Better to have more disabled or dead babies instead of science.
/s
He was jailed for illegal medical practices but it seemed like he established a proper lab after serving the sentence and hopefully he is focused on less objectionable practices. https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1178695152/china-scientist-he...
That's not to say the research itself is not impressive nor important, but think critically about the fact that this money doesn't exist in a vacuum.
How confident are you the answer isn't very close to zero? We've already curtailed smoking quite a bit in the past 30 years. At the level of an individual, it isn't any particular mystery how to stop obesity or to simply not drink, but population-level interventions attempting to get people to voluntarily behave differently for their own health historically haven't worked well in these specific domains. Throwing more money at the problem doesn't seem like it would obviously change that.
Also keep in mind that overeating and alcohol addiction have significant genetic components. Research into gene editing has the eventual potential to cure damn near any disease, including whatever pet causes you personally think are worth defeating.
Said like that it paints things like there are not far more resources spent on propagating the bad habits (as some ROI is expected from this by some actors), and any attempt to put a social health program in history always ended in major catastrophes.
Maybe even the dirt cheap one, because even 100 dollars could go longer way somewhere in the Sahel.
It is good that the humanity does not have a one-track mind.
I could say I believe the government should fund research into fixing people who think cilantro tastes like soap because for most of us it is delicious and promotes healthy diets. Should I be able to compel (tax) you to pay for that research?
Where that line is drawn will always be wrong to someone. How research is prioritized will always be wrong to someone. Is there an ethical way to determine the best use of collective resources and what portion of one’s property must be taken from them to fund that research.
BUT the long term view of creating a technology that can treat any genetic illness (or maybe even any illness?) must outweigh that _eventually_
In reality, as this process becomes more mature it is going to become inexpensive.
The reduction in cost will almost certainly be similar to reduction in cost needed to sequence an individual's genome, which has fallen from tens of millions to hundreds of dollars.
The only catch is that we have to spend money to get there.
Another catch is that the nations who underwrite this research will turn millions in investments into trillions in dividends and the stingy or poor will be left in the cold.
Seeing that private enterprise is only good at taking publicly-funded work and patenting it, and that in the absence of public funding nothing ever gets invented, we should be all-in on this.
edit: it's apropos that you mentioned obesity because GLP-1 drugs are the direct, irrefutable, product of spending at government labs.
edit2: specifically, a single government scientist playing around with lizard saliva in the 1970s because he thought it was interesting.
There's no evidence to support that gene therapy will ever be inexpensive. We can merely say that the process may become less shockingly expensive.
Sending robber barrons and their girlfriends into space?
When a Utopian dies, of anything, the cause is marked and not forgotten until solved. A fall? They rebuild the site to make it safe. A criminal? They do not rest until he is rendered harmless. An illness? It is researched until cured, regardless of the time, the cost, over generations if need be. A car crash? They create their separate system, slower, less efficient, costing hours, but which has never cost a single life. Even for suicide they track the cause, and so, patiently, blade by blade, disarm Death. Death, of course, has many weapons, and, if they have deprived him of a hundred million, he still has enough at hand to keep them mortal. For now.
My prediction is based on the number of efforts, too numerous to list here, being undertaken to develop lab equipment to automate the extremely labor-intensive workflow and the accumulation of vast libraries of CRISPR-Cas9 screens and dependency maps, the creation of which are also expensive and labor-intensive.
A similar thing has been said about so many cutting edge therapies and technologies in the past that I think you'll end up being quite surprised.
Eventually someone will invent a machine that spits these therapies out like espresso machines.
Getting a new drug or therapy approved for a rare form of a disease and then expanding the indication to the common disease patient population is a well established strategy.
This is something beyond that, and is very valuable as this baby has no actual means of fighting this issue at all.
And who's to say this won't lead to fixing the other things anyway.
Great use of dollars
There are known DNA changes that would probably help all people with chronic diseases, but it's ethically more accepted to go for the more fatal diseases and cleaner cases first, like a rare mutation with a high fix rate.
