61–70 of 243 posts
This is awesome but I'm curious why they tried it first on this super-rare disease instead of something more common?
I feel like I missed something, and now everywhere I look we have headlines like this. What's wrong with "CRISPR gene editing shown to cure Transthyretin amyloidosis in patient study" Maybe I'm now one of the old people who doesn't understand new usage of language. But I understand that usage dictates grammar rules, but I feel I missed something.
I understand your asking a rhetorical question but in the interest of having a discussion about this I’ll try to give you an answer. Imagine a title like “Xonuicfixs shown in zenocttkike to cure Xclatngt”
Reading that you might thing “wrf are they talking about?” But imagine I just change the title to be more like:
“A breakthrough in Xonuicfixs shows promise as a cure for a range of decided.”
Have I lowered the information content of the title? Yes, certainly. However I have also made it very apparent to you an others who don’t know the subject matter why this is a worthwhile achievement, and this might therefore just become the first article that you read and learn about Xonuicfixs.
And really shouldn’t that be the job of a title? To convey to potential readers why the content might be with their time. And I would note that this is entirely different from clickbait which tires to lure you into content with no information about what the content is.
Please do familial hypercholesterolemia soon! I know it would be harder but getting started on targeting specific mutations could be fruitful. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3681164/
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Technically a plasmid is kind of like a software patch, but generally they're employed by bacteria and not eukaryotes like humans.
Interesting. I have watched nearly all of The Thought Emporium’s videos (so clearly I’m an expert, lol) and I think he uses the term plasmid to describe DNA he’s working on in the crazy bio IDE he uses. I think in this instance he applied it to a yeast that he cultured and put into pills and swallowed. He really is doing some neat stuff though. He’s inspired me to do some small bio hacking experiments and it ALMOST m…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
In the particular context of Though Emporium this wasn't going to happen. It used an adenovirus that couldn't reproduce so it was only going to alter a limited number of cells in his intestine. The technical requirements to this kind of limit the number of people that are going to really mess themselves up. I would be more worried about people accidentally releasing edited bacteria or viruses.
> releasing edited bacteria or viruses. From what I understand it’s hard to order the sequences of DNA or RNA you’d need for this without someone noticing. It’s probably not impossible, but not something anyone is going to bungle into.
Anyway, Maybe a few years ago the barrier to entry was too high for most people but that is so not the case anymore. Even just this year a friend sent me a link to a $2000 gizmo that was about the size of a pack of gum that could do desktop sequencing. Generating your own custom DNA in your bedroom is considerably harder (but not impossible) but it is not at all difficult to order a custom sequence from a half dozen different retailers. The file you send them is just a big chunk of a few letters. It’s assembly code with no comments (yes I know folks do put in comments in text sometimes and sometimes biologically but just like always comments lie more than not), they functionally cannot be checking for what it could do if what you’re working on is even remotely novel. For the price of a playstation you can have it delivered to your door next day air.
There are very real risks here for our entire planet. Possibly one of our largest risks. To hide behind “it’s too difficult for a malicious actor” is not helpful. I think genetic literacy is maybe the only thing we all can do as we might be entering very weird territory as a closed system that has a bent towards global narcissism and self harm.
Something that gives me some comfort is that to be good at it you really have to do a gross and difficult deep dive into how all life works and I think there are very few people that could do that and still feel like it’s ok to do harm at even a small scale. The things we are going to see in the next few years will be pretty fucking weird. I guess when you get down to this level, the only thing to have is something like faith. Eeeek.
The period missing from the title makes this very hard to parse what is being said.
Agreed. NPR never used to use clickbait titles like this ("He ..." is pure clickbait). It's sad to see them doing it regularly now. I imagine the latest generation of journalists grew up thinking this is normal. I know HN prefers original headlines, but I wish these would be edited down when posted here.
>Doctors infused billions of microscopic structures known as nanoparticles carrying genetic instructions for the CRISPR gene-editor into four patients in London and two in New Zealand. The nanoparticles were absorbed by their livers, where they unleashed armies of CRISPR gene-editors. The CRISPR editor honed in on the target gene in the liver and sliced it, disabling production of the destructive protein. this is one…
So this is editing liver cells, which I read somewhere is the easiest to do, since the liver absorbs foreign elements from the bloodstream. The success of this should mean that many genetic liver conditions can soon be treated this way. For other organs, I expect a longer wait.
>Doctors infused billions of microscopic structures known as nanoparticles carrying genetic instructions for the CRISPR gene-editor into four patients in London and two in New Zealand. The nanoparticles were absorbed by their livers, where they unleashed armies of CRISPR gene-editors. The CRISPR editor honed in on the target gene in the liver and sliced it, disabling production of the destructive protein. this is one…
The record breaking temperatures that I'm suffering in the PNW right now serves as a grim reminder that we won't have much of a future, even with all this cool tech.
Or at the very least, I can see a future where gene editing could relieve your suffering from heat by raising the threshold your body can tolerate :)