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Comment by OkayPhysicist | Hacker News Reader

>> a rush to genetic engineering is something that might behave like cancer itself over time.

Can you elaborate on this? To me, it seems perfectly reasonable that a directed and intentional process of man-made engineering could blow the random process of evolution out of the water, both in timescale and in effectiveness. For example, there's not really an evolutionary advantage to eliminating geriatric cancer: kids have been made, genes have been passed, in all likelihood multiple generations down by the time old-age related illnesses develop. Yet, we want to live longer, and live better lives during that time, so we can take the reigns and address what evolution couldn't.

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What's the quote, "in their speed to find a solution, they never slowed down to think if they should"?

There are plenty of examples of humans rushing to market something they think works one way but upon a much longer study, the results are something much worse than if we had not instead. Heavy use of asbestos, heavy use of lead in fuel, paint, etc.

Genetically modifying anything just sounds like the most obvious of things that should be studied for much much longer than whatever the first company looking to profit is wanting.

Agree, this is something that would take centuries probably. The most plausible way to do it would be including extra copies of TP53 under appropriate regulation. This has been done in mice and they seem fine. Unfortunately, it would need to be done in larger animals progressively to show safety, which would take 20 - 30 years for a full lifecourse study in primates (unfortunate because we are experimenting on primates). Even longer if their lifespan is increased.

After that, we would be left with a conundrum, which is the ethics of modifying the germline of an embryo. I don't know what the solution is there. Maybe it could be justified in families with an elevated risk of cancer, or Mars colonists for whom any sort of cancer will be a death sentence. Another option would be an as yet uninvented way to edit the genome, but provide an 'Undo' function to reverse the edit, say by giving some small molecule.

Frankly, no. People are dying right now. Like, everyone, of one thing or another. The situation is an emergency, even if all we've ever managed is ten millennia of triage. That is the default, that is the background. Weigh the risks, sure, but don't act like choosing to do nothing is without cost. We should study genetic engineering just as much as we need to, as best as we can tell, and no more.

Less morbid, there are many more substances we "rushed to market" and worked out fine. Should antibiotics still be unavailable, banned even, to complete longitudinal trials? Chemotherapy and radiation "sound like the most obvious of things that should be studied for much longer". Thank God that didn't prevent us from using them to save hundreds of thousands of lives. Hell, asbestos was used for way longer than any of that stuff, didn't make it any safer.

Frankly, no. Buildings are burning with people dying inside right now. The situation is an emergency, even if all we've ever managed is ten millennia of triage. That is the default, that is the background. Weigh the risks, sure, but don't act like choosing to do nothing is without cost. We should study asbestos just as much as we need to, as best as we can tell, and no more. In the meantime we need to fireproof all buildings with asbestos.

Edit: /s (If that wasn't obvious.)

We did weigh the risks. We did study asbestos. And we as a society made an informed decision that the risk of asbestos outweighed the risk of buildings catching on fire.

I don't understand the point you were trying to make here. Why shouldn't we invest effort to research a technology that might mitigate the 2nd leading cause of death in the developed world?

People are talking about prevention vs treatment of cancer, yet, asbestos was a cause of cancer, so by eliminating it, we eliminated a vector of cancer. That's preventative. We as humans, have become so "smart" with all of the things we can create that while not truly understanding the long term effects. We know we've screwed ourselves in the past (even fairly recently) with our cleverness, yet we continue to be surprised when it happens again.

Modifying the source code of humans is like the new hire thinking they can make the code so much faster because they don't know how the section code they are working on is used by the larger system as a whole. All they see is that there's an apparent bug in the section they are viewing now. Never mind the sections of code that have programmed workarounds for that specific bug, and will now break downstream because the buggy returns are no longer present. So how do we know if these kinds of workarounds in the human genome are also not present?

> Modifying the source code of humans is like the new hire thinking they can make the code so much faster because they don't know how the section code they are working on is used by the larger system as a whole. All they see is that there's an apparent bug in the section they are viewing now. Never mind the sections of code that have programmed workarounds for that specific bug, and will now break downstream because the buggy returns are no longer present. So how do we know if these kinds of workarounds in the human genome are also not present?

We know for a fact the current code base is full of bugs and convoluted workarounds due to the original coder having no idea what they were doing. While we may not yet know the best way to refactor the code, it undoubtedly needs to be refactored.

> There are plenty of examples of humans rushing to market something they think works one way but upon a much longer study, the results are something much worse than if we had not instead. Heavy use of asbestos, heavy use of lead in fuel, paint, etc.

All this just means is that progress of science and technology has some qualities similar to natural evolution: namely, there's a bit of trial and error. It's not, however, a condemnation - not unless you can propose a way humanity could do even better.

All the cases you listed is something we've developed, discovered problems with, overcome and mastered in scope of couple generations. Were natural evolution to guide humans through their interactions with lead and asbestos, we'd still be dying in pain from exposure a thousand years from now, because evolution takes time and doesn't care that you're conscious.

> What's the quote, "in their speed to find a solution, they never slowed down to think if they should"?

Sure, but it's neither here or there. If you saw someone running away from a lion, would you throw this line towards them? Perhaps they should slow down and consider if they're not better off being eaten?

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