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

Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

nytimes.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

451–460 of 570 posts

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#451

Post by raldi »

aucisson_masque wrote: post #369
raldi wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The DNA was only edited in the liver. But by the time this baby grows up and starts a family, we'll probably be able to fix that, too.

That's a bold claim. The baby is 9 month old, there are many things that can still go wrong with this experimental treatment. Hopefully not, but even then no one can say what progress will make science in the next 25 years. Back in the 50's people thought we would be driving in flying car in 2000.

Four years ago highly-upvoted /r/SanFrancisco comments said self-driving taxis were decades away: https://old.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/nbjsij/real_r...

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#452

Post by imacomputertoo »

efilife wrote: post #359
concordDance wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What was the question? The rampant flagging here is quite annoying.

My original comment said: > But your child will die and that's a fact. Is it only ok for it to die after you?

Is there more context to this question? I couldn't read the article because of the pay wall. But in isolation, this is a dumb question. All decent parents want their child to live as long as possible and be as healthy as possible. Is there something deeper you were trying to get at?

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#457

Post by [deleted] »

deadbabe wrote: post #443
Cthulhu_ wrote: post #404

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Definitely not soon, there's a lot of conditions at the moment for this to be applicable (from what I gather, I'm no expert, just a HN commenter), and well before wholesale gene editing is a thing there will be the legal aspect. I mean the precursor to gene editing is selective breeding, which on humans quickly leads to eugenics.

Don’t know why so much fear over eugenics. You either resign to waiting millions of years for evolution to do its thing, or we just take matters into our own hands at some point and evolve faster.

[deleted]

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#458

Post by mr_toad »

xvilka wrote: post #447
fendy3002 wrote: post #259

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the usual next questions will be: - how further can we push this to make the best, most optimized human? - what are moral implication of this? - what are the side effects / downsides?

There's no "most optimized human". We are already that, perfected in millions of years. What could really happen is the split between multiple sub-species. For example, it makes perfect sense to do the optimization for orbital station dwellers or Mars colonists or underwater dwellers.

We’re not perfect, we’re just good enough to have survived.

There are lots of hereditary illnesses and conditions that could probably be tweaked with DNA editing, if we can identify the responsible genes. If someone can cure male pattern baldness they’ll be rich.

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#459

Post by paulryanrogers »

philipkglass wrote: post #142
paulryanrogers wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What should we as humanity, as society, spend most of our wealth and resources doing? Sending robber barrons and their girlfriends into space?

I'm of accord with the Utopians of Ada Palmer's Too Like the Lightning : When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved. A fall? They rebuild the site to make it safe. A criminal? They do not rest until he is rendered harmless. An illness? It is researched until cured, regardless of the time, the cost, over generations if need be. A car crash? They create their separate system, s…

So we should not even try to help the sick because 'death' has too many other ways to kill them?

Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment

#460

Post by insane_dreamer »

declan_roberts wrote: post #101
jmcgough wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yep, this effort is the culmination of 50 years of research. Could be the last harrah of the NIH with the amount of cuts we've had and the scientists who are taking jobs in other countries.

Unfortunately a staggering amount of research in other countries is largely funded by the NIH/USA.

Terrible take. Do all scientists who make breakthroughs that we might benefit from live in the US? CRISPR itself was a US-German collaboration.
Post reply on HN