Live data from Hacker News

Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

cosmosmagazine.com

171–180 of 231 posts

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Erasing someone's dysphoria would also fundamentally change their identity and personality. If I were to suffer a head injury today that so altered my personality, the result would be very unpredictable. I could become a better person, or a worse one. I could lose my wife, my career, everything. But even if the outcome were positive, I wouldn't be me anymore. This me would cease to exist, replaced by a new one. On th…

You seem to come from the point of view that body and mind are quite separate, and that changing your body through surgery and hormones and other chemicals has less effects on the "real you" than a change in brain wiring would cause.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#172
post #101
post #63

How can I get involved in this work as a software engineer?

If you can't find out yourself then you're probably not motivated enough.

Does asking the HN community not fall into the category of “finding out”?

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#173
post #2

This stuff seems miraculous. > "Through minimally invasive surgery, Shu injected adeno-associated virus (AAV) engineered to carry and deliver functioning copies of the human OTOF transgene, into the children’s inner ears. " Can't read that and not get curious, excited, for the future. Congratulations to all those involved in the research and thanks to all who contributed to it - including all taxpayers if public fund…

I'm sure there will be other treatments based on AAV and CRISPR. I'm interested in ALS as a relative has it and that stuff is one of the only approaches that might work. The had a go on mice with so so results - lived longer but no cure https://www.cell.com/molecular-therapy-family/molecular-ther...

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#175
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…

Your point seems to be that massive changes are required to achieve wings. I’m saying that’s not impossible and an acceptable modification to whoever wants to do this to themselves. As long as you can maintain the brain as is, I don’t see there being a problem with radically modifying the rest of the body. Argentavis magnificens had a wingspan of around 24ft and weighed around 72 kgs or a 160lbs which is close to wha…

It's about as close to impossible as you can get. If you tried to do it in the womb, too much deviation from a regular human fetus won't be carried to term. If you try to do it after growth plates have closed, you'd have to destroy every bone in the body first, which would kill you. That gives you some kind of post-birth, pre-puberty window over which some sufficient level of body remodeling can at least happen in principle, but you seem to be underestimating the level of remodeling to do this. You'd need to drastically reduce bone density, which would leave you extremely susceptible to injury. You'd have to undo human adaptations in the spine and pelvis for upright posture, which would be extremely painful. You'd need to effectively swap out the glutes with pecs and undo the adaptations for brachiating arms. Things like your eyes and ears and basic breathing apparatus are not well-adapted for flight. Things like where blood and lymph and other bodily fluids tend to pool in the human body versus where they do in the bodies of flying animals. Just as laying down for too much time will cause it to pool in places your body can't easily clear right now, being horizontal for flight would have the same effect.

It's not just a matter of growing wings. And yeah, the energy demands of making all these changes, as others have pointed out. The only kinds of animals that go through this level of non-fetal metamorphosis are insects with weights measured in the tens of grams, energy needs that kind be sustained by something like a cocoon. How would you meet the energy demands of an adult human going through metamorphosis? You couldn't do it by eating, not only because your gut can't actually digest the amount of food you'd need (you don't have an elephant gut) but also simply because being conscious through the process, unlike insects in a cocoon, would be so absurdly painful that I doubt you'd be able to function and do anything at all, let alone spend all of your time finding and eating food. You'd need to be put into a medical coma and injected with intravenous nutrients to have any shot at all.

Why on earth would we ever try this? In reality, giving yourself genes to grow wings would just kill you.

Look at this picture from Wikipedia showing Argentavis side by side with a human: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentavis#/media/File:62628-A...

What sorts of processes do you imagine are necessary to stretch the human body to the size of the Argentavis body without adding any weight? It'd be like getting flattened by a steam roller, then drawn and quartered. Bodily tissue isn't balloons.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#176
post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Moreover, they are at this stage the exact same problem- requiring not competing but identical research: we need to understand generally how biology works enough to predictably engineer it.

> they are at this stage the exact same problem- requiring not competing but identical research I'd go one step further in arguing they're complementary. The personalities that will work on e.g. wings or longevity are not the types drawn to curing diseases, much less the boring ones. Broadening the field from solving mundane problems to solving daring ones is net positive. You gain personalities that would have other…

And a huge part of what steered talented people into programming over biomedicine was the relative freedom. The more you can do without the drag of convincing a vast bureaucratic/political machine to let you try your idea, the more people will contribute to progress.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A futurist I knew of long ago pointed out that the Moon’s gravity is light enough that the human skeleton could achieve sufficient lift without sustaining damage in the process. True, you might have to be a junior Olympian to do it, but it’s possible. On earth your pectorals would tear off of your sternum long before you achieved takeoff.

I thought the same thing. The lack of Moon atmosphere is a real problem though.

Heinlein, "The Menace from Earth"

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn’t it obviously good to get rid of someone’s problem? Otherwise it wouldn’t be a problem.

If your perception doesn't match your body, would you prefer to change the perception or change the body?

It seems pretty clear to me that changing one’s body is preferable to changing who you are. The former is something you’re born with, but the latter is something you can decide for yourself.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#179

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's try to fix the world's vast number of actual, boring health problems before trying to add the equivalent of spoilers and chrome-plated hubcaps to perfectly healthy human bodies.

Most of those problems in the US are caused by lifestyle, and can't really be changed without behavioral modification. And a lot of our health issues are a matter of poor access to healthcare.

This assumes that the fundamental nature of human beings can't be changed, which is the presupposition that genetic engineering denies.

The entire point of genetic engineering is to try to engineer people at the cellular level. A fanciful example would be modifying human metabolism to be more similar to those of birds that consume most of their calories in the form of simple sugars. Humans can't eat a diet of 100% sugar and remain healthy, but other animals can. It may be possible to change that fact, if we know how to edit our genes.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Intellectual monopolies disincentivize development and incentivize rent seeking. Here, rent seeking is legal action and lobbying intended to protect and extend monopolies, instead of advancing science. Other than economic logic, we have natural experiments to back this up: i.e. the steam engine patent granted to Watt and Boulton in 1772 and its chilling effect on engine duty improvement (and the explosion of progress…

I agree with all of this. The example of the patent on steam engines is fascinating, thank you! It's certainly true government granted monopolies are far from the ideal incentive structure, with many downsides. (And lobbying for EG patent extensions likely IS rent-seeking). Advance market commitments and other systems likely have better characteristics.

I was rather objecting to the misuse of a technical term, and the idea that we should expect all innovation to happen without reasonable incentives.

Post reply on HN