Yes good points. I’m still interested in who’s pushing (backing) this, and why some scientists felt it was worth risking their careers over. But then again, life is cheap in China (if things don’t work out - secondary mutations or ailments - get rid of them like a journalist who asks questions).
There are TV ads running now for a drug that would be taken to help prevent getting HIV. Kinda makes me wonder about the target user. Should everyone take the pill, just those engaged in risky sex practices?
I had a doctor who believed the advantages of statins would one day make them the new fluoride. Is this a drug like that?
You’re referring to PrEP. Typically it targets sex workers and gay men. If you only have safe sex or are in a monogamous relationship, there’s no reason to get it.
I would add it probably includes anyone who is in a sexual relationship with someone who is HIV positive, gay or otherwise.
I’ve seen the ad too. It plays a dozen times every time I watch something on HULU.
I mean, hey, lots of folks think they are until suddenly they learn they’re not!
One of those times I have to look up to see what the fuck thread I’ve wandered into.
You would think they would specifically mention that in the ad.
Did some more research on Dr. He and the more I learn the more concerned I am. He’s actively talking himself up for a Nobel prize, and also owns a biotech company ready to cash in on this. What’s more, in a country where gender is critically important he can promise a specific gender (male) along with supposed disease resistance with the IVF firm he’s paired himself up with.
However, the crisper technique he’s using isn’t quite what I thought at first. He’s simply damaging the CCR5 gene to make it dysfunctional. How those changes turn out in anything hasn’t been tested beyond viable embryos and early births. Don’t know if he bothered to try and match the known kinda safe version of the natural mutation of CCR5 gene in the European community, or if he just did a slash and burn until he found a sequence that messed it up.
They also never took the time to do simian testing to let them develop to see if anything adverse happens (say leukemia or other blood cancers). This is pretty obvious based on the timeline submitted. This leads to why someone in research would do that? One is fear things won’t turn out, two is your need/desire for money outweighs your concern for the patients well-being because maybe you won’t be first to the market. Which is why I think it’s the latter. He knows anyone can do this. It’s not some kind of super special thing he alone figured out. The CCR 5 mutation has been well documented for years, the question has always been what kind of threat does using CRISPER in an embryo pose to a human who has 80 years ahead of them… and then their children? Are the edits he made truly stable? If one of those 3 kids develop cancer, how in the world are they going to know if its environmental or due to crisper?
If this turns out bad, like if 1 of the 3 children ends up with… autism (not caused by crisper). Think of what that would do to the future of this line of research. When autism was never a link to vaccines, made up by a doctor who wanted to make himself rich by making a vaccine alternative (Andrew Wakefield), we still suffer even though it’s been properly smashed under the bus of scientific proof there is no causation.
This dude’s no saint.
They could just be like, Do you like sex?
I think that CRISPR that is something that absolutely should be used embryonically to cure debilitating life-long diseases.
It is also something that needs to be adopted universally so that every child can recieve the life-saving care that an embryonic gene-edit could give, otherwise we live in the horror world that is Gattaca.
But, if we have the technology to stop babies from being born with Huntington’s disease, ALS, down syndrome, childhood cancers, sickle cell anemia… etc. Why wouldn’t we want to use it? We can make our children healthier, better, and reduce longterm costs of care? It is just plain better for the human race to stop preventable diseases if we can (And this could make those incurable diseases at least preventable).
How much different is the anti-vaccination argument than the anti-gene editing argument?
I also think that the end point of gene editing in children is preventing debilitating diseases, full stop, and it needs to be heavily regulated. The cat is out of the bag now, and we need to move to create controls that we all can live with.
I don’t think there is a feasible way to use CRISPR after an embryo has implanted in the uterus. Which is where most embryos are when women learn they are pregnant.
Fair enough, but I am sure that technology is coming.
Don’t be so sure.
Research into such technology would be considered unethical for reasons I described above. And in addition to the long term risks, manipulating an embryo in the uterus carries a high risk of miscarriage. Frankly, it would be easier to just find a cure for all the diseases you listed.
You’ll be driving a flying car on Mars long before we have universal gene editing.
Gengineering is the only real cure for genetic defects, by definition. Everything else is treating symptoms.
We do need to define what’s allowed. Fixing defects is an obvious gimme. But what about propensity towards substance addiction or obesity? What about psychopathy, or depression? What if we found an allele sequence that correlated strongly with suicide later in life? Wouldn’t you want to protect your child from these things?
I think there’s a great near-future novel with all the stuff going on now, like Instagrammable views that have thousands of people in line waiting to take the shot, because everywhere is polluted and ruined, ect. I think this is already starting to happen.
I think the genetic engineering problem is inevitable. I always frame it this way - if every girl in your child’s school has been genetically engineered to look like a model, not doing so to your child will make her the ugliest girl in school. If not, perhaps, the ugliest girl in the city. She’s going to be miserable, and she’s going to hate you for keeping her plain.
I think Gattaca aims too high with its Silicon Valley / MIT view of tech company creators that made it and the slurry below of everyone else. Make it personal, about things like appearance and feelings rather than standardized test scores.
It’s easy to resist genetic engineering for yourself, but it’s much harder to do so for your children. Especially if the social consequences of not doing so could be disastrous. IE, you can resist not making your kid a super genius, but can you resist participating if by opting out they’re doomed to be a social outcast? This is assuming, of course, genetic engineering could become as inexpensive and widespread as using OTC medicine or whatnot (at least for narrative purposes anyway). In practice at least, this stuff would be the luxury of the great and the good.
The disease fixing thing otoh is pretty self evidently good and will probably be the vector by which more superficial editing slips into society.
Not necessarily.
The cure for breast cancer is surgery, radiation, and/or chemotherapy. If you have genetic risk factors for breast cancer, gene therapy is no more “curative” than reducing alcohol consumption (also a risk factor). In both cases you can lower your risk, but not eliminate your risk.
If you want to reduce the risk of depression for your child, why not start them on Prozac in infancy? I mean, what could go wrong?
It’s easy to forget that genes are only one component of disease, and genes that elevate risk of certain diseases are genes that also have other functions. Adding Prozac to baby formula may very well be safer than a CRISPR intervention to reduce depression risk, yet I doubt anyone will line up for the former.
A little food for thought: is caffeine good for you or bad for you overall? The answer is, we’re not sure. Maybe good for you in some circumstances, but bad in others. No long term effects. Probably. That’s the best we can do for a simple compound that was isolated two hundred years ago, is already in near universal use, is easy to administer, and is rapidly cleared from the body. Imagine the challenge in a cost - benefit analysis for universal gene therapy, which has none of those advantages.
Mastectomies don’t cure breast cancer. That’s an insane way to look at it. Radiation and chemo address the symptoms, not the root cause. If we could find the genes that code for susceptibility to breast cancer, we could edit them, and the person would be less likely to get it in the future.
Genes are absolutely only one component, you’re correct, and there may well be far-reaching effects to gengineering. We need to do the hard work to figure out what they may be, because gengineering isn’t going away. The technology exists, someone is going to use it.
There are absolutely diseases that are generic though, like A1AD disorder for example, which my Aunt died from and of which i may be a carrier (I still haven’t gotten tested, i just keep forgetting. Father has 1 allele and Mother 0, so i can’t actually get the full disease.)
If you fix all the genes that increase the risk of breast cancer, and the patient gets breast cancer anyway (which is not improbable), then what has gene therapy cured?
If surgery, chemo and radiation do not cure breast cancer, then what does?
Yes, there are diseases that are 100% genetic. And there is a good argument for selective gene therapy for known carriers.