Modifying Your Own Genes Is Just An Injection Away If You’re Feeling Lucky
fastcompany.com
fastcompany.com
* Edit your genes to be less risky, or face higher insurance premiums!
* Anyone with genes that tend toward criminality must report for genetic "repair."
* All childhood vaccines will come with DNA editing to provide extra resistance to the flu! And as a bonus, genes shown to improve attention and obedience...
So many possible dystopian futures here. This tech will inevitably be abused in some ways, as all are, but let's hope that society can keep it to a minimum.
The average annual flu vaccine actually includes markers for two to three different strains that are /estimated/ to be the ones that are likely to take off each year. The reason for this years flu being so bad is that they got it wrong.
As far as general immunity, that’s unlikely: immunity basically isn’t inherited - “inherited” immunity is generally derived from the mother’s immune system through milk and some of the microbiome picked up by the baby during birth.
Generally gene editing is unlikely to allow magic vaccines to be built in to your dna. These days the primary problem in creating vaccines is first finding a set of markers that are sufficiently stable to make it unlikely that they can be trivially mutated away, that also doesn’t match any markers people have on their own cells (otherwise you’d just create an injected autoimmune disorder), and also can be packaged so that trains the immune system correctly.
My wife is the actual scientist, I just write code :D (she actually understands all of this, so take my entire commentary as being a CS major interpreting a molecular biologist - I'm an idiot, my wife is amazing :D)
I don't know if any of the scenarios I've suggested are viable, honestly. Genetics is an extremely complex domain, and it isn't likely that we can create targeted effects on behavior without a host of unwanted side effects. My main concern is that if any of these things do become viable, there will be strong pressure from social planners and authorities to make them a reality. I hope that we are able to resist the temptation to revive eugenics and recast it as an engineering discipline.
IIRC, the skin whitening industry in Asia, which hawks products of very questionable efficacy, is worth tens of billions. I wonder how much a CRISPR solution would be worth, given that it has a better chance of working than snake oil in a soap.
Jokes aside, is it really as simple to administer as injecting one's self with a, as he calls it, plasmid?
The point I was trying to make was that changes from CRISPR-style gene therapies in males will be passed to the offspring since sperm are produced constantly. The same is not true for gene editing in females because female eggs are all (mostly?) produced at birth.
I was mainly wondering why we don't expect the eggs themselves to be modified.
I was looking more for what you thought was an "abuse" of something like this when applied to yourself.
That actually sounds amazing.
Some lunatic will write some possibly underhanded-C-esque/probably just ignorant implementation of some modification which causes apoptosis after some chemical feedback loop.
At the very least, it needs to be understood and administered by licensed professionals. I'm not saying we need full blown-FDA trials spanning years (though there are very good arguments for that), but this can't be a direct to consumer market.
If progress means death as a byproduct, than this death is totally welcome.
Joe Dirt, looking to make the next big thing on the street by causing your white blood cells to secrete fentanyl for a life-long high, does not.
This technology is easily if not more dangerous than firearms. It is literally in the same class as chemical warfare. Desensitizing ourselves to that danger AND allowing any old schmuck to publish his flawed plasmid to a public store for anyone to try is criminally negligent.