[dekhn]

This is not a bad analogy. I got my start in computers but moved to biology and spent a long time thinking of gene therapy as a hex editor for patching genomes.

The reality is so much more complicated, though, that even good analogies don't provide us with any path forward in terms of actual changes to make.

[notheguyouthink]

What part is more complicated? Ie, is it the editing process is imprecise? Perhaps the editing process is like using sed (as mentioned by other people)?

In simple terms, at least.

[dekhn]

You mean the editing? The editing depends on fairly complicated processes that originally evolved (to the extent that one can impute function) to repair drastic problems.

The complicated bit comes in knowing what to change. There are some diseases in which the entire disease is caused by a single mutation and changing that one mutation in the germ line would be sufficient to correct for the disease. However, most situations involve complex interactions with many genes in a way that making a single or small simple change would have many side effects, or cause other serious problems.

[infinite8s]

It's like editing a 500Gb text file on disk by trying to flip the magnetic bits with a tiny magnet

[24gttghh]

Wait...is that not how HDD's work already?