[Sarki]

Am I the only one to foresee that such changes can do way more harm than good?

As comments went on a previous post on a similar topic: Genetic changes are a lot like assembler software changes.

The best part? In living things there's very little documentation, based on "poor" reverse engineering (as we know little about it).

[gravelc]

I agree - we're a long long way off being able to accurately predict the impacts of genetic changes, particularly given effects like pleiotrophy.

We still don't even really understand why a tiny worm with around 1000 cells (C. elegans) has roughly the same number of genes as a human being. Sure, at the cellular level, the complexity of the two organisms is much the same, but at the macro level, it's not even close. Obviously all the information to build the organism is in the germ cells, but discrete genes are just a part of the equation.

In my opinion, as someone why tries to work this stuff out for a living, we are many years away from grasping how it all fits together. Until then, I'd be wary of modifying myself except in the most dire of circumstances.

[cixin]

We don't really understand how most of the treatments we have work. We have data, we have in many cases some ideas, but we don't know.

Take Psoriasis as an example, doctors are still prescribing coal tar based treatments. I guess they are ~100 years old. They don't work very well, and people don't really know why they should work at all.

Pretty much all Psoriasis treatments are like this, even the more recent ones. They interfere with some pathway related to the immune system... but we don't really understand why they work.

So we don't really understand "how it all fits together" for current treatments. It's still reasonable to use them if they are relatively safe, and work. Same is true of gene therapies.

Mostly we figure out that things work/are safe through experimentation. Not through totally understanding the system.

[cixin]

Realistically, what harm can the experiments described in the article do to the general population?

It's so hard to do anything, even design diagnostic tests, that requires FDA approval that personally I'd avoid any startup that had that on their route to revenue.

It's kind of a shame, and countries where it's easier to develop new treatments and tests are likely to take the lead.

[frozenport]

I disagree about the revenue concerns.

Many new ideas for medical technologies are founded on academic work that is often fraudulent. When I hear that a startup is going to start the ball rolling on FDA approval, that often means that the technology is more likely to work.

[Sarki]

First of all, I'm not a biologist but a software consultant and have worked in several software companies as level 3 support.

My personal experience on tiny and sometimes unrelated changes having a catastrophic impact: software configuration changes, new hardware, other softwares bug, antivirus rules and updates, etc.

These points can be roughly related to a living being: psychological/environmental/habit changes, transplant/implant, organ failure/traumatism, immune system false positive (e.g. alergies?), ...

I'm not against the idea gene manipulation, just saying that his doings are very marginal and must not be praised.

If labs have been relying on white mice and drosophilae it's for some good reasons:

Common sense (how many people died because of charlatanism?), ethics and Human Rights.

What is at stakes here can lead either to a nobel price (I sincerely hope for him) or a darwin award (thanks to the ignorance of such red flags).

[DyslexicAtheist]

> What is at stakes here can lead either to a nobel price (I sincerely hope for him) or a darwin award (thanks to the ignorance of such red flags).

We need something like this https://iotdarwinaward.com/ but for genetic engineering :-)