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

CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

npr.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

81–90 of 243 posts

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#81

Post by didibus »

MeinBlutIstBlau wrote: post #47
coryrc wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the line of reasoning that leads to banning abortions*. People have a right to alter their bodies. EDIT: and preventing young women from choosing sterilization.

Precisely. Otherwise if we're going to walk the line of "well even though it's your body, 'us smarter people' say it's bad for you there for you cannot do it" will inevitably lead to the logic of dictating abortion rights as well. This is exactly the logic conservatives use with the Covid Vaccines but because liberals "know what's good for everyone," people shouldn't be allowed to make the "my body my choice" when it…

It isn't about knowing what's best for you, but what's best for others. So where ethics come into play is when what you're seemingly doing to yourself could actually have impact on others as well.

For abortion, you can claim it impacts others both ways, are you impacting a new born from having its life, or are you preventing a yet to be born child from having a troubled life, and saving family, parents and society its burden.

For a vaccine, are you putting others at risk of a disease by not taking the vaccine?

For bio-hacking, are you possibly creating dangerous virus or bacterias that could harm others, are you making modifications to yourself which will put a tole on the medical system if you later need assistance or special treatment if you mess up, etc.

This is the same reasoning with drugs often, will your modified behavior cause harm to others if you consume them?

Etc.

None of this is black and white, but I think having these discussions on "what harm to others it can cause" is justified.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#82

Post by kaba0 »

rolleiflex wrote: post #78
noveltyaccount wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a one-time treatment? Does it remove all of the offending genetic material, and then when those cells divide they are cured? Or does it require ongoing treatment?

It’s editing the genes of the cells of the liver, so presumably when those liver cells divide and multiply, the change would also be copied along as well. What isn’t clear to me is that if this is targeted at the liver cells in particular, or splicing it for every cell in the body. In other words, this could be a germline mutation (passed to children) or it could be a somatic mutation (no change to future children),…

Even if it is not specific, I would believe gametes are not affected/can be easily excludes due to the blood-testis barrier.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#83

Post by kaba0 »

dcwardell wrote: post #73

Crazy genetics ideas I would like explored A modified tree that drops nuts of (nearly) pure graphite or some other form of nondecomposable carbon which we can easily harvest and sequester. Photosynthesis in humans to supplement our energy consumption. Shoutout to Knights of Sidonia. I understand the ethical issues surrounding the second one.

> A modified tree that drops nuts of (nearly) pure

Well, we sort of have that in the form of specifically engineering bacteria to create some drugs, notably insulin. Though I’m sure graphene require additional biological structure and that is a much harder problem them adding/removing a few genes.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#84

Post by jjoonathan »

DoreenMichele wrote: post #51
changoplatanero wrote: post #8

Reminds me of this guy that cured himself of lactose intolerance. https://www.popularmechanics.com/science/health/a17804128/sc...

I recently watched the two videos on this (that I'm aware of) and it's the first time gene therapy didn't strike me as macabre Frankensteinian experiments on vulnerable people who will say "yes" to all kinds of crazy stuff out of desperation. Cystic fibrosis significantly impacts gut function and many people with it do poorly with dairy products. I could see this and/or some variation of this being valuable therapy f…

> it's the first time gene therapy didn't strike me as macabre Frankensteinian experiments on vulnerable people

That's because it has barely begun to become viable IRL while science fiction writers have been using it as a convenient punching bag for decades -- without ever stopping to ask if they should.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#85

Post by aussieguy1234 »

baybal2 wrote: post #42
zz865 wrote: post #13

Would CRISPR be the technology people would use to modify a bat virus to make it human transmissable? This stuff should stay in its box.

It will not stay in the box. The allure of armies of supersoldiers without sense of emotions, conscience, and remorse is irresistible for dictators. I bet Chinese, or Russian militaries are already working on that.

Humans still have to be fed. Killer robots dont

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#86

Post by nitrogen »

DoctorNick wrote: post #60
ausbah wrote: post #43

>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.

Stop with the doom trolling and get busy inventing solutions.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#87

Post by nobodyknowsyoda »

ProjectArcturis wrote: post #74
cj wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s not impossible to speculate the possibility that in 50-100 years, climate change could be reversed through a CRISPR-like technology (e.g. something that can be released and replicate in the environment, thereby changing it). 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 :)

You want something that replicates in the environment and removes carbon? We have those. They're called "plants."

> They’re called “plants.”

Incidentally, CRISPR + plants is one of the most promising solutions to climate change: https://www.ted.com/talks/joanne_chory_how_supercharged_plan...

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#88

Post by rorykoehler »

calrueb wrote: post #19

The fact that we can apply these sort of therapies to an adult human who consists of millions upon millions of cells blows my mind. Having the ability to fix our "buggy" genetic code while we are alive is amazing.

Monkey patching in production.

Re: CRISPR gene-editing breakthrough opens door to treating broad array of diseases

#90

Post by bobthechef »

coryrc wrote: post #45
tialaramex wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Both have inherent risks, none of which affect others. If you make germline edits, this does potentially impact others - you can have children who inherit the edit. They don't have any choice about that (depending on the edit they might randomly not receive a copy of the edited material, but that's luck) and its consequences in them may be undesirable even if the outcome for you, an adult, was fine and anyway your…

That is the line of reasoning that leads to banning abortions*. People have a right to alter their bodies. EDIT: and preventing young women from choosing sterilization.

How do you reason that people have the (presumably absolute) right to alter than bodies however they please? How do you justify that claim? It makes very specific assumptions which are very problematic. For example, do you have the right to lobotomize a perfectly healthy brain? It is immoral? Can you say you have the right to do something immoral? How about altering your uterus during pregnancy to prevent nutrients from feeding the child?

I think it's pretty obvious that right implies morally acceptability. You can't claim to have a right to something evil. (The reverse is not true. It is morally acceptable to own a Tesla, but you don't have the right to one.) Alterations can be harmful and any harm that is not a justifiable side effect is by definition immoral. That it's your body does not somehow negate the immorality of self-harm. Indeed, direct self-harm is even worse morally than harm of others because it is in direct opposition to one's own good (arguably, harm of others is also a form of self-harm, specifically harm of one's character and will and habitus, of one's intellect because of the harm of one's reasoning faculties it entails, and harm of the common good). So you cannot say you have the right to self-harm. This is just a strange consequence of the incoherent ideology of absolute autonomy.

Now, if you have, say, a defect in your body that is preventing the proper functioning of your body, then we may correct this defect through intervention. This is restorative, that is, it seeks to restore the function due to the body by virtue of how it ought to function. This is the basis of medicine.

Another false view that can nudge people toward the view that any modification is acceptable is metaphysical materialism, also incoherent. In that case, crude metaphors between artifacts and living things are elevated to the status of the truth and since it doesn't matter what we do to an artifact per se. We can modify a computer any way we wish because there is no fact of the matter about what a computer is or how it should be apart from human intent. It is just a collection of things arranged in a particular way incidentally that puts them in a series of incidental causal relations, but there is no inherent tendency for these things to exist in these relations and no accounting for one in terms of the others except through the lens of human intent. Living things aren't like that.

Post reply on HN