[crusso]

We are in the infancy of genetic manipulation. A working understanding of CRISPR only developed in the past few years. There were some significant hurdles to getting to that point.

In the coming decades, we shall be programming genes like we program computers. We'll model organisms, formulate changes, simulate the formulated changes, then create the genetic "programs" (really, life forms) using some kind of biological gene expresser.

Right now we're in something akin to the vacuum tube era of computing where you need to be a government or a large corporation to do more than just tinker. As with computers, those barriers to entry will not remain in place for very long.

[yters]

This assumes life works like a program.

[crusso]

I'm not saying that we're going to be writing genetic Perl scripts. I'm saying that the basics of looking at genetically-based organisms as a type of programming/engineering is inevitable.

You may not have an "if" statement, but you have genetic segments than can cause the synthesis of a protein when present. You may not have goto statements, but you have stop codons that end the processing of the creation of a protein.

Read up on the genetic engineering solutions already being created regarding how payloads are created in bacteria, how they're delivered to target cells, how the payloads are activated, etc. These are step-by-step processes with conditional behaviors, loop-like replication of processes, spawning of processes, subroutine-like embedded processes, etc.

Genetic programming will be similar to computer programming in ways. It will be different in ways. But the arc of progression of how we start off with huge barriers to entry and little understanding to where we eventually manipulate genetics cheaply and trivially are inevitable.

[imtringued]

The question is how do you test it?

Do you really think we can transfer the usual edit, compile, run, rinse and repeat workflow to genetic engineering?

From the perspective of the majority it's an acceptable tradeoff to sacrifice a few thousand humans for the benefit of billions. It could even cause less suffering than natural selection.

I still wouldn't want to be one of those pre release versions...

[crusso]

Probably a lot of animals will be used at first.

Then, human tissue samples can be grown and kept to test results on actual human DNA.

As time goes by, computers will model more and more of the problem space.

I still wouldn't want to be one of those pre release versions

The particular applications will vary, but we're already doing human trials using gene therapy. This is our "Hello World" phase happening now.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/12/14/health/hemophilia-trial-uk-cu...