121–130 of 243 posts
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Not unless we all work our asses off! Engineers can do anything :^)
... except politics, engineers are usually not very good at politics, and climate change is, in large part, a political problem.
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.
I think targetting tbe liver is far easier than most other tissues though, unfortunately.
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I am 100% pro bio hacking, I would go as far as to say that I think the bio hacking community might be the only place I can see solutions to our largest problems coming from. I mean the bio hacking community too, not acedemia. Not that acedamia isn’t crucial to that process. 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 frien…
I think the key here is that you have to be doing something novel, which seems like a high bar. Like you can order the DNA for small pox. No one will fulfill that. But it does seem like a determined, over-educated would-be bioterrorist could pull this off with COTS equipment in the very near future, maybe.
What makes me feel alright is that I think to do some damage is not a technical or money issue but an issue with taking a dive on the closest thing we have to the meaning of life and I'd hope that that study would be the sort of thing that keeps someone from being the worst kind of monster. I mean, we have a ton of tools out there to be awful, why this?
I guess what I'm saying is that to look at this set of problems and say "someone else probably has it handled" or assume anything we know is even slightly predictive of the future is silly. I think it's important for those that care to get an understanding of biology as we are now at an unprecedented point in existence where there's just not a way to feel too comfortable. Added benefit, the more people that get that understanding the closer we might get to yeast that eats plastic or mushrooms that make insulin.
What are the limits of gene editing?
Before getting too excited, let's not forget the stories where gene therapy went horribly wrong. https://www.sciencehistory.org/distillations/the-death-of-je... > Doudna expressed similar concerns about CRISPR. > “I hope that we don’t get ahead of ourselves with this technology. As exciting as it is, I really would like to see . . . people take a very measured and responsible path forward, where there’s careful vetti…
Damn this sucks to read. To think of how much progress we might have made in a promising field if we could just get over one person dying. Yes it's awful, and we shouldn't be flippant, but we're talking about work to help _humanity as a whole_. This isn't the same as saying "the means justify the ends." This is just saying, "Shit, we fucked up there, let's not do that again, but let's keep learning." I don't know how you ever advance without making mistakes.
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Stop with the doom trolling and get busy inventing solutions.
Without doom trolling nobody will vote for the people who want to implement the costly solutions.
As an example of a similar drastic falloff at the top of a response curve, I recall reading that people who live right next to a dam report near zero concern about the dam collapsing, but as you go further away people are very concerned, then somewhat concerned, than only little concerned.
So anyway, we need more carrots, fewer sticks.
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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…
"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." The first problem is that you are claiming that the child's body is the woman's body. It isn't and you know that. You know that is it an entirely distinct human being with it's own DNA, etc, etc. In…
What makes us human beings is our personalities, our brains. Chop off my hand, I'm still me. Destroy my brain, I'm deceased regardless of how long you keep my other organs going.
A fetus does not become human, IMO, until it can have a personality and sentience. Women have the power to create without consent of the created; the power to destroy their not-yet-human equally lacks the consent of the created. If the latter is prohibited than so should the former.
From a societal view, we have enough people. Every way to support people consensually choosing to not have children should be encouraged.
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Without doom trolling nobody will vote for the people who want to implement the costly solutions.
There's a curve to most people's response to levels of advocacy. The response rises with advocacy to a point, but then past a certain point, the response drops precipitously. When the advocacy turns into over-the-top vehemence, people tend to stop responding and may even respond negatively (i.e. rebel and go full anti-whatever). As an example of a similar drastic falloff at the top of a response curve, I recall readi…
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Stop with the doom trolling and get busy inventing solutions.
Technical solutions are often ineffective when faced with obstacles of politics or cutting corners to make money.
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Not unless we all work our asses off! Engineers can do anything :^)
... except politics, engineers are usually not very good at politics, and climate change is, in large part, a political problem.