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I think it was here a few years ago that I read a comment saying that sick children will be the Trojan horse for normalizing gene editing of humans, because who could say no to sick children, right? Well, guess it's here now, so how long utill the eugenics wars start?
From an evolutionary perspective it‘s interesting how the further medicine gets, the more we inherit genes unfit for life without medical support.
Research funded by the NIH which our government is actively gutting
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From a purely utilitarian perspective, funding research like this is not an effective use of dollars at the margin. How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How many people could we save if we stopped spending money we don't have to do things that the government isn't competent at allocating anyways? That's not to say the research itself is not impres…
> How many people could we save if an equivalent amount was put into reducing obesity, smoking, and drinking? How confident are you the answer isn't very close to zero? We've already curtailed smoking quite a bit in the past 30 years. At the level of an individual, it isn't any particular mystery how to stop obesity or to simply not drink, but population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily beh…
Said like that it paints things like there are not far more resources spent on propagating the bad habits (as some ROI is expected from this by some actors), and any attempt to put a social health program in history always ended in major catastrophes.
> To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be c…
Made it sound like it's a computer, is it Turing complete?
>KJ has made medical history. The baby, now 9 ½ months old, became the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment, according to his doctors. This is _not_ the first human to be treated with a treatment under the wide umbrella of gene therapy based on their own edited genes. There probably is a more narrow first here but the technical details get lost in journalism which is a shame.
I want to say, maybe it's better to say first human under proper IRB/regulatory compliance. Some rogue academic in China tried it a few years ago, if I recall, but with absolutely no oversight and he was pilloried. Also I don't think there is much details about what he actually did... https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1178695152/china-scientist-he...
This research is instead a therapy used to treat an already born baby, and it doesn't modify all the cells in the body. Many cells in the body that are transformed by this technique will eventually die and be replaced by clones of stem cells which weren't transformed. I haven't read in detail about whether this therapy targets stem cells, and how long term effective the treatment will be- hepatocytes (liver cells) turn over constantly, so I would expect if the treatment did not affect the hepatocyte stem cells, it would only last ~months and the treatment would have to be repeated.
Research funded by the NIH which our government is actively gutting
Not to mention the long arcs of the careers of scientists and support staff involved in this breakthrough, who were also supported by federally funded research grants.
I guess it's still too early in this story's news cycle for the people with anti-views to be making noise yet. No GMOs, but human gene modification is okay. No cloning either. The boogeyman is gonna get us no matter what we do
Are the edited genes inherited, or the original ones? Does the previous question have an answer that depends on the babies sex? From an evolutionary perspective it‘s interesting how the further medicine gets, the more we inherit genes unfit for life without medical support.
> To accomplish that feat, the treatment is wrapped in fatty lipid molecules to protect it from degradation in the blood on its way to the liver, where the edit will be made. Inside the lipids are instructions that command the cells to produce an enzyme that edits the gene. They also carry a molecular GPS — CRISPR — which was altered to crawl along a person’s DNA until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be c…
Made it sound like it's a computer, is it Turing complete?
It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?
Someone should have said this to me:
> Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
>
> This is biology.
–Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I think it was here a few years ago that I read a comment saying that sick children will be the Trojan horse for normalizing gene editing of humans, because who could say no to sick children, right? Well, guess it's here now, so how long utill the eugenics wars start?
Answering the real question- it's unlikely these techniques will see widespread "recreational" usage any time soon, as they come with a wide range of risks. Further, the scientific community has learned a lot from previous eugenics programs; anything that happens in the future will happen with both social and political regulation.
It's ultimately hard to predict- many science fiction writers have speculated about this for some time, and social opinion can change quickly when people see new developments.