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Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

cosmosmagazine.com

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Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#141

Post by nkrisc »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #60
nkrisc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Taking it seriously for a moment, that still seems outlandish even in a sci-fi scenario. The amount of changes that would be necessary to the body for a human to achieve autonomous powered flight would be substantial. Given our overall density, we would need enormous wings and musculature. Consider that the heaviest flying birds alive today weigh maybe 40lbs and have a wingspan of 8ft or so. If we naively extrapolate…

> it would have to completely transform you into a completely different creature, simply due to the physics of flight In OP's defence, they never mentioned flight. Maybe they just want a peacock train.

Ok, fair enough. I hadn’t considered that. In my mind, wings you can’t fly with are worse than no wings.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#142

Post by alexey-salmin »

glenstein wrote: post #132
alexey-salmin wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What about the deaf people that don’t enjoy their life as it is and do welcome the opportunity to hear? I would be happy if they had such an opportunity. The question, once again, was different: should the hereditary deafness be eradicated in childhood by gene therapy once advances of medicine allow that?

I think you changed the question and escalated the severity of the proposal so it became easier to knock down as a straw man. Originally this was about the desirability and capability of enabling deaf people to hear writ large. But now you are framing it as full scale eradication carried out in a way that bypasses consent.

I'm not, please read the whole discussion.

The root of this thread referenced the cochlear implant which produces best results when implanted at a very young age (staring from 9 months) obviously without consent of the patient.

Other author replied that:

> The weird thing that we should not strive to fix human defects when they are truly defects is astounding.

All my comments are essentially stating the disagreement (or rather lack of agreement) with this point of view.

It declares being deaf as a "true defect" that we should "strive to fix". In the context of the gene therapy now available, I understand this means that a deaf-born children should be "fixed" to remove this "defect". This vision is not crazy, but it doesn't strike me as universally true either.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#143

Post by alexey-salmin »

PierceJoy wrote: post #138
alexey-salmin wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, I'm not wrong, I just don't like relying on "obvious" statements like "5 senses are better than 4". We can't know for sure what was "better" until the human race experiment is finished (and then we won't know either obviously). Consider this: hereditary autoimmune diseases are usually seen as a disadvantage. However they were a huge advantage during the bubonic plague in Europe, increasing the chances of survival…

Hereditary autoimmune diseases are not a sense, and are irrelevant to this discussion about whether hearing is an objective advantage or not. I’ll ask again, since you must have missed this question: is a deaf person, all else equal, more likely or less likely to survive and procreate relative to a hearing person?

> I’ll ask again, since you must have missed this question: is a deaf person, all else equal, more likely or less likely to survive and procreate relative to a hearing person?

You know the answer: it can be both ways depending on circumstances.

* In the prehistoric world I think he was less likely to survive. The difference doesn't seem to be dramatic though since these genes were not eradicated from the population.

* In the modern world the difference is close to zero with an unknown sign. Given that in developed countries probability to procreate seem to be limited by a desire to procreate, I can't rule out that e.g. deaf people for some reason have 0.1% more desire to have kids, or any other side-effect. So answer to your question is unknown, requires a study to figure this out.

* In the future hearing can be an advantage or a disadvantage depending on how the circumstances evolve. We see that species gain and loose senses depending on the environment.

EDIT: I would also like to clarify this part:

> Hereditary autoimmune diseases are not a sense, and are irrelevant to this discussion about whether hearing is an objective advantage or not.

It's a human trait which was "obviously good" in the past and is "obviously bad" now. Hence I don't trust statements that other human traits like deafness are obviously good or bad. It's interesting to discuss but it's not granted.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#144

Post by alexey-salmin »

glenstein wrote: post #130
alexey-salmin wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of vertebrates (including human's ancestors) lost the 6th sense of electric fields in process of the evolution. Apparently 6 is not always better than 5 from the nature's point of view. Moles went further to loose sight as well.

I don't think that's quite right, evolution makes trade offs and allocates scarce resources, it's not necessarily because such things would not be beneficial.

It's not clear what "beneficial" means if you consider it separately from the resources required to achieve it.

E.g. it's beneficial to be stronger I guess, and gorillas are always strong whether they use their muscles or not. However for humans nature chose a different path where only the muscles you actively use are strong. This approach seem to work great so far, even though it results in many individual muscles of the body being weak. For each and every of these muscles you can argue that making it stronger would be "beneficial" but as a whole it doesn't seem to work out.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#145

Post by LadyCailin »

nehagup wrote: post #43

When I try and imagine what that must be like from the inside—I can’t think of anything more exciting or scary than to gain a new sense.

There is a belt you can wear that has vibrators around it, and it always vibrates the north facing side. I read that people who wore that for a few weeks started gaining the ability to create much more accurate maps in their head, which makes sense, this is how pigeons do it too, they basically can just always sense where north is.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#146

Post by fragmede »

akoboldfrying wrote: post #122
Teever wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What do you get from admonishing someone for saying the kinds of things that they just said?

Why do you consider an attempt to focus a public discussion on the most important uses of a new technology to be an admonishment?

it certainly reads as one, and calling them "most important" reveals your bias that those uses are more important too.

Like it or not, the way society is currently arranged, making stuff for rich people is more profitable than making things for poor people, and greed can kick in, so people do things out of love of money rather than necessity. were the deck stacked more equal, maybe things would be different, but human psychology is devilishly complex.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#147

Post by Almondsetat »

wouldbecouldbe wrote: post #139
Almondsetat wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If through gene editing you could also erase someone's disphoria what option would you choose?

That’s like trying to cure depression by getting rich. It hardly ever works

What?

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#149

Post by carterschonwald »

chris_t wrote: post #126
GOD_Over_Djinn wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Discoveries like this should be shared with the world - not gatekept by rent-seeking venture capitalists. Wouldn’t you rather be Jonas Salk than Scrooge McDuck? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonas_Salk > Salk was immediately hailed as a "miracle worker" when the vaccine's success was first made public in April 1955, and chose to not patent the vaccine or seek any profit from it in order to maximize its global distrib…

Rent-seeking has a technical definition; earning money from things you invented does not meet it. While Salk is obviously an inspiring example, a wise society should happily incentivize the development of useful technology.

Well said

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#150

Post by iandanforth »

meindnoch wrote: post #127
herbst wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are magnet Implantats you can put into your finger which lets you feel magnetic fields.

That's not a new sense, just using the existing tactile system with a magnet.

Senses are defined by what they sense, not how they are sensed. A person can have their sight partially restored through implants that bypass rod/cone activation. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6934168/
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