point these tests, as well as more precise ones, are likely to become standard procedure…

I understand that these tests require withdrawing amniotic fluid to analise, and / or getting genetic material from the fetus itself. And my understanding is also that to get the amniotic fluid carries fairly moderate risks of infection etc for the fetus so these screenings aren't necessarily done because of the risks not to mention the costs involved.

I think there are some newer tests which only require maternal blood and can screen for some genetic conditions by filtering extra-cellular genetic material.

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

#132

Post by tremon »

vannevar wrote: post #8

It seems like a dead certainty that gene editing creates unintended mutations, since to do otherwise would require the technique to be 100% controllable and verifiable, and it is neither. So the only question is whether those unintended mutations are harmful or not, either to the immediate generation or subsequent ones. Because there is so much uncertainty around that question, these kinds of experiments are ethicall…

I don't agree that uncertainty is a valid objection in ethical discussions. That reasoning leads to circular denial: we can't study something because we don't know enough about it, and we don't know enough about it because we can't study it.

Rather, I would suggest that the ethical discussion focuses on intended and unintended side-effects of a specific direction of study, and whether the long-term effects can be aligned with healthy societal progress.

Personally, I think that pregestational gene editing doesn't have many secondary benefits, and that the technology, once available, will have a huge negative effect on society (both on the gene pool and on equality). So I would argue against this line of research should be prohibited based on that, not based on the limits of our knowledge.

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

#133

Post by imtringued »

neuronic wrote: post #119
im3w1l wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well I was thinking more along the lines of disabilities, weakness and abnormalities, but I guess death too.

You guess harming a human baby to the point of death might be a problem?

The goal of gene therapies isn't to kill their patients but it wouldn't surprise me if introducing a lesser disease in exchange for curing a serious disease would be considered an acceptable outcome even if it means that people who have not been seriously ill will now suffer from the lesser disease more frequently.

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

#134

Post by imtringued »

roenxi wrote: post #103
PhasmaFelis wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And the truly bad mutations should self-correct before passing to subsequent generations. That's an awfully euphemistic way to say "The kids'll die before they grow up."

We live in a world where kids die before they grow up. Gene editing technologies will almost surely reduce the number of children who die before they grow up and lead to higher quality of life for everyone else. I'm not necessarily for gene editing. I think it is probably a long-term certainty and a net good, but it makes me uneasy because it is one of the maybe-this-one-ends-humanity style technologies. That being s…

Why would it end humanity? It may cause greater suffering than any war in history but it is not a serious threat to humanity.

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

#135

Post by [deleted] »

Gatsky wrote: post #130
vannevar wrote: post #8

It seems like a dead certainty that gene editing creates unintended mutations, since to do otherwise would require the technique to be 100% controllable and verifiable, and it is neither. So the only question is whether those unintended mutations are harmful or not, either to the immediate generation or subsequent ones. Because there is so much uncertainty around that question, these kinds of experiments are ethicall…

This isn't really it. It's not like this sort of thing would have been OK if editing was 10 or 100 times less likely to cause off target effects. The way the whole thing happened was stupid. It was the wrong population of patients (healthy children), who had other options for avoiding HIV infection (antiretroviral suppression in parents, surrogacy, etc etc). And the fool decided this was the right population in which…

[deleted]

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

#136

Post by imtringued »

adrianN wrote: post #97
im3w1l wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Random harmful mutations have happened all day every day as long as life has existed. We are basically designed for dealing with it. But worst case, we can eliminate harmful mutations from being passed on to subsequent generations through screening. I wouldn't worry about the long term problems of that, it's fairly easy to solve. What I would worry about is: a) Short term suffering from failed experiments. b) Reduced…

I wouldn't worry so much about reduced diversity. Once we're good enough at creating genetically manipulated babies we can recover any diversity we want in one generation.

That doesn't make any sense. Right now every single human is a gene designer and each of them is using a benchmark that is specific to their environment. There is no way you can replicate that without building a parallel society of gene designers.

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

#137

Post by imtringued »

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…

>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.

The argument should go the other way. Because these DNA mistakes are predictable our genes have designed safeguards against them. If you now randomly introduce a "mistake" that is beyond the capability of the system then it won't help you.

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

#138

Post by Hitton »

This seems like as good opportunity as any other to remind that the previously published study that those gene-edited babies will have shorter life expectancy, that was used to bash He Jiankui previously was retracted [0]. It almost looks like some scientists are envious of him and scramble to find something to use against him. There are risks to many medical procedures and only time will show if these are more or less serious.

That said, I don't think that attempting to grant immunity to disease you might never encounter and is possible to be well treated (if not cured) nowadays was a right reason for first human gene edit. If it fixed a single gene disorder which would allow some parents to have their own healthy biological child, it would be certainly more palatable.

[0]: https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-019-03032-2

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

#139

Post by imtringued »

deusofnull wrote: post #55
jandrese wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 befo…

Dunno, but all kinds of things could happen with novel co-dependent alleles with devistating effects when the express. Imagine theres a cool gene edit in 100 years that lets you live to 200 easy and it becomes normal for most people to get it. But, it just so happens that thers an early gene edit that was available 20 years from now, less ethically created and expensive. but hundreds of thousands of people get that f…

I'm now wondering what measures scientists use to prevent genes that reduce child mortality but also decrease life expectancy. It's unlikely that the company that designed your genes will stay in business for 70 years so that it can update its gene designs to fix this fatal flaw.

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

#140

Post by neuronic »

imtringued wrote: post #133
neuronic wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You guess harming a human baby to the point of death might be a problem?

The goal of gene therapies isn't to kill their patients but it wouldn't surprise me if introducing a lesser disease in exchange for curing a serious disease would be considered an acceptable outcome even if it means that people who have not been seriously ill will now suffer from the lesser disease more frequently.

But the problem with all of this aren't these strategic questions about eradicating disease and improving the human condition.

It's that all of this is happening within a frame of ignorance with regards to the insane, elusive complexity that is genetics.

Somehow the idea that changing genes at will can be predictable isn't dying off.

Post reply on HN