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Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
31–40 of 231 posts
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t wait for a geneCAD where we for example, design wings for a human body and then it works out the rest and generates a CRISPR based AAV that you can inject yourself with. True race and sex changes too. Hopefully in the next 50 years but that’s wishful thinking.
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 what an average human weighs.
If you compare growth rates to other mammals like elephants, I doubt a change like that would take much more than 5-10 years.
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#33Through a mutual acquaintance, I met someone who did a little work for on the OTOF gene therapy and it really is remarkable stuff.
My wife and I had our embryos screened by Orchid Health since we have a related genetic condition: a pathogenic mutation in GJB-2. Amazingly, Decibel Therapeutics has has one of these in R&D and the OTOF success gives us hope. We have a few embryos that are affected and the more that can grow up healthy the more chances we'll have at children.
The technology itself is unbelievably futuristic: involving using a virus to deliver a repaired gene into existing cells.
This form of non-syndromic hearing loss may well be repaired two generations from now. An interesting thing is if you follow along with the literature, some Chinese labs report success with these gene therapies in kids on the cusp of teen age. That's remarkable. It will give a lot of people today the chance to have healthy kids in the future even if they were unfortunate enough to carry the genes today.
Personally, the fact that I can practically hold a whole genome sequence of our embryos on my computer means the future is here. Last time, I posted a few links for everyone interested in the subject https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40312242
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#34I’m curious about the effect on the deaf community. I understand there’s resistance to “fixing” deafness as some consider it a component of their culture and community, not unlike queer people and the attempts to “fix” them. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cochlear_implant#Criticism_and...
There is a fascinating documentary about this, but I cannot recall its name. One segment talks about a form of sign that represents sound, so that the child learns their family’s language (rather than sign language, which is another language entirely). It is very unpopular in the deaf community despite its advantages for daily life.
Sounds like Signed Exact English, which is disliked both for the context around it and for being more awkward than a natural sign language (e.g I think it doesn’t take advantage of using positions in space for grammar, it only uses the hand shapes and movements?)
I don’t know of any language agnostic phonetic sign used as a first language for children: that sounds about as hard as making them learn through writing instead of talking.
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#35Wait until they have kids. The deafness gene will be passed along. Soon enough we'll be like the cars with the hardware without the software or the locked features.
ah, an eugenicist. and yet, if i stated that eugenicists should be eliminated from the gene pool, you'd be outraged.
Obviously: for a start, since there’s no genetic test for eugenicism, you’d have to wait and eliminate them as adults. They may have already reproduced by then, but there’s also no clear mechanism for inheritance so we don’t even know if that is a problem. If they adopted children do we consider those kids to have inherited it?
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t wait for a geneCAD where we for example, design wings for a human body and then it works out the rest and generates a CRISPR based AAV that you can inject yourself with. True race and sex changes too. Hopefully in the next 50 years but that’s wishful thinking.
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…
"...are you suggesting coconuts migrate?"
Seriously, lesser-schooled folks don't realize the extent to which evolution took tiny variations over an extremely long time to achieve physical flight. The way it arose differently in pterosaurs, birds and bats is fascinating.
I think younger children are capable of understanding more about genetics than we often suppose. More of these concepts should be taught at younger ages.
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#37This 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 can’t wait for a geneCAD where we for example, design wings for a human body and then it works out the rest and generates a CRISPR based AAV that you can inject yourself with. True race and sex changes too. Hopefully in the next 50 years but that’s wishful thinking.
That would be cool - maybe a simple 20/20 vision would be a great next step after hearing
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can’t wait for a geneCAD where we for example, design wings for a human body and then it works out the rest and generates a CRISPR based AAV that you can inject yourself with. True race and sex changes too. Hopefully in the next 50 years but that’s wishful thinking.
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…
(a) I like your analysis (b) maybe the wings are just for show so that you flap them out at clubs every now and then right when the music hits the drop or something and everyone is like WHHAAA????!!!!
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#39This 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 can’t wait for a geneCAD where we for example, design wings for a human body and then it works out the rest and generates a CRISPR based AAV that you can inject yourself with. True race and sex changes too. Hopefully in the next 50 years but that’s wishful thinking.
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.
Re: Gene therapy restores hearing to children with inherited deafness
#40Wait until they have kids. The deafness gene will be passed along. Soon enough we'll be like the cars with the hardware without the software or the locked features.
ah, an eugenicist. and yet, if i stated that eugenicists should be eliminated from the gene pool, you'd be outraged.
The fear of being beholden to a company for your health is not one to dismiss so easily.