Comment on Get on that grindset
danc4498@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It’s illegal to gene edit embryos? What happened to said embryos? Real life X-men?
It’s illegal to gene edit embryos?
Not in all countries. In US, it’s not illegal unless you use federal grant money.
So Sam Altman is starting a company to do this, basically targeted eugenics for wealthy people. Of course, the technology is not 100% accurate, so there will be children born with genetic abnormalities or disease, …so keep the receipt!
That sounds horrible. So what do they do with the kids born with issues? Are the wealthy just going to send the kid to be adopted or somehow make it legal to dispose of babies?
In episode 5 of this show:
The governmwnt has this sort of what I call a “breeding program” that basically artificially creates embryos and insert them into women who’s main job in this dyspotian future is to raise the kids. Exams at 15 and 18, if fail, then the embryo is considered defective and the government soldiers take the kids to an “advancement program”, which is secretly just forced euthanasia. ADHD is also considered defective and they get terminated.
Better yet, they’ll have the carrying mother deported with the yet to be born baby, or simply disposed of in a recycling center
Woodchipper’s parked out back
It’s not abortion if the baby is born.
This guy did so to two children, giving them an experimental immunity gene IIRC. He promptly faced jailtime for medical malpractice.
He apparently is back in the news for wanting to do alzheimers testing on mice and then zygotes. this time all above board, he says.
That’s all wrong.
He edited out the receptor for HIV. This is natural in some people. He did it for cash.
He’s not a doctor. The infraction is editing the human germline, which is not illegal in the USA, but is in most countries.
Thank you. I figured i’d gotten info wrong but all the articles I found about him were being extremely vague, so i figured i’d leave things up to Cunningham’s Law.
Not enough jail time
We are never going to turn lizards into Charizards without breaking some eggs
Doesn’t birth break eggs? And nobody is complaining about that!
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
If he got incredibly lucky, they’re immune to AIDS. It’s much more likely that they’re not and will develop symptoms of new and exciting genetic disorders never seen before.
The biggest problem was that the technique used is really unreliable, so you’d expect off-target edits to be more common than on-target ones for a human-sized genome. For bacteria, you can get around it by letting the modified bacteria reproduce for a few generations, then testing most of them. If they’re all good, then it worked, and if any aren’t, you need to make a new batch. Testing DNA destroys the cells you’re testing, so if you test enough cells in a human embryo to be sure that the edits worked, it dies. You can’t just start when the embryo is a single cell to ensure that the whole thing’s been edited in the same way as you need to test something pre-edit to be able to detect off-target edits.
SkyezOpen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
I feel like we’re ignoring the obvious solution here. Stick the kids with an AIDS needle and see what happens! /s
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
That tests the AIDS immunity, but not whether there are off-target edits. IIRC, the mothers were all HIV-positive, so the children are all pretty likely to be exposed anyway, which was part of how he justified the experiment to himself.
eru@mouse.chitanda.moe 3 days ago
the fathers were HIV-positive, not the mothers.
that (besides the obvious ethical concerns) was a big reason behind the backlash from the genome editing community. we had already known a much less invasive method for preventing HIV infection of the embryo in this case, by ‘washing’ the seminal fluid away from sperm (sperm cannot become infected with HIV, but the HIV particles would be in the fluid surrounding the sperm).
phoenixz@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
I might be wrong here, but iirc the virus doesn’t automatically pass on to the embryo and HIV doesn’t always “take” either. Even a blood transfusion has a limited chance of infection, like 30% or so IIRC
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
They are not immune to HIV. They lack the receptor for HIV. Many people lack this receptor naturally.
AnyOldName3@lemmy.world 3 days ago
People without the receptor that HIV targets are immune to HIV because of that, like how a rock is immune to verbal abuse or double foot amputees are immune to ingrown toenails. The immune system being able to kill something isn’t the only way things can be immune to other things.
Fedizen@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Immune here means you have an immune response. I’m pretty sure the word here is “carrier”
SaveTheTuaHawk@lemmy.ca 3 days ago
You do not understand what immunity is. you are using it as a metaphor.
queermunist@lemmy.ml 3 days ago
I think it’s more like how a rock is immune to being covered in vomit.
It’s still covered in vomit, it just can’t smell or care about it.