Instead if no resources is allocated on developing all the technical requirements to do such a thing, humanity ends up with less tools to heal itself, and that's it.
b) the whole point of NIH and other government research funds is to pay for this sort of "not clearly an effective use of dollars" type of research that Pfizer et al won't touch. but you can look at a ton of future applications from this - lipid packaging, CRISPR methods, drug delivery, etc that had to be devised, and could conceivably be commercially viable if the methodology is perfected and the cost comes down.
This is _not_ the first human to be treated with a treatment under the wide umbrella of gene therapy based on their own edited genes. There probably is a more narrow first here but the technical details get lost in journalism which is a shame.
What's intriguing is not the 'custom' part, but the speed part (which permits it to be custom). Part of what makes CRISPR so powerful is that it can easily be 'adjusted' to work on different sequences based on a quick (DNA) string change - a day or two. Prior custom protein engineering would take minimum of months at full speed to 'adjust'.
That ease of manipulating DNA strings to enable rapid turnaround is similar to the difference between old-school protein based vaccines and the mRNA based vaccines. When you're manipulating 'source code' nucleic acid sequences you can move very quickly compared to manipulating the 'compiled' protein.
https://www.npr.org/2023/06/08/1178695152/china-scientist-he...
This research is instead a therapy used to treat an already born baby, and it doesn't modify all the cells in the body. Many cells in the body that are transformed by this technique will eventually die and be replaced by clones of stem cells which weren't transformed. I haven't read in detail about whether this therapy targets stem cells, and how long term effective the treatment will be- hepatocytes (liver cells) turn over constantly, so I would expect if the treatment did not affect the hepatocyte stem cells, it would only last ~months and the treatment would have to be repeated.
That is one of the most incredible things I have ever read.
The talk of "crawling along the genome" is kinda fundamentally wrong though and is a bit irking - CRISPR kinda just bumps around until it hits a PAM site, in which case it starts checking against sgRNA. Much more random than they make it seem
About CRISP, it's like the ultimate Perl+Regex for the body.
It was only in college, when I read Douglas Hofstadter’s Gödel, Escher, Bach, that I came to understand cells as recursively self-modifying programs. The language alone was evocative. It suggested that the embryo—DNA making RNA, RNA making protein, protein regulating the transcription of DNA into RNA—was like a small Lisp program, with macros begetting macros begetting macros, the source code containing within it all of the instructions required for life on Earth. Could anything more interesting be imagined?
Someone should have said this to me:
> Imagine a flashy spaceship lands in your backyard. The door opens and you are invited to investigate everything to see what you can learn. The technology is clearly millions of years beyond what we can make.
>
> This is biology.
–Bert Hubert, “Our Amazing Immune System”
I misread this as "fleshy" for a moment, and the quote almost works better that way.
True programmatic biology is still very underdeveloped. I have seen logic gates, memory, and state machines all implemented, but I don't think anybody has built somethign with a straightforward instruction set, program counter, addressable RAM, and registers that was useful enough to justify advanced research.
Hilarity subsequently ensues.
Further, your immune system does some clever combinatorial swapping to achieve diversity (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V(D)J_recombination). The generated diversity is then screened by the immune system to find highly effective antibodies that bind to specific foreign invaders.
Doing something actually interesting from an engineering perspective makes for fun science fiction, but as always, the specific details in that story would be a very unlikely outcome.
Which, yeah, that's a miraculous discovery. And it was well worth the 2023 Nobel in Medicine.
Like, the whole system for gene editing in vivo that we've developed is just crazy little discovery after crazy little discovery. It's all sooooo freakin' cool.
That's good if your goals are to detect genetic modification which may be considered cheating in competitive sports.
That's bad if your goals are to detect genetically modified people and discriminate against them.
I see a near future where the kind of people who loathe things like vaccines and genuinely believe that vaccines can spread illness to the non-vaccinated feel the same way about other things like genetic modification and use legal mechanisms to discriminate and persecute people who are genetically modified.
I'm not totally sure. If I understand it correctly, the mRNA contains pseudouridine, and it makes the protein that will edit the DNA. The edited DNA should look like a normal one.
[And no, I am not anti-vax, nor anti-gene-editing.]
