What does this mean for longevity research? Could the same treatment potentially be adapted to make edits that could lengthen lifespan of healthy people?
Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
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Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#292[flagged]
No, it’s not what you describe.
Also it seems like you think the mRNA vaccines were harmful. Can you briefly describe what mRNA is and how the mRNA vaccines would have harmed this child?
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#293When 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 ev…
> That test is not available in Australia even today.
Pretty much every lab test is available in Australia if you are willing to pay for it; if they don’t have a local lab capable of running the test, they’ll send the sample overseas
The real question is whether it is covered by insurance or not, and a lot of the time the answer is “no” - I recently forked out over US$500 for genetic tests on one of our kids (which the paediatrician recommended), although the results weren’t particularly helpful (“rare variant of uncertain clinical significance”)
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#294Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Last I heard those gene editing things lead to so called of-target edits, so they were basically corrupting random dna. Now in this case the baby would have died without this treatment so clearly benefits outweight the risks. But even then they probably want to have the dose be as low as possible.
But I'm speculating a bit here.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#295Are the edited genes inherited, or the original ones? Does the previous question have an answer that depends on the babies sex? From an evolutionary perspective it‘s interesting how the further medicine gets, the more we inherit genes unfit for life without medical support.
Is the global gene pool actually degrading though? I only ever hear that in thinly veiled attempts at advocating for eugenicism. And it never comes substantiated by any research. Anyway, this baby proves we can fix hereditary diseases now.
> eugenicism
That comes in many forms:
Black/dark one, nazi style, where you outright sterilise or even kill those with unhealthy/bad genes.
And white/peaceful one, where you‘d appeal to those with unhealthy/bad genes not to procreate and encourage those with healthy/good ones to do.
You can‘t seriously tell me it‘s not extremely unethical for people with huntington‘s disease or cystic fibrosis to have children.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#296Hmm, I thought clinical gene editing (gene therapy) was frowned upon because it's inherently risky and fraught with ethical hazards. What technically and ethically has changed since 2005 beyond CRISPR?
Germline gene editing is still considered risky and unethical. That is, editing cells that form eggs and sperm, thus changing the genome of some of the descendants of the edited person. This is somatic editing. These edits will not be inherited.
Somatic editing is becoming more common (see Casgevy) but there are technical hurdles that prevent its application to many cases.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#297Earlier quoted context omitted.
I never said any of this
I didn't say you did. I was trying to understand your point, and so was inferring what you could possibly have meant with your original comment.
Oh, sorry. I definitely think a father can (should?) celebrate medical advancements like this, and definitely shouldn't undermine death like "Ah, that's life". My point is that people often worry about their children's death when they themselves are still alive. Death seems okay if it's when they don't get to see it
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#298Let's be specific, they don't know if he is fully cured. They need more time to conclude efficacy.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#299Damn what a strange time to be alive. Juxtaposing this against the constant nonsense coming from RFK is as jarring as it gets.
Re: Baby is healed with first personalized gene-editing treatment
#300Gattaca here we come!
Fertility care often already included testing for common genetic disorders, and parents with a history of severe disease would often make the hard choice to try again. Due to recent Theocratic political shifts, it means more families will face the worst possible life for their children. Gattaca was a film years ahead of its time, and raises the question of what happens when people try to "fix" human beings beyond dis…
Disease is fuzzy word, it basically means below some made up bar for healthiness. Take dyslexia as a simple example. That disease can by definition not exist in an illiterate population. We have raised the bar and now they are diseased in need for a cure.
The more we things we cure the higher we will reach and the higher we reach the higher we will raise the bar. I don't think that's a bad thing, but its worth bearing in mind.