|
I never said not concerned, I said less concerned relative to the apparent concern in the comment I was replying to. Any error would be in the relative level of concern. I know of their concerns. A friend of mine just got his Ph.D and has a very interesting story about how he answered a query by one of the CRISPR patent holders (then a student in his program) regarding techniques for delivering an intact sequence to the mammalian nucleus.[1] Prior to graduate school my friend spent several years working at the Craig Venter institute studying rhinovirus (while his wife completed her post-graduate work at NIH), and the technique he utilized at the institute and recommended "coincidentally" ended up being the one used. Which gives credence to the whole argument that the CRISPR "discovery" was basically combining together two already well-established methods for gene editing in an obvious way. Also, he was the safety directory in his lab, both at school and at the institute. Because of the nature of the work, he would obviously be well aware of the risks involved with any sort of gene therapy. I don't know whether he would approve of germline therapy, but I'm pretty sure he'd agree that any blanket ban with the pretense of saving humanity would be naive as it's quite likely already happening to some extent under the radar, both deliberately and unintentionally. But that's a different sort of argument and doesn't contradict what yours, as far as I understand it. I just took your argument as being excessively alarmist, and my point boils down to that scientists tend to be less alarmist because they're already inured to these things. They know how the sausage is made, and it's never pretty. They see the enormous holes in knowledge that you can drive fleets of buses through. But they also understand that nature is far more forgiving than popular science journalism would have you believe. "Holy sh+t, I didn't expect that'd work as well as it did" is, I think, not an uncommon experience; likewise for "holy sh+t, that didn't go as I expected", for that matter. [1] Or something to that effect. Don't quote me because (a) I'm recalling from memory, (b) he gave me the dumbed down version, and (c) a Harvard e-mail system migration meant that he lost all his previous correspondence so he's likewise recalling his discussion from memory. |