I'm not arguing about whether the risks of the attenuated virus outweigh the benefits. I think the data are very clear there. (Heh -- and I'm sure the vast majority of people will agree with that statement, even if they disagree on what the clear answer is....)
It's just that one shouldn't mock a belief without including the necessary qualifiers, as otherwise you're setting up an argument that can be invalidated by being shown to be factually incorrect.
As for genetic modification of humans, IMO there are a lot of very good reasons to be wary, most of them social. Fatal hereditary conditions are obviously an easy call. What about autism (not saying there's a genetic link there to use, just a what if)? Or other neurodivergence? Like being a troublemaker in class? Or voting for the party that doesn't control the medical incentive structure? Heck, let's stick with the fatal hereditary conditions, and say the editing does not affect germ cells. Is it ok if the human race gradually becomes dependent on gene editing to produce viable offspring? Or let's say it does extend to germ cells. The population with resources becomes genetically superior (eg in the sense of natural lifespan and lower medical costs) to those without, creating a solid scientific rationale for eugenics. Think of it as redlining carved into our blood.
I don't think discrimination against the genetically modified is the only potential problem here.
As humans, we'll deal with these problems the way we've dealt with everything else transformational. Namely: very, very badly.
If it turns out some pathogen or chemical made me autistic, regardless of whether or not I could be cured as an adult, I'd have certainly preferred to live the reality where I had been as a child.
I'm not going to claim that I know the perfect place to draw the line.
To me the wildest scenarios take this off the table.
Nothing in medicine is certain. Nearly any medical treatment has a small chance it could kill you. There’s a small, but non-zero chance of a lethal infection even if they injected you with saline, odds that rise dramatically in less than sanitary conditions.
Ironically the use of the attenuated oral vaccine for polio was because of the risk of infection in places where the availability of sterile syringes was hard to guarantee. It’s all about the relative odds.
Assuming requisite safety of course.
Please tell me there are measures to prevent this going into the wild. Please tell me this won't be used in large-scale industrial farming.
So the real trick here isn't the mRNA, it's the nanobubbles. Basically, you're putting these bits of mRNA into these little fat bubbles and then injecting those into the blood. Making those bubble shelf stable is really hard, hence the issues with temperature and the covid vaccine. To then make those little fat bubbles stable-ish in the blood is also a really hard thing to do. They have to get to the right places (in this baby's case, the liver) and then degrade there, drop off the mRNA, and not mess up other tissues all that much. Like, it's not terrible to make these micelles degrade in vivo, but to have them do that and not degrade in the tubes, ... wow... that is really difficult. There's a reason that Moderna is so highly valued, and it's these bubbles.
To try to then put these in a weapon that could do this though the airways would be, like, nearly impossible. Like, as in I think the second law of thermodynamics, let alone biology, and then simple industrial countermeasure like a N95 respirator, yeah, I think all of that makes it pretty much impossible to weaponize.
(Hedging my bets here: I don't know if they had to do all that with this baby, as you can kinda go from lab to baby really fast, since it's such a special case. But for mRNA based vaccines and cancer treatments, you have to deal with the shelf stable issue)
(Also, other bio people, yes, I am trying to explain to laymen here. Please chime in and tell me how I'm wrong here)
Something that a lot of people are unaware of is that US Military is allowed to do this. I forget the exact EO, but it was signed by Clinton and is in the 12333 chain of EOs. Mostly, this is used for the Anthrax vaccine. But, it does give clearance to do other forms of medical experimentation on warfighters.
No, really, I am serious here. This is true. I may have the details a bit off, so sorry there, but they can and do preform medical experiments on people without their consent. Now, to be fair, France does this too. They do sham surgeries over there. Non-consenting human medical experimentation is quite the rabbit-hole.
So, I can kinda see in the next 10 years, certainly the next 50, a routine shot given to warfighters to help them with things like blood loss, or vitamin C production, or fast twitch muscles, or whatever. The legal framework is already there and has been for a while, it's just an efficacy issue, honestly.
I cannot imagine a more effective weapon than an invisible gas that melts you alive, and there are MANY chemical and bio examples of these types of weapons.
