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Comment by iamnothere | Hacker News Reader

The medical applications are obvious and compelling. On the other hand, let's hope this doesn't usher in a new era of eugenics...

* 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.

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The reason for annual flu vaccinations isn’t because we can’t make vaccines, it’s because the flu virus mutates quickly and the mutations are sufficient to make all existing “knowledge” in the immune system not see it.

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.

There are other reasons why flu vaccines don't work from year to year. For instance, this year there is evidence that vaccines made in eggs acquired mutations that limited the effectiveness of the immune response (https://www.statnews.com/2017/11/07/flu-vaccine-egg-producti...). Viruses made by other means don't seem to have this problem but are a lot more expensive and we'd need to retool the entire flu vaccine industry to solve this.

True, I didn't mean to discount other issues,

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)

That does make sense, I was just throwing out a hypothetical (and poorly thought-out!) "carrot" that might be used to convince people to accept genetic modifications.

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.

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