A new technology is not perfect? Shock.
Doesn't mean it should be abandoned. Just means it needs a bit more work.
This was already known and why research into making crispr 2.0 isin progress.
Its also why researchers aren't too keen on starting human trials just yet
Yup, much better they find out now than in human trials. I'm sure they can resolve the issue.
Prior studies mostly analysed the effect of CRISPR/Cas9 on small sections of DNA at and around the target site, as well as possible off-target sites. This study used a variety of methods to look for errors involving larger sections of DNA which the previous studies could have missed, and found that such errors were far more common than previously thought. Moreover these errors have the potential to affect DNA supposedly remote from the target site. The broader implications of this remain to be seen.
"CRISPR 2.0" is a term made up by pop sci outlets that doesn't really mean anything by the way.
Is there anything wrong with simplifying concepts like that? To uninformed readers it may actually be more immediately clear. Like, better to point to something people already understand and say "its like that catchy named thing youve heard of but better" than to have to reexplain the entire concept, no? A lot easier to search online and learn more, etc.
It's grossly oversimplifying a concept that is already poorly understood by the public, and in my experience merely fosters ignorance of the topic rather than make people want to learn more about it.
Rookie mistake. If you're not making at least 1 backup a day on 8 different formats then you're just asking to lose your DNA
Back up your DNA to jpeg
Since each DNA nucleobase can be represented using just two bits, you can represent DNA fairly easily in gif format if you just assign 0-3 a unique color, then each nucleobase will be uniquely colored in the image.
Do it. Let's see.
I don't have a genome to work with
I'll be honest, I was trying to make a low hanging fruit joke about storing genetic data in a lossy format. Sorry if it wasn't clear enough.
loss joke etc
Fantastic technology, although there's still many ethical issues around this. Playing god is very dangerous.
Humanity always "playing god" for few thousands years without too much complaint, except silly Alarmists like you and Neo-Luddites.
Playing God has stopped the vicious cycle of great plagues and has let us not be shaped by the world but rather shape our own world. playing god is what we do, it is what we've done, and is what we will continue to do.
"playing god" is such a response fishing non-statement. Like, what does it mean exactly?
it means playing with systems so large and interdependent that we cannot immediately and falsifiably account for every possible consequence and it's a perfectly acceptable criticism in this case. it took hundreds of millions of years for life to evolve and devise itself in ways that were stable and healthy and suited to circumstance and it's not only unscientific but philosophically and morally insane to believe that we're destined to be the 'masters' of such a technology, as the metaphor implies, without being extremely skeptical.
There are implications for gene therapy in humans using CRISPR/Cas9, but really the more important part is how this affects results of previous studies that relied on CRISPR/Cas9. Were the phenotypes observed truly the result of target gene knockout, or could there have been other non-target knockouts that were not detected by previous methods?
Life and more specifically DNA can hardly be called stable and healthy. And there's nothing inherently unscientific about thinking that's it's possible to manipulate both, as we have been doing for millenia now. We don't have to be "masters" either. If we know enough to do things that lead to a great boon with manageable risks then we'll have made something good or least useful.
This was John Hammond's mentality in Jurassic Park
To be fair, the problem in Jurassic Park wasn't the science, but the park management. Let's not forget that we keep enclosures of vicious animals in cities around the world without incident.
Heck, we even have enclosures of vicious humans everywhere.
What do you mean without incident there are fuck tonnes of incidents in both prisons and zoo's/animal sanctuaries.
That was a small part of the problem in JP. The main problem was developing something new in which man had no idea how to contain and just assumed big electric fences would work, and that they can easily control the number of animals in the park.
Let's not forget the big part where the raptors systematically tested each part of the fencing for weaknesses even when they were electrified.
The message of the story is nature is too unpredictable for man to ever believe in controlling. Besides that, the park management was managed by people - and people everywhere tend to err.
Jurassic Park was also a fictional story.
But yes, it pays to be cautious. I imagine it'll be a looooong time before this gets to human trials, and then it'll be in human trials for a looooong time as well. I can imagine it'll be at least another decade or two before we start seeing applications or this outside of trials.
Yes but the themes are not, like in much science fiction.
This argument sounds good, but means nothing.
This is such a lame response to valid concerns about our overuse and overprotective nature toward scientific endeavors. As it stands we, while we can test with genetic changes based on cells that do not pass on DNA we have zero idea the effects of natural evolution and genetic biology will have on those changes for successive generations.
Likewise, the ethical arguments are almost universally ignored for what I can essentially call, "Sci-Fi Nerd Fantasies", mainly that of the potential abuse of genetic engineering for designer babies but also enforcing at a genetic level societal norms which have already been demonstrated to be entirely destructive without the ability to also fuck with people's babies.
We are not equipped with the ethical guidelines to properly use this current technology in the way that many are asking for and we do not have anywhere near close to properly run experiments with reproducible results and that is the key here. Reproduciability. It doesn't matter if the technology is immediatly safe, if its dangerous in the long term it must be controlled and researched for possibly safer alternatives which is already happening with CRISPR 2.0.
Now, for the moral argument, we run into subjectivity, mainly to the point of this: Some in this thread have stated that we have played God and I would argue that it is at best a failure of understanding the science behind many of these movements and also a failure to understand how little we know of their impact.
For instance, in the situation of vaccines and fighting disease. The tools we currently have are less playing God and more like a chimp slamming a rock against a coconut. Its crude, brutish but effective in what it sets out to do. In no way does it come close to the sheer amount of progress and regression that CRISPR and other genetic engineering projects have.
The second point of failures to understand how little we know is about the argument about GMOs and how while they can clearly show a reduced use of water and fertilizers, they also encourage heavy pesticide use and help accelerate an already understudied issue of biodiversity loss due to cultivation of crops. To make the assumption that GMOs are good no matter what is to completely ignore the harm that every technology we've deployed in snappy immediate ways has had on us whether its the Industrial Revolutions effect on the environment that we've known since the 1910s(The Ecology Movement actually started back in the early 1900s FYI so we've known we can do long lasting damage to the environment for a long time) to nuclear fission which could be used to help create a longer lasting, cleaner source of power that could push harmful fossil fuels out but also be used to kill us all.
Effective policy is far more important and we do not have the data to deploy said policy effectively so until such time we have the means to create effective policy, deployment of such powerful tools should stay fairly limited.
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