Honestly this is not impressive. I don't say that to be abrasive, it just isn't.
I'd expect to get
something for spending billions of dollars and having legions of intelligent people working away, if only by freak accident.
To put it another way, we had serious medical breakthroughs before cheap genetic examination and alteration was possible. Our benchmark should not be nothing, it should be the past periods of change in the field surely.
How does the 'modern' genetic engineering stack up against antibiotics, peptide synthesis? How many lives saved, how much higher a quality of life do we have as a result?
Eroom's Law is still in force despite xray crystallography and dna sequencing being orders of magnitudes cheaper. Suppose drug discovery isn't the the bottleneck and we blame the FDA, then where are the breakthroughs in Russia and China?
> We wouldn't have recombinant insulin without genetic engineering, so there's a pretty good high footprint drug for you, the modern combination insulin products that are fast acting and sustaining.
That is notable, yes. Partly because it is a good high footprint drug as you say, but also because of the reason for its demand... It is interesting because if you watch the Ford Foundation video from the 1960s I linked to, there is a household personalized preventative healthcare system. I believe we could build such a device in theory, but I don't see that we're breaking much ground. The last thing I saw that impressed me was the Toto intelligence II toilet but it didn't take off. I'd like to buy one, esp. if it was linked to my fridge and food cupboard to perform input/output analysis. I don't think there's a company even pretending to offer such a system today but it was readily imagined half a century ago.
> It's also the case that breeders are using identical methods to their ancestors, except for the part where they do things like clone champion bulls to use for breeding.
Breeders were doing pretty okay before artificial cloning.
I have some relatives in farming, I think they send off sperm cells to be hazed by freezing or some other hazing process that eliminates the weaker candidates.
I also know some old school breeders from a cattle mart who are basically wizards. They carefully examine their subjects to determine characteristics, like Darwin's pigeon fanciers in Origin. They are extremely gifted at selecting, like the Met's super recognizers.
"He said that of the millions of cows produced every year, the number that are cloned is “overall pretty insignificant.”
“But the bottom line is you do not want large numbers of these animals for a number of reasons, number one being that cloned animals are generally unhealthy.”"
That in a nutshell is my general outsider know-nothing view of biotech. It has no serious visible impact and I begin to suspect we don't actually know what we're doing. DNA is less the library of Alexandria and more like Borge's Library of Babel. Where are the cows with adverts emblazoned on their fur for passing cars to see? Weird exotic GM pets? We should see stupid things like that if we had any power. Freeman Dyson's vision of GM, laudable though it is, seems very far away.
I was looking for bioluminescent outdoor lighting/cool science project a while back. Found nothing useful. That's a low bar! That kind of thing should be standard by now and I believe we should all in shock that it isn't cheap and readily available.