281–290 of 570 posts
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> that the child will die at some point So what? So a father shouldn't celebrate medical advances that mean their kid doesn't have to die after a week? And if it does, they should just be like "Ah, that's life!"
I never said any of this
the road to hell is paved with good intentions. In our lifetimes we will see a brave new world controlled through eugenics.
>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.
Okay, I'll bite: Who then was the first patient of any age to have a custom gene-editing treatment?
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It's not a slippery slope. Fixing defects is rather straightforward, since it's usually a single gene that needs to be edited. If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes. For this reason I do not think that curying diseases will lead to designer babies.
You're certaily unfamiliar with the term "incrementalism" and its workings
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No, it's only in the liver, from what I can tell from the science, not the gametes. No, it would not depend on the sex of the baby, as the chromosomes that you're editing aren't X or Y. Evolutionarily, the inheritance of genes is a far slower process than the medical advancements we make, so what I think we're seeing here is a chasing down of the low probability events. In that, most of the evolutionary pressure is c…
If they could get complete delivery to the liver stem cells, then the change could be permanent, although this is making many simplifications. Organs in your body usually keep some very old cells (formed in the embryo) around which act as parents for all the new cells in an organ. Any cell can only divide a limited number of times, so they typically maintain a "tree structure" where the old cells create children and…
If someone in the year 2050 was to pick out the most important news article from 2025, I won't be surprised if they choose this one. For those who don't understand this stuff - we are now capable of editing some of a body's DNA in ways that predictably change their attributes. The baby's liver now has different (and better) DNA than the rest of its body. We still are struggling in most cases with how to deliver the D…
Detailed New England Journal of Medicine article about this case: https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2504747 And an Editorial piece (more technical than the NYT): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2505721