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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

#201

Post by [deleted] »

gibolt wrote: post #190
vsuperpower2020 wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The amount of people who can actually work on anything meaningful in this field is double-digit at best. Sure, if you add up "many different things" you have plenty of people who can work on plumbing, programming, and gene editing. What are you going to do for geneCAD? Right, absolutely nothing. It doesn't matter how many of you there are; you could be 8000 million or 8000 trillion people and still accomplish nothing…

This assumes things are static. There are millions of programmers now, but certainly weren't 100 years ago. The tools to investigate this will get cheaper and easier, driving more people into the field hoping for the next big win, a big payout, or just to make an impact. Anyone can make a small circuit design have have a fab print it for you. The same could happen here, all you need to do is provide the sequence

[deleted]

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#202

Post by rylittle »

CaptainOfCoit wrote: post #200
meindnoch wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a certain age beyond which you cannot learn proper speech. There's a certain age beyond which you cannot learn absolute pitch. It wouldn't be surprising if there was a certain age beyond which you cannot learn to understand music.

> There's a certain age beyond which you cannot learn absolute pitch I can understand things like that get harder and harder as you become adult. That it's absolutely not possible beyond a certain age I think is just a commonly held belief that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. What is this age limit where you've never seen anyone be able to gain that skill? I'm sure there are counter-examples.

Interestingly enough, I once read that no one over the age of 60 has ever _retained_ perfect pitch

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#203

Post by knodi123 »

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.

you'd be surprised.

I've heard about people experimenting by wearing a belt with dozens of haptic motors and a compass, so that it always indicates the direction of north. After a while wearing it, they stop consciously feeling the sensation of the vibration, and just feel "northness". And then when they take off the belt, they feel weirdly disoriented for a while, even in familiar places.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#204

Post by rekttrader »

toufka wrote: post #170
m3kw9 wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I thought you can’t just inject genes and then the body will start replicate it. Does it need periodic injections?

If the DNA is in the cell's nucleus, the DNA will be utilized to produce whatever gene is encoded in the DNA. But if the DNA is just floating around on its own it will not survive a cell division event and the material would need to be periodically reinjected to keep working. However, if the injected DNA is part of a full chromosome, it will be replicated when the cell divides - and will be permanent as long as the c…

Thank you for this description of how it works. It seems like truly beautiful and terrifying magic.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#205

Post by seattle_spring »

geraldwhen wrote: post #114
Veraticus wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being LGBTQ is not a disability or handicap; it’s simply different, like being red-haired or left-handed.

If you feel compelled to remove parts of your body and take opposite sex hormones for life, that’s clearly a disability. If genes could fix your brain to not feel compelled to swap sexes, that would be a huge win in the quality of life for most individuals. You can pretend that pretty much anything “isn’t a disability, it’s just different.” But that isn’t true.

You're focusing pretty hard on a single letter of that acronym that makes up a small percentage of the overall community.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#206

Post by glenstein »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #142
glenstein wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I read it multiple times and the unresponsiveness of this comment serves to further confirm my assessment, that you were unique in introducing the notion of full-scale eradication without qualification into this conversation. The participant you quoted noted a preferability, but you engaged in an original creative act in equating this to eradication.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#207

Post by xedrac »

landryraccoon wrote: post #179
jmcgough wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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% su…

Are you saying you could see sugar being somehow folded into the many different proteins that make up the vast number of tissues in our bodies. Or are you saying our tissues could be constructed out of sugar crystals instead?

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#208

Post by vsuperpower2020 »

LoganDark wrote: post #92
telesilla wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Make sure to read Daniel Dennett before you change too much, you might forget who you are and become someone else entirely. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/What_Is_It_Like_to_Be_a_Bat

I have Dissociative Identity Disorder, so I already become someone else all the time... In all seriousness, at times I do genuinely wish species transition were possible. Imagine gender dysphoria but for species, so species dysphoria. It may sound insane, but honestly so can the entire concept of dissociative identities. I don't know if I'd want to change my brain, but the physical properties of the body definitely.…

I hope you're joking about wanting to become a "fluffy quadruped". Or, if not, I see why we had asylums.

Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness

#209

Post by magicalhippo »

alexey-salmin wrote: post #104
stahtops wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn’t attempt to “fix” anyone. Everyone has to do that themselves. What about the deaf people that don’t enjoy their life as it is and do welcome the opportunity to hear?

> 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?

> The question, once again, was different: should the hereditary deafness be eradicated in childhood by gene therapy once advances of medicine allow that?

Sure, because it's reversible. If they don't like hearing they can always become deaf again.

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