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

241–250 of 570 posts

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

#241

Post by beeflet »

NoMoreNicksLeft wrote: post #119
dekhn wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's unclear the outcome of this will be eugenics wars. Answering the real question- it's unlikely these techniques will see widespread "recreational" usage any time soon, as they come with a wide range of risks. Further, the scientific community has learned a lot from previous eugenics programs; anything that happens in the future will happen with both social and political regulation. It's ultimately hard to predict…

The problem won't be that there will be those who want to have babies with edited genomes, and those who oppose that. It will be that people just don't have children at all.

I think one reason why people won't have children is the gene-editing and the IVF that is coming. Nothing is left to chance, or to god any more. Having children is now a clinical affair. It's spiritually void.

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

#243

Post by gr_norm »

Kuinox wrote: post #240
gr_norm wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The EA community is generally incapable of self-awareness. The academic-but-totally-misinformed tone is comparable to reading LLM output. I've stopped trying to correct them, it's too much work on my part and not enough on theirs.

What does EA means here ?

"Effective Altruism", something I find myself aligned with but not to the extremes taken by others.

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

#244

Post by maxerickson »

VierScar wrote: post #239
maxerickson wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is this a troll? Pseudouridine mRNA isn't gene editing.

What do you mean? Is mRNA not used to produce the enzyme that these comments mentioned? I don't think they were saying mRNA is gene editing itself. Just commenting on a modified mRNA helping the process compared to normal mRNA. Might be misunderstanding though so correct me if I am

I dunno, I think they are being sloppy and conflating things. We can induce manufacture of proteins and can design proteins that carry out gene editing, so we can stack that knowledge together to induce cells to manufacture proteins that carry out gene edits, but it's the payload that is the gene editing, not the instruction to make the protein.

Given the merry movement to call the COVID vaccines gene editing, it rankles.

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

#245

Post by andreygrehov »

tuna-piano wrote: post #224

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…

Are there any age restrictions?

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

#246

Post by beeflet »

kulahan wrote: post #223
Muromec wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That would be less effective than bio and chemical weapons are. Which are not used because they just suck

I’m not sure of by “they just suck” you meant to imply that they’re ineffective. If that’s the case, I strongly disagree. They are not used because somehow all countries pretty much agreed they’re way TOO effective and horrific. Nobody wants it used on them, so nobody uses it on anyone else. I cannot imagine a more effective weapon than an invisible gas that melts you alive, and there are MANY chemical and bio exampl…

The ceiling for the destruction caused by biological weapons is far greater than chemical weapons. There is no chemical weapon that can hijack the victim to make more of it.

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

#247

Post by scotty79 »

XorNot wrote: post #147
scotty79 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think it's gonna be that hard. All cells that blood reaches were happily taking mRNA vaccine.

No they were not. A vaccine triggers an immune response, not a functional change. mRNA vaccines are highly localized: you get a sore arm because most of it only gets taken up by muscle cells around the injection site, which spend some time producing the antigen and triggering a primary immune response (the inflammation aka the sore arm).

Still it needs to enter the cells all the same.

As for being localized it's true however after vaccine dose S proteins have been detected also in remote locations in the body because you can't make something 100% localized.

If you had an infusion that doesn't trigger immune system you could just increase the dose significantly, put it in the blood and most likely it would have reached all cells that blood reaches.

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

#248

Post by 0x1ceb00da »

TheJoeMan wrote: post #207
cryptoegorophy wrote: post #205

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How does it know how to gps around? From what I know everything down there is a chemical reaction with some minimal physical motion, but how do you program it to know where to change and what and how.

It’s more like a “ctrl+F” for DNA. Hopefully there’s only 1 match (the target site).

So you create a molecule that binds to a certain location in the dna, and then deploy a billion of them?

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

#249

Post by _heimdall »

Thebroser wrote: post #216
_heimdall wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know someone well who works in this space, personalized gene therapy as cancer treatment. > until it finds the exact DNA letter that needs to be changed. This pine is disingenuous (at best). There is no way of guaranteeing where the DNA is inserted. It is designed to only slot into a very specific portion of the DNA but they don't have a way to control that precisely, the accuracy is high but "exact DNA letter" is…

The approach they used which is base editing doesn’t actually insert or remove DNA, it actually uses an enzyme to convert one base to another, which is much safer as this doesn’t require a double strand break in DNA: https://blog.addgene.org/single-base-editing-with-crispr

That is interesting, I didn't catch the difference my first time through the article.

I do still question their claim of 100% precise results though. At least based on that high level description I can definitely see it being safer, but I question any scientific claim that is an absolute.

Specific to the editing vs insertion mechanism, I question how it doesn't run into similar constraints where the mechanics of targeting exact portions of the DNA can occasionally miss or impact the wrong segment of DNA entirely.

I haven't dug as deeply down the base pair conversion though, so I could absolutely be wrong!

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

#250

Post by bigtones »

danielodievich wrote: post #213

When my second son was born and was just so very tiny some genetic test came out questionable. We were very strongly encouraged to go to Childrens hospital ASAP to get more tests. He handled it well, being just a few weeks old. The tests came with "he's a carrier of something obscure but nothing to worry about", so it's all forgotten. Three interesting thing come out of it from me. First, I was on Microsoft insurance…

My niece in Australia has a rare genetic disorder and when my wife and I had our first baby in California a few years ago we were concerned about that. We also had fantastic insurance and the hospital team there did a test where they took a blood sample from my wife and seperated the childs DNA from the mothers in the blood sample and tested it for several genetic disorders. That test is not available in Australia even today.
Post reply on HN