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Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

bbc.com

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Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#51

Post by huac »

texthompson wrote: post #23
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Genetic engineering works far, far better. We've already plucked the low hanging fruit of adequate nutrition, early education, salt iodization, and lead reduction. Anyway, those reduce mental retardation, they don't improve the baseline too much. And the Flynn effect looks to be slowing or reversing. 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the wo…

People in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean water. Lots of other folks in the world also don't have clean water. Doesn't that seem like an easier thing to fix than trying out experimental therapies?

doesn't doing both seem more effective

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#52

Post by the8472 »

blueblimp wrote: post #37
yjftsjthsd-h wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Genetic engineering works far, far better. Um, do we know that? Unless I've missed some very interesting research that sounds like an extremely untested hypothesis.

It's untested in the sense that no genetic engineering has been done in humans, yes. (Unless you count gene therapy to cure disease, which is fairly different.) However, there are some pretty strong reasons to think it would work, at least if we're just talking about improving within the typical range of human ability. Going to the extremes of existing ability and beyond is probably possible too, but there are more u…

Has IQ-improving gene-editing been proven in animals then?

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#53

Post by mrfusion »

quotemstr wrote: post #7
criddell wrote: post #2

Will this change potentially be transmitted to his children?

Unfortunately, human germline modification is still taboo here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/scientists-argue-... It angers me that a misguided and stringent sense of ethics might slow the deployment of one of the most beneficial technologies ever conceived.

That same misguided sense of ethics is becoming rampant everywhere. It might end up completely halting human progress.

Looks at the first Reddit comment on any interesting new technology. There's always someone dismissing the whole idea due to some outlandish risk.

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#54

Post by Symmetry »

texthompson wrote: post #23
Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nope. Genetic engineering works far, far better. We've already plucked the low hanging fruit of adequate nutrition, early education, salt iodization, and lead reduction. Anyway, those reduce mental retardation, they don't improve the baseline too much. And the Flynn effect looks to be slowing or reversing. 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the wo…

People in Flint, Michigan still don't have clean water. Lots of other folks in the world also don't have clean water. Doesn't that seem like an easier thing to fix than trying out experimental therapies?

And if you're interested in helping people in places that don't have access to these things that salt ionization is almost certainly the thing to work on first.

http://www.givewell.org/international/technical/programs/sal...

As to Flint that does seem to be finally over now, though goodness knows it went on for a distressingly long time.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flint_water_crisis#2017

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#55

Post by blueblimp »

the8472 wrote: post #52
blueblimp wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's untested in the sense that no genetic engineering has been done in humans, yes. (Unless you count gene therapy to cure disease, which is fairly different.) However, there are some pretty strong reasons to think it would work, at least if we're just talking about improving within the typical range of human ability. Going to the extremes of existing ability and beyond is probably possible too, but there are more u…

Has IQ-improving gene-editing been proven in animals then?

Yes: http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2014/09/human-speech-gene-can.... (That said, you'd need to use a different approach in humans, because we don't have any smarter species that we can copy genes from.)

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#56

Post by Symmetry »

Moshe_Silnorin wrote: post #12
deepnotderp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better way to increase iq would be to raise the socioeconomic level...

Nope. Genetic engineering works far, far better. We've already plucked the low hanging fruit of adequate nutrition, early education, salt iodization, and lead reduction. Anyway, those reduce mental retardation, they don't improve the baseline too much. And the Flynn effect looks to be slowing or reversing. 50 IQ points is huge. It's the difference between a burger flipper and a physics professor. The change to the wo…

People are talking more about 15 point gains through embryo selection now rather than 50 point gains. The later might be possible at some point but even the former isn't quite within the grasp of current science.

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#57

Post by Symmetry »

After adenoviruses proved to be dangerous [1] I wonder what sort of virus they're using now?

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesse_Gelsinger

Are doctors allowed to use gene therapy in life or death conditions now? In the trial for fixing OTC deficiency that Jesse Gelsinger died in they only administered the trial to people who were capable of living with the disease as opposed to the babies that were going to die in their first year without it. The idea was that a parent faced with the possibility of their child dying painfully couldn't possibly refuse the treatment and therefore couldn't give informed consent.

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#58

Post by kweinber »

ygaf wrote: post #50
deepnotderp wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A better way to increase iq would be to raise the socioeconomic level...

No amount of life quality can raise iq by the magnitude in the parent post.

If we don't try, then we'll have a lot of poor, sick, and unhappy geniuses walking around.

I wonder which types of crime they'll optimize?

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#59

Post by amluto »

quotemstr wrote: post #7
criddell wrote: post #2

Will this change potentially be transmitted to his children?

Unfortunately, human germline modification is still taboo here: https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/scientists-argue-... It angers me that a misguided and stringent sense of ethics might slow the deployment of one of the most beneficial technologies ever conceived.

I would like to see reliable, precise modifications before human germline modifications happen. As I understand it, current techniques involve infecting cells, integrating whole foreign genes (or even genomes) into them, and hoping that a beneficial modification comes along for the ride. If every family starts editing their children's genome like this, we'll end up with a whole lot of random crap in our germlines.

CRISPR is better but not there yet, I believe. Let's get all the way to being able to do the equivalent of sed to our germline cells before we start editing.

Re: Teenager's sickle cell reversed using a treatment to change his DNA

#60

Post by juki »

abtinf wrote: post #29
deepnotderp wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're putting too much faith into IQ. Shockley only had an IQ of ~125 (even though he became an eugenicist...). More importantly, Feynman used his low IQ score (124 I think) to show how useless the IQ test was as a predictor of intelligence.

IQ mean is 100 and stddev is 15. He was in the top 5.5% of human intelligence.

There are tests that don't use a standard deviation of 15. Feynman might have done, for example, the Cattell Culture Fair Intelligence Test[1], which has a standard deviation of 24.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cattell_Culture_Fair_III

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