First US Patients Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing Trials Get Underway | Hacker News Reader

First US Patients Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing Trials Get Underway

npr.org

89 pointsspking25 comments

The genie is out of the bottle, and it's not going back in at this point. The in-embryo editing is the most troublesome, but even these trails raise serious concerns.

Can CRISPR be weaponized and permanently damage the genes of a large area of people? What type of unintended modifications/side-effects may occur when used as a treatment? What happens when this finds its way outside the lab? Will treating some disease lead to causing others?

Could this be the great filter? How many other civilizations in our galaxy have been wiped out due to experiments in gene editing? Or maybe this will be the beginning of discovering the secret of aging? Could this type of research lead to a time when humans live two to three times as long? Need a fraction of our current food supply? Are we headed for a new era where life can be preserved indefinitely?

There is a world of possibilities. Let's hope humanity collectively picks the right ones.

> Can CRISPR be weaponized and permanently damage the genes of a large area of people?

Old Bill Burroughs went on about that, sort of. That is, race-specific viruses for efficient genocide. It's probably also an SF trope, but nothing comes to mind.

<spoiler>The Utopia TV series from BBC channel 4.</spoiler>

Amazing show.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utopia_(UK_TV_series)

Note: The name of the channel that the TV series was broadcast on is "Channel 4". There is a British channel called "BBC Four", but not all British television channels are operated by the BBC.

The Mass Effect series explores that sort of idea with a species-specific mutation that dramatically reduces birth rate.

Perhaps Old Bill Burroughs should have concerned himself with something more realistic, like not murdering his wife, rather than hypothetical genocide.

Yes, he shot Joan Vollmer in the head, in Mexico City. Using a .38 snub, as I recall. He variously claimed that it was an accident. Or that they were playing William Tell. But he fled to the US, to escape prosecution, and was eventually convicted of manslaughter. Later, after doing Scientology, he claimed that he'd been possessed by an evil spirit.

For an interesting take on the aftermath, see Rudy Rucker's Turing & Burroughs.

Regardless of eventual effect, none of us reading this now will live long enough to see any of them. So much of the population won't be touched by this stuff for so long that it's hard to really say if there will be a real effect outside of the genetically ill.

You forget the nature of technological developments. In the 60s nobody would ever imagined that those room-sized and extremely expensive 'computing machines' would become a regular and extremely affordable part of basically everybody's daily life, and even something people would often carry within their pocket, within just a few decades. It'd have sounded quite ridiculous.

Look at future predictions from any era and people always make the exact same mistake. The extrapolate the future to be the present, with some new currently imaginable toys. For instance 19th century predictions of the future included cities with giant domes over them so you don't wet as you walk. In reality the future is always radically warped by frequently unforeseen technologies. And now technology is evolving at a faster than ever rate. So a general guideline would be that if your prediction for the future doesn't sound absurd, you're probably wrong.

People are not software. Unless some cataclysmic event ocurs, no statistical significant part of the population will be gene edited, since you disqualify all babies starting from now. It's still custom per person, very expensive.

Modern society is not a simple Darwinian struggle for survival.

Extrapolating the future from the present is completely sensible. Today's society is not that unthinkable for somebody from the early 20th, or even 19th century: People work jobs in offices and factories; they complain that they're busy. Health, transportation and communication have improved. Poor people fight and die in wars that rich people start.

My prediction for the rest of this century is that all the large scale trends will continue. There will be no sharp discontinuity with the past. Renewable energy use will increase, and climate change will keep getting worse. More and more species will go extinct. Computers and batteries will keep improving at a decreasing rate. Robots will not take all the jobs. Poor people will continue dying for rich people's mistakes.

That's exactly what I thought. It's the case with climate change as well...we are heading towards irreversible changes but people are selfish and it's hard to care for future generations at your expense. On the contrary we are willing to risk more if there is a chance of reward in our lifetime rather than wait 100 years to understand everything about the tech before to use it.

The unintended consequences are going to be interesting. Right now we're in going full on with introducing far more technology than we can reasonably ascertain the consequences of. When you get into genetic modification of things, a big issue is that you can't just see whether or not somebody drops dead to determine the safety. What happens in the longrun, what happens to their children, what happens with their children's development? And that issue follows similarly for their children's children.

And then there are consequences that don't even manifest in an immediately critical way. For instance testosterone levels and fertility rates are already plummeting and there's no entirely solid understanding of why. And of course people are also getting much fatter. Is this because society has lost self control or is it because of other factors? Or perhaps other factors are having an impact on self control. Even psychological issues seem to be spiraling out of control which again results in one asking the exact same sorts of questions.

But I think suggesting this as a filter is generally hyperbolic for a simple reason. So long as people are allowed to have a choice in what they consume or otherwise put into their bodies, natural selection will work. You'll always have people that, for reasons good and bad - intentional and unintentional, will choose to abstain from various things. And such is the population of earth today that even if you knocked off 99% of the world's population there'd still be around 76 million people left which is still about an order of magnitude greater than the human population at most times in our species entire history. And as an interestingly useful coincidence there seems to be a disproportionate overlap between the abstainers and the sort of people that would be fully capable of surviving even given the collapse of society.

>Can CRISPR be weaponized and permanently damage the genes of a large area of people?

Yes.

>Will treating some disease lead to causing others?

Yes.

>Could this type of research lead to a time when humans live two to three times as long?

Yes.

> Need a fraction of our current food supply?

Yes.

I suggest anyone interested read A Crack in Creation, by Dr. Jennifer Doudna.

The Dude! She’s on one or two Radio Lab episodes about CRISPR. It was the first time I heard about how it works in any detail and it blew my mind.

Our current great filter threat is climate change. If CRISPR can help us survive that,then ok.

Our actual great filter is stupidity. Our civilization has every mean to sidestep every other "great filter" that has been mentioned in this discussion, but we're collectively too stupid.

Group stupidity specifically; tribalism. Sticking with your group even when you know you're wrong or right.

It's much worse than that. We are facing existential issues and need a collective, collaborative effort to solve them on a sustainable basis.

It's not going to happen. This isn't one of those "if we can rally all our scientists and engineers" things like APOLLO or MANHATTAN.

For example, how are we even going to tell millions of sailors to stop ocean-based plastic pollution [1]? Are Navy ships, heavy polluters themselves, going to enforce those rules? Are we trusting Chinese fishermen to adhere to new environmental protection laws?

That's one part of a small part of a part of the problem that is climate change and ecosystem destruction....

[1] https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/questions/42315/do-10-asi...

Which is why I also think should move ahead with AI research and development despite the risks

From my point of view, we should try to improve humans before we attempt to create and contain a general intelligence in order to have a serious chance at that. BCIs are improving every day and there are many ways we can use it. Let's just wait what will be the VR/BCI/ML equivalent of MS office.

How are they dealing with the purported 96% human rate of immunity against CRISPR?

1. https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/243345v1 2. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-018-0204-6

I think the concern around crispr enhancement is a positional arms race. Maybe some enhancement is safe, but once the option is available, people will go to extremes to get ahead. You can say otherwise, but I saw adderalls passed around before tests and SATs when in school; I'd say that's the same idea.

Oh, you think we can just have the government establish a safe and sensible limit? Right, because that's worked in the past.

Seesh, I read that as *First US Patents Treated With CRISPR As Human Gene-Editing..."

There's a huge battle going on over who owns the patents on CRISPR. Since it's worth billion of dollars I assume it will go own for some time.

This is great news. I've mostly heard about it for embryos so I'm glad that options for existing people are being explored.

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