That’s the story but it doesn’t hold up. Chemical weapons were used as recently as the Syrian civil war. I also think if they were really effective in modern warfare, Russia would have long ago deployed them in Ukraine.
More here: https://acoup.blog/2020/03/20/collections-why-dont-we-use-ch...
The reason that the body doesn't alarm as much to Pseudouridine, is that it's not a 'natural' RNA base. Meaning that, for the most part, nature really never uses it and so we haven't evolved to look out for it. Nature uses Uridine and so immune systems have evolved to look out for random bits of RNA in the body that use it and then clean that all up.
It's like if you're looking to clean up legos in you house with a romba that only cleans up legos. And all of a sudden it finds a duplo. It's going to take a hot second to figure out what to do with the duplo. And in that time, you can sneak by and build a duplo fort. (Look, I know this analogy is bad, but it's the best I can come up with on the fly, sorry. If anyone else wnats to come up with a better one, please do!).
The Pseudouridine is used up and degraded very quickly inside the cell, minutes at the very very longest, more like microseconds. It's just part of a messenger (the 'm' in 'mRNA') to tell the cell to do things.
You might see mRNA gene editing in factory farms, but it would just be easier to do germline editing instead and skip spraying animals, plants, and fungi. Why waste the equipment, right?
If anyone else does know, please chime in!
Given the merry movement to call the COVID vaccines gene editing, it rankles.
Do you know of any good resources that I can use to get up to speed on the exact methods they used for the baby?
My understanding, outdated as it is, is that we're using the mRNA to go in and create CRISPR-CAS9 slicers/dicers and additionally to that, the correct genes (not mRNA) to get stitched in. I would love to know more about how I am wrong here, as I am sure I'm not even close to really understanding it.
Thanks!
One of the treatments for sickle-cell involves switching off the gene that makes the malfunctioning red blood cells, but of course that's not sufficient; you'd stop making red blood cells completely and you'd die. So it's combined with a modification that switches on a gene that all humans express pre-birth that causes your body to make "super-blood": red blood cells with significantly more binding points for oxygen. This is necessary because a fetus gets oxygen from its mother's blood, so the increased binding affinity is useful for pulling the oxygen towards the fetus at the placental interface. After birth, expression of that gene is disabled and regular RBC genes switch on.
So the therapy doesn't "fix" sickle RBCs; it disables the body's ability to make them and re-enables fetal RBCs! I have seen no literature on whether having fetal RBCs in adulthood has any benefits or drawbacks (besides changing the affinity ratio for their fetus if the patient gets pregnant, I imagine increased-affinity RBC could help for athletics... But I also imagine it requires more iron to generate them so has dietary impact).
No problems really..never knew I had it until I was told I had thalassemia trait as part of genetic testing. My hemoglobin panel shows fetal hemoglobin.
This is even more great reading behind the above:
https://www.lbl.gov/people/excellence/nobelists/jennifer-dou...
The fact that this treatment "built on decades of federally funded research" is the scary part, given that such funding may disappear.
This isnt entirely unlike the method mRNA vaccines use. Through some clever biochemistry, mRNA vaccines get bits of code into cells where the cell's built in code compilers manufacture proteins that induce immunity.
We have developed software patches for our biology.
> 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 skipping over a few pretty important details.
To be clear I'm not saying it is ineffective or unsafe, only that the claim made is marketing speak and not actually true.
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!
I had heard about CRISPR a while back but most reporting on it kind of hand waved over the mechanisms of how it actually accomplishes its work. What these researchers have figured out to make this work absolutely blows my mind.
Essentially you can design an rna molecular that contains a 20 nucleotide long sequence that can target your region of interest, with the caveat that there is a standard recognition sequence proximal to your sequence of interest (PAM sequence)
And an Editorial piece (more technical than the NYT): https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMe2505721
It’s crazy encouraging that this worked out for this kid, and I’m somewhat shocked this treatment was approved in the US - I don’t think of us as very aggressive in areas like this. But to me, really hopeful and interesting.
Right off the bat, the liver receives roughly a quarter of all cardiac output, either directly or second hand from the digestive organs. Additionally, the liver has a fenestrated endothelium which, while not completely unique in the body, uniquely allows molecules like lipid nanoparticles (LNPs) to access liver cells. Finally, the liver is the site of most lipoprotein processing, and LNPs can be designed to take advantage of the existing pathways to get the gene editing mRNA into the hepatocytes. All this is to say that if you have a genetic condition that primarily effects the liver, there's a lot more hope for treatment in the near term than for others.
Good lecture on the difficulties of finding appropriate platforms for delivering gene therapies to cells for anyone interested [1]
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).
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.
But I'm speculating a bit here.
People born with this lack the enzyme CPS1, which screws up the urea cycle and causes a build up of ammonia. Ammonia build up is bad for your nervous system.
As to the FDA stance, it tends to be more willing to go ahead with compassionate uses like this when it's clearly life or death.[1]
[1] https://www.statnews.com/2025/05/15/crispr-gene-editing-land... This discuss a little of the FDA stuff but not much more detail, it sounds like they did let them skip some testing.
There could be other babies that can also grow up to be future Hitlers. So let's say 4 such babies exist. By killing one I eliminated 1/4 for futures with Grown up Hitlers that exist.
This whole thread is getting flagged. Likely by an irrational parent who can't even compute natural selection, babe, and Hitler all in a single paragraph.
It’s perfectly reasonable to say that while a technology has the propensity to be used for evil, it also has positive applications and that the real benefit now outweighs the potential downside in a hypothetical future.
Otherwise you will go down a rabbit hole at the bottom of which lies a future where we all just kinda dig in the dirt with our hands until we die because every technological innovation can be used in a variety of ways.
Like, it’s silly to me that I can’t bring a 1.5” blade keychain utility knife on a flight, and then they hand me a metal butter knife in first class. I could do way more damage with that. But they allow the butter knife because the utility has shown to far outweigh the potential downside that hasn’t manifested.
> I will slaughter a baby if I know for a fact that baby will grow up to be the next Hitler
This is one of those things that is easy to say precisely due to the impossibility of it ever actually becoming a real decision you have to make.
It's true. But things like this should be easy to say right? Like we may not be able to act logically. But we should be able to think logically, communicate logically and show that we are aware of what is logical.
My post got flagged meaning a lot of people can't separate the two things. So for example I may not be able to kill the baby in reality, but I can at least see how irrational I am.
The person who flagged me likely not only can't kill the baby. He has to construct an artificial reality to justify why he can't kill the baby and why his decision must be rational.
It would maybe be easier for a 15-25 y.o. to kill a baby they don't know and whose parents/family they don't know, and maybe even easier if they don't speak their language or look like them. Of course, the baby wouldn't be the only one you'd have to kill, most likely.
I submit that it would be very very different if you found out that your 4 year old child was going to go on to be the next Hitler. For a "normal" person, I think they would go to the ends of the earth to try to shape them into the kind of person that wouldn't do it. I think very few people would coldly calculate "welp, guess I gotta execute this adorable little child I've grown so attached to" as it looks up at them saying "I love you so much forever, mommy/daddy" with their little doe eyes.
(ETA: it also brings up side questions about nature vs nurture and free will)
And then consider the lifelong repercussions of the emotional fallout. You can use all the logic in the world to justify the action, but your human brain will still torment you over it. And likely, most of the other human brains that learn about it would torment you as well.
---
So, while I think you can say things like that, ie the ability and allowance, I think you should question whether you should. I think saying those kinds of things really doesn't add much to the discussion because I believe it's really just an uninformed platitude that only someone with a lack of life experience would believe.
For me this all highlights the fact that meaty ethical questions don't have a simple reductive answer. Which ties back in to the original problem that OP outright states that this is simply and clearly the wrong path to go down.
(PS the downvoting/flagging could be due to breaking the guidelines around discussing downvotes and flags, and not actually due to the topical content of the posts, and/or assuming bad faith on the part of other users as such: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html)
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- many science fiction writers have speculated about this for some time, and social opinion can change quickly when people see new developments.
It will be that people just don't have children at all.
If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes.
For this reason I do not think that curying diseases will lead to designer babies.
I'll steelman "fixing defects" by sticking to serious hereditary diseases (and yes, only those that correspond to one or a few known genes). As more and more conditions become treatable, the population with access to resources will have lower healthcare costs by being less susceptible to problems. (Which is a good thing, note!) Insurance companies will have more and more proxies for differentiating that don't involve direct genetic information. Societally, "those people" [the poor and therefore untreated] cost more to support medically and are an increasing burden on the system. Eugenics gains a scientific basis. Do you want your daughter marrying someone genetically substandard, if you don't have the resources to correct any issues that might show up? Probably not, you're more likely to want to build a wall between you and them. Then throw over anyone who falls behind the bleeding edge of corrections.
It'll be the latest form of redlining, but this time "red" refers literally to blood.
But, I think that it's misguided to apply the human problem of othering to a given technology. Regardless of technology X, humans are gonna human. So, if X helps some people, we should consider it on that basis. Because without X, we will still have an endless stream of other reasons to draw red lines, as you allude to. Except in addition we'll also still have the problem that X could've helped solve.
If gene editing to cure diseases leads to a future where people want to shunt off the poor that are now the outsized burden of the healthcare system, the answer from where I sit is to find ways to make the gene therapies available to them, not to cart them off to concentration camps while they await extermination. This will require all the trappings of human coordination we've always had.
Preventing X from ever coming to fruition doesn't at all prevent all possible futures where concentration death camps are a possibility. To me they are orthogonal concerns.
Even if you can convince one culture/society not to do it, how do you stop others? Force? Now you have a different manifestation of the same problem to solve. Society needs to learn how to "yes, and..." more when it comes to this stuff. Otherwise, it's just war all the way down.
Well, you're wrong. Where is the line drawn for what constitutes a disease? Retardation? Autism? Eventually every child below, say, 130 IQ will be considered disabled and unable to find work.
Apply this to every other trait: cardiovascular health, strength, height, vision, etc. All forms of weakness can be considered a disease. The end product of eugenics is that mankind will be made into a docile and fragile monoculture.
>If you want make your baby smarter, taller, or more handsome, it's not so easy because these traits involve 1000s of genes.
And? it's obvious that the technology will eventually be capable of this, just not all at once. It starts with single-gene mutations, then it will be 10's of genes, and then hundreds and thousands.
That is the slippery slope: there is absolutely nothing about your reasoning that prevents one step from leading to another.
It's helpful to evaluate claims on this thread in the context of the story. It's possible (though still a very open question) that complex behavioral traits will generally become predictable or maybe even controllable in the future. But those would require breakthroughs (including basic science discoveries breaking in the direction baby-designers want them to) more significant than the announcement on this story.
Unless those other countries step up and fund it themselves.
They might. They might not.
I guess it's still too early in this story's news cycle for the people with anti-views to be making noise yet. No GMOs, but human gene modification is okay. No cloning either. The boogeyman is gonna get us no matter what we do
Fascism has a long history of rejecting rationalism and science, and of embrassing esotericism [3]. Something our representation of nazis in media did a terrible job at conveying. We always see nazis as cold, calculating and rational when they are anything but.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/12/us/politics/rfk-jr-rock-c...
[2] https://www.pbs.org/newshour/health/trumps-new-surgeon-gener...
Indiana Jones and Hellboy are pretty explicit about this.
It is breathtaking to consider how the members of the Administration and their children, parents, and grandparents have benefited from NIH-funded research in innumerable ways that they are shamefully unaware of, every time they visit the doctor or the ER.
They have created a huge rift in this country and I am still trying to figure out if I will forgive my family members and what they'd have to do to set us on a path towards reconciliation.
When there's a contract in place to conduct pediatric cancer research, and the government decides one day to break that contract, and it takes courts to rectify the situation, and then the government defies the courts, and the voters are cheering on the illegal actions of the politicians, well, rage is a mild word for what I feel.
Heck, if parents could provide a trust fund for their kids in a way that their kids couldn't piss it away, they'd be all over it. (I'm sure this exists to varying degrees.)
Look at what wealthy parents already do to get their kids into colleges or out of jail. I think it's ridiculously naive to think that we parents wouldn't jump at the chance to write generational wealth into our kids' genes.
(This is not an argument that developing this capability is a bad thing and should be stopped.)
Gattaca was a film years ahead of its time, and raises the question of what happens when people try to "fix" human beings beyond disease prevention. A subtle, but important ethical difference. =3
From an evolutionary perspective it‘s interesting how the further medicine gets, the more we inherit genes unfit for life without medical support.
No, it would not depend on the sex of the baby, as the chromosomes that you're editing aren't X or Y.
Evolutionarily, the inheritance of genes is a far slower process than the medical advancements we make, so what I think we're seeing here is a chasing down of the low probability events. In that, most of the evolutionary pressure is coming from things like dirty water and bad food, but as we're solving those low hanging fruit, we have to go to lower probability events to make progress that feels equally important.
Also, if I am wrong here on the answers to the questions, please correct me!
Organs in your body usually keep some very old cells (formed in the embryo) around which act as parents for all the new cells in an organ. Any cell can only divide a limited number of times, so they typically maintain a "tree structure" where the old cells create children and grandchildren (etc) that then differentiate into the organ-specific cells that do the actual organ work.
If you modify only the differentiated cells, eventually they die, and are replaced by descendents of stem cells; if those stem cells didn't get modified, their descendents will not have the fix, and the treatment efficacy reduces over time.
Anyway, this baby proves we can fix hereditary diseases now.
Really incredible story and I'd love to know the process for receiving this, for example FDA approval etc. It's nice to see such in-your-face results from Federal funding programs. Without being political, it's sometimes hard for regular people to appreciate just how much good actually comes out of Federal Funding. There was another thread where someone even said something along the lines of : "Well during war things get done faster" . This simply isn't true. It might be done louder but Federal Funding never stopped pushing things forward.
"The implications of the treatment go far beyond treating KJ, said Dr. Peter Marks, who was the Food and Drug Administration official overseeing gene-therapy regulation until he recently resigned over disagreements with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the secretary of health and human services."
"But KJ’s treatment — which built on decades of federally funded research"
"The result “is a triumph for the American peoples’ investment in biomedical research,” Dr. Urnov said."
"The researchers emphasized the role government funding played in the development."
"The work, they said, began decades ago with federal funding for basic research on bacterial immune systems. That led eventually, with more federal support, to the discovery of CRISPR. Federal investment in sequencing the human genome made it possible to identify KJ’s mutation. U.S. funding supported Dr. Liu’s lab and its editing discovery. A federal program to study gene editing supported Dr. Musunuru’s research. Going along in parallel was federally funded work that led to an understanding of KJ’s disease."
"“I don’t think this could have happened in any country other than the U.S.,” Dr. Urnov said."
This is an article about federal funding of medical research with a cute baby as the human interest bit.
Three interesting thing come out of it from me. First, I was on Microsoft insurance which was quite gold plated at a time, a blessing only obvious in rear-view mirror, because Childrens was quite excited to continue any number of tests. Second, the technology of all this is absolutely amazing and I am so happy that it was available to me, and it has likely gotten better. Three, I want that tech to continue to expand and current destruction up there is going to hand this torch to someone else, which makes me sad.
One of the biggest perks of working for Microsoft for a long time was their health coverage. I can't tell you the number of times I'd be doing initial paperwork for a doctor's appointment and the receptionist would be like, "Oh you have THAT insurance, we're going to do all of the tests." I've heard they since cut back on it a little, but it truly was gold plated.
Pretty much everything 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”)
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 DNA update instructions into the body. But given the pace of change in this space, I expect massive improvements with this update process over time.
Combined with AI to better understand the genome, this is going to be a crazy century.
Further reading on related topics:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/JEhW3HDMKzekDShva/significan...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/DfrSZaf3JC8vJdbZL/how-to-mak...
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/yT22RcWrxZcXyGjsA/how-to-hav...
- how further can we push this to make the best, most optimized human?
- what are moral implication of this?
- what are the side effects / downsides?
In fact, gene editing completely removes the need for eugenics programs.
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?
jakubmazanec•9